The ancient sources do not abound in lengthy descriptions of painted decoration in shrines. Most records are no more than short references focusing on the artists themselves rather than their work or on technical details of their work. That does not mean, however, that these references are without interest for this investigation. These texts tell us about the prestige such paintings could have had and about their relative rarity or peculiarity. The sources can be divided into two categories, the first including information about real buildings (still extant or lost) and the second focusing on fictitious temples which only appear in literary texts. The latter category is represented by the genre of ekphrasis (see infra). The discussion focuses on the former category. Textual sources provide information on:

• 1. artists

• 2. iconography

• 3. gods and their sanctuaries

• 4. patrons

• 5. technical details, including the first use of specific techniques.

Authors like Pliny and Pausanias are mainly interested in the oldest and/or the best, as well as peculiar details in images and technique. Historical accounts highlight the patrons of temple building or restoration. Therefore, the texts in general do not cover all aspects we are looking for simultaneously. That means that we know disproportionally much more about one single detail within a shrine and relatively little about the shrine as a whole. From the set of texts one gets the impression that temple decorations were unimportant except when showing specific imagery, the result a famous hand (either from an artist or in a technical sense) or decorating a particular sanctuary. All texts refer to monumental public temples, none describes shrines of private cults.

The location of the paintings, for example in the pronaos (προνάος), inside the naos (e.g. interiores parietes), on the outer walls, on the courtyard walls (παστάς, πϵρίβοƛος), is rarely mentioned. Even the terms ἐν or in (in), ἐνταῦθα (here) are not conclusive, as ‘in the temple’ means most probably ‘in the sanctuary’ and not specifically ‘within’ the temple building.

It is striking that in De Architectura Vitruvius, our main written source on the construction of temples in antiquity, does not describe the interior decoration of the buildings in question, apart from the architectural features, in Books 3-4 (On Temple Building) and 7 (On Painting). Vitruvius keeps silent because these data were either insignificant or were such common knowledge that they had no need of being recorded.