This course offers an introduction to some advanced techniques of visual analysis through an engagement with Roman wall painting. At the center of the seminar are the mythological frescoes that once adorned houses and Villas in and around Pompeii and other cities of Vesuvius, before the destruction of 79 CE. While these paintings have been analyzed primarily in contextual and socio-historical terms, our own approach will focus on the role of images in the formation of new forms of subjectivity emerging in the late republican and early imperial periods. Particular emphasis will be placed on the "psychoanalytical" implications of the use of Greek myth in a Roman context, and the usefulness of the notion of "fantasy" for an understanding of the imagery under discussion. Other topics include the image's relation with its prototypes and the notion of "substitution," art and empathy, art and spatiality, myth and visual narrative. The course offers an introduction to one of the most important bodies of ancient art (and one that is actually compatible with a broader art history), as well as an introduction to techniques of visual analysis. Readings include art historical and historical writings (by J. Elsner, P. Zanker, S. Bartsch, A. Wallace-Hadrill, and others), but also a selection of seminal texts from the fields of critical theory, visual culture, film theory, and "anthropology of the image."