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The ideas are trite and the treatment is contemptible the colours pass from dirty red into brown and black. These certainly are the worst wall-paintings I have ever met with, worse even than the coarsest painted shrines on the waysides of Italy; indeed no Church save the Greek Church would tolerate an art thus debased.
These details were known to us by the wall-paintings only until I myself discovered two perfect specimens in 1884 and 1885; one at Thebes, in a tomb of the Thirteenth Dynasty, and the other at Ekhmîm, in the Graeco-Roman necropolis.
Some of them represent the fable of Cupid and Psyche, which is probably the romantic invention of a literary period, and cannot, I think, be reckoned as a genuine mythical product. But if you like these wall-paintings we can easily drive thither; and you will then, I think, have seen the chief works of Raphael, any of which it were a pity to omit in a visit to Rome.
The olives tossed their filmy boughs in twilight underneath his windows, sighing and shuddering, with a sheen in them as eery as that of willows by some haunted mere. The great attraction to students of Italian art in the convent of Monte Oliveto is a large square cloister, covered with wall-paintings by Luca Signorelli and Giovannantonio Bazzi, surnamed Il Sodoma.
It was over this matter of pictures that I had first met her, for her father owned a palace on the farther side of the Rialto Bridge upon the Grand Canal, and it was so packed with wall-paintings that Suchet sent a party of sappers to cut some of them out and send them to Paris.
On the other hand, Egyptian wall-paintings show the Egyptian chariotry advancing in neat lines and serried squadrons. According to Nestor these had of old been the Achaean tactics, and he preferred the old way. There was to be no rushing of individuals from the ranks, no dismounting. The poet's meaning seems quite clear.
These two cuts will give you an idea of the catacomb wall-paintings. The mosaics of the Middle Ages were of a purely ornamental character down to the time of Constantine.
Nevertheless, these simple and often rude wall-paintings furnish us with many pieces of information that we search for in vain amidst the ancient authors, who naturally considered the commonplace everyday scenes of life beneath the notice of contemporary record.
They are a deeply religious people, these Tyrolean peasants, as is evidenced not only by the many handsome churches and the character of the wall-paintings on the houses, but by the amazing frequency of the wayside shrines, most of which consist of representations of various phases of the Crucifixion, usually carved and painted with a most harrowing fidelity of detail.
At every step in these sacred precincts, we meet some reminder of the Angelic Brother. How the gray walls blossomed, under his brush, into forms and colors of eternal beauty! After seeing the larger wall-paintings in corridors and refectory, this little gem seems to epitomize his choicest gifts.
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