Harriet I. Flower

“Their association with the hearth, from the legendary birth of Servius Tullius onward, kept these gods close both to the women who managed the household and to the slaves who prepared the food. By contrast, the grander shrines in the public rooms of the house (especially but not exclusively the atrium) only very rarely featured paintings of the lares, genius, or snakes so typical of kitchen cults. Instead, these shrines contained small statues of the gods (either of bronze or rendered in a variety of other materials) cultivated by the family, deities known collectively as the penates, which is to say gods worshipped by a kin group.12 These deities included an eclectic mixture of the gods of local public cults (such as Venus the patron deity of Pompeii or Mercury the god of trade) with others of personal or gentilicial significance to the family.13 While small statues of lares could frequently be found here, their religious function was different than their role in the kitchen. In other words, the main focus of the shrines in the atrium was not on lares, although these familiar gods were usually invited to every religious occasion in the house.”
― Harriet I. Flower, The Dancing Lares and the Serpent in the Garden: Religion at the Roman Street Corner