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8 THE CAPITOL DOME peian paintings as they were being discovered. At the site, he placed transparent paper directly on the painted walls, traced the architectural and fi gurative outlines, and made notes about their colors. Back in Berlin in 1828–9, Zahn, encouraged by his friend, the famous literary fi g- ure and statesman Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (who himself had visited Pompeii in 1787), published many of his drawings via color lithography in a folio of 100 plates. Lithography offered a more direct process than intaglio printing, since designs were traced in reverse directly onto the stones from which they were printed, rather than being etched or engraved into copper plates. Moreover, Zahn's use of color lithographs avoided pre- vious laborious processes of hand-coloring woodblock prints or etchings, which often limited the circulation of color versions; instead, color lithography enabled the relatively effi cient production of large numbers of color prints. Zahn's work for this volume and two subsequent volumes, also on Roman wall painting from Pompeii and other sites in the Bay of Naples, are central to the devel- opment of the printing technique of color lithography. Die schönsten Ornamente was also important in the dissemi- nation of archaeological discoveries, and Zahn's volumes differ markedly from other contemporary publications of Pompeii. They are distinguished by their focus on repro- ductions of paintings, mosaics, specifi c motifs from these two-dimensional media, and most importantly color. In contrast to other nineteenth-century publications, which regularly included extensive narrative regarding the sites and material culture discovered, Zahn's only text was a brief, one-to-two-page, bilingual (German and French) listing of the works in each folio that provided titles or identifi cations of subjects, listed known fi ndspots and discovery dates, and—tellingly—described the color- ation of specifi c parts of each subject. 9 Close comparison of the walls of S-127 with Zahn's drawing of the south wall of the dining room from the House of the Ship (Casa del Naviglio) at Pompeii in which the fl oating maenad appears shows that Brumidi adopted the decorative scheme for the walls of the Naval Affairs Committee Room directly from Zahn's draw- ing—and from the layout of the south wall of the triclin- ium in the House of the Ship (fi gs. 8 and 9). Like the wall at Pompeii as shown in Zahn's plate 13, Brumidi's design includes fl anking fl oating maidens and fl anking columns; for his purposes, Brumidi positions the doorways in the place of the Pompeian wall's central mythological panel rep- resenting the wedding of Zephyr and Chloris. In terms Fig. 10. Comparison of details of (right) candelabra from S-127, U.S. Capitol, with Zahn, Die schönsten Ornamente, Vol. 1, pl. 16, study of a candelabrum from the south wall of the triclinium in the House of the Ship, Pompeii