The Association française pour la peinture murale antique (AFPMA) was founded in 1979 to support the study of ancient painting in Gaul, and has been regularly publishing its colloquium proceedings ever since. The volume under review is the most recent of these. True to its title, ‘From the trench to the museum’, it focuses on current developments in the excavation, restoration and display of largely Roman period wall-paintings in Gaul. Thus twenty-nine essays discuss recent finds; two present scientific analyses of fresco materials; and four treat restoration techniques, cataloguing methods and display concepts. All of the essays are greatly enhanced by the volume's stunning full-colour presentation. High-quality photographs, hundreds of meticulous line-drawings, aerial photos of the sites undergoing excavation and numerous digital reconstructions make this book as beautiful as it is useful. The illustrations do not simply enrich the presentation, but open avenues for comparative studies and further research that are simply not feasible when only poor-quality images are available. It is enough to make one hungry for the next volumes in the Pictor series.

Each of the thirty-five contributions (excluding the last, a summary of the methodological round-table session) treats the painted and stucco decoration excavated at a single site. Every essay typically includes a summary in French, a description of the site and its decoration, an overview of the restoration work and a list of stylistic comparanda. The material discussed in these essays is quite fragmentary, making the digital reconstructions of their original appearance absolutely vital. Many of the renderings are elaborate (80, 176–9, 412–13), including a three-dimensional model of an entire massive villa (299–315) and several vivid drawings of jaw-dropping painted ceilings (292, 339).

The pictures alone make clear that the decorative trends in Gaul are closely related to those in other parts of the Roman Empire, and the authors explicitly adduce comparanda in Italy and beyond. But it bears emphasizing how far-reaching these trends are: as one author notes, the closest match for a star-spangled ceiling discovered in Gaul is in Pergamon (291). Although reflecting on the repercussions of this tantalizing idea falls outside the scope of this volume, it is nonetheless one of the most exciting possibilities that this volume offers to wall-painting specialists. Several decorative schemes in Gaul parallel those in Magdalensberg, Austria (29) and Cologne (100–1). As for Italy, Oplontis and Pompeii are often mentioned among the ‘comparaisons stylistiques’ (e.g. 52–4) and several motifs (40, 52–3, 98) recall those in the villa at Isera (M. de Vos and B. Maurina (eds), La villa romana di Isera: ricerche e scavi (1973–2004) (2011)). Familiar subjects like dolphins and hunts (122–3) and erotes (197) remain as popular in Gaul as elsewhere. With the aid of this volume, the repertoire of schemata and subjects can be explored on a large scale as never before.

The three essays on restoration and display are an unusual and commendable addition to the excavation reports. One of them details, among other things, the complex restoration of the painted curved wall of an apse (240–5). Another presents a restoration method that leaves visible a portion of the back of a fresco panel, in order to show off its means of attachment to the original wall (257). The same team of contributors also realized a striking restoration in which the fragments of a painted wall are set into their proper spatial relationship, then overlain by a digital projection of the complete wall scheme that serves to contextualize the fragments (259). The final display-oriented essay illustrates how different modes of reconstruction should be considered for the specific effects they create, as each highlights different aspects of the fresco fragments. Simple lines extending the geometry of the scheme place emphasis on the fragments, for example, whereas ‘full colour’ restoration may detract from the fragments even while giving a more complete impression of their original context (261–6).

Given the overwhelming strengths of this volume, several shortcomings hardly detract but nonetheless deserve mention. The two essays on non-Roman, non-Gallic painting (to wit, Sogdianan and fifth-millennium Bulgarian) are excellent but strangely out of place. A map at the front of the volume, showing at least the most frequently referenced sites, would have been useful. A more serious reservation concerns an issue by no means unique to this volume, but indeed so common that it is worth expressing. When dealing with such meticulously excavated and recorded material as in this volume, dating wall-painting by style rather than stratigraphic context seems a great loss. The diligent excavation of these Gallic sites offers a much-needed chance to test externally the use of the Four Pompeian (sic) Styles as a basis for chronology, as is the rule in Campanian archaeology. To what extent it might apply in the provinces must be probed in light of these new finds. What is more, it has now been well established that the Four Styles could be deployed out of chronological sequence (as studied by Regina Gee at Oplontis Villa A); so it makes the most sense to date wall-paintings by stratigraphy rather than vice versa. That this stratigraphy survives in Gaul — as it does not in Pompeii — is a blessing not to be overlooked.