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They abounded in things beautiful, in carving and mosaic, in wall-painting and tapestries, in statues which had been the glory of Greece, and in marble portraiture which was the boast of Rome.
Indeed, this interesting wall-painting furnishes an epitome of Florentine art, in its intentions and achievements, during the first half of the fifteenth century. The color is strong and brilliant, and the execution solid. The margin of the Salome panel has been used for scratching the chronicle of Castiglione.
The hunting-cat scene, which presents remarkable resemblances to a well-known scene from a wall-painting at Thebes, represents cats hunting wild-fowl in a marsh intersected by a winding river, in which fish are swimming and papyrus plants growing.
The other stone has a somewhat similar inscription. The Romans, who did not use wallpapers, were in the habit of colouring their plaster with various pigments. Some very interesting specimens of wall-painting are preserved at Cirencester, and may be seen in the museum. The most remarkable example of the kind is a piece of coloured plaster, with the following square scratched on its surface:
Fresco and tempera paintings were chiefly intended for the interiors of churches or public buildings, whose dim light harmonized their more or less crude and positive tones. It was, however, only through the breadth and freedom of wall-painting that the ambition of the early masters was fully aroused and their powers found ample scope.
But these were built of wood and were far from being massive or imposing. As in other periods of Japanese architecture, the exterior was sacrificed to the interior where there were choice woodworking and joinery in beautiful woods, and occasionally screen-or wall-painting as decoration. There was still little house-furnishing.
Centuries have dimmed the wall-painting, sunshine has faded it, mould has mottled the broad surfaces of red and blue and green, and a later age has done away with the dresses represented; yet, when the frescos in the library of the Cathedral at Siena, for instance, were newly finished, they were the fashion-plates of the year and month, executed by a great artist, it is true, grouped with matchless skill and drawn with supreme mastery of art, but as far from representing the ordinary scenes of daily life as those terrible coloured prints published nowadays for tailors, in which a number of beautiful young gentlemen, in perfectly new clothes, lounge in stage attitudes on the one side, and an equal number of equally beautiful young butlers, coachmen, grooms and pages, in equally perfect liveries, appear to be discussing the æsthetics of an ideal and highly salaried service, at the other end of the same room.
The household fire was made in a hollow of the earthen floor, usually to one side of the room, and the smoke escaped through a hole in the ceiling; branches of trees, charcoal, and dried cakes of ass or cow dung were used for fuel. Wall-painting in a Twelfth Dynasty house. Below is a view of the outside, and above a view of the inside of a dwelling.
Bear in mind these characteristics of that art: it is wall-painting that is an organic part of the surface on which it appears: it is on the same lines as the building and adapted to the colors and forms of the structure of which it is a part. The wall-splendors of America that are the most scattered about in inexpensive copies are the decorations of the Boston Public Library.
Some thirty-five years ago I well remember the period it was the fashion, just as, in a sense, it is the fashion now, to say that the Egyptians were the real masters of sculpture, wall-painting, and metal work, that the Greeks learnt from them, and in the fine arts originated nothing.
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