At Pompeii, archaeologists have disclosed two almost life-size effigies hewn into the façade of a funerary monument, a man and a woman preserved in arresting sculptural detail.
The reliefs are executed with a supple naturalism that collapses the distance of two thousand years, restoring an uncanny sense of individual presence.
The city met its cataclysmic end when the eruption of a nearby volcano interred it beneath successive strata of ash and pumice in the space of a single day.
That suffocating blanket, for all its violence, acted as an inadvertent preservative, arresting the fabric of daily existence in a state of near-miraculous completeness.
Specialists are meticulously interrogating the carvings for testimony about attire, ornamentation, funerary ideology, and the social standing of the deceased.
Such commemorative portraits furnish an unusually candid glimpse into how the Pompeians wished to memorialise themselves for posterity.
Season upon season, the exhumed metropolis persists in relinquishing artefacts that recalibrate scholarly understanding of the Roman world.