Like the Alma-Tademas, a Belgian family of talented painters who specialised in scenes set in Pompeii.
Pompeii
Narrative painting was popular and becoming increasingly sophisticated two millennia ago.
Ask which were the first landscape paintings in Western art, and most would suggest works of Dürer, Albrecht Altdorfer, or Joachim Patinir. But they were actually very late compared to frescoes of the Cycladic civilisation, some three millenia before.
The Eclectic Light Company 