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Early Italian art has nothing more truly beautiful to offer than the white-robed Madonna kneeling at the judgment seat of Christ. It will be felt by every genuine student of art that if Orcagna painted these frescoes in S. Maria Novella, whereof there is no doubt, he could not have executed the wall-paintings in the Campo Santo at Pisa attributed to him by Vasari.
When it is rational to say, 'I know not my father or my mother, let my children be aliens to me, that no prayer of mine may touch them, then it will be rational for the Jew to say, 'I will seek to know no difference between me and the Gentile, I will not cherish the prophetic consciousness of our nationality let the Hebrew cease to be, and let all his memorials be antiquarian trifles, dead as the wall-paintings of a conjectured race.
All useful things are ugly and forbidding. A kitchen is indispensable, but you take care not to sit there; you live in the salon, which you adorn, like this, with superfluous things. Of what use, let me ask you, are these charming wall-paintings, this carved wood-work? There is nothing beautiful but that which seems to us useless.
The so-called tombs of "Beni Hasan," the Enchantress Isis stopped for us to see, in order that we might admire wall-paintings in rock chambers, and gabble about Queen Hatasu or King Seti and his mother Pakhet, the "Beautiful Lady of the Speos." But it was difficult to rouse emotion concerning things which we glided by without visiting.
Horizontal lines convey a feeling of repose, of quiet, as in the wall-paintings of Puvis de Chavannes; vertical lines, of solemnity, dignity, aspiration, as in so much of the work of Boecklin; crooked lines of conflict and activity, as in the woodcuts of Durer; while curved lines have always been recognized as soft and voluptuous and tender, as in Correggio and Renoir.
The collection to which I have alluded was made some years ago, when access to the wall-paintings of Italy for the purpose of tracing was still possible.
The ancient wall-paintings which have been found in Rome are far more varied than are those of Etruria; for, while some of the Roman pictures are found in tombs, others are taken from baths, palaces, and villas. They generally belong to one period, and that is about the close of the Republic and the beginning of the Empire.
As a connecting link with that chapter the reader will note that one of the marked things about the Egyptian wall-paintings, pictures on the mummy-case wrappings, papyrus inscriptions, and architectural conceptions, is that they are but enlarged hieroglyphics, while the hieroglyphics are but reduced fac-similes of these.
So when a few characters are once understood, the highly colored Egyptian wall-paintings of the same things are understood. The hieroglyphic of Osiris is enlarged when they desire to represent him in state. The hieroglyphic of the soul as a human-headed hawk may be in a line of writing no taller than the capitals of this book.
Apart from such considerations, the wall-paintings in the cathedral of Albi have accumulated such interest from time that no reason would excuse their removal. This unique church was mainly built at the close of the thirteenth century, together with the Archbishop's palace, with which it was connected in a military sense by outworks.
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