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It had been the fruit of Jo's first orgy of the senses. But now it stood out in that stark little room with an air as incongruous and ashamed as that of a pink tarleton danseuse who finds herself in a monk's cell. None of those wall-pictures with which bachelor bedrooms are reputed to be hung. No satin slippers. No scented notes. A little orderly stack of books on the table near the bed.
This has been followed by an equally fine work under the same auspices, illustrating the wall-pictures of the Cavern of the Font-de-Gaume in the Dordogne, for which we have to thank the Abbé Breuil. A further volume on Spanish Caves has also appeared from the same source in the present year.
"Who puts a mediocre article into a costly envelope?" was the philosopher's sartorial standpoint. A portfolio that leaned against a microscope contained black and white studies of some of his illustrious visitors, which caught happily their essential features without detail. The few other wall-pictures were engravings by other hands.
Here, as in sculpture, we find the same or similar motives and groupings repeated in a way which shows that the painter or rather the collaborating painters must have been reproducing or adapting an original which was particularly admired or had obtained a fashionable vogue. The wall-pictures, done in fresco or distemper and in various dimensions, fall into four main classes.
Among the wall-pictures made by ancient cave-men are numerous drawings of human beings in masks representing animals' heads probably indicating the "dressing-up" in animal masks of priests or medicine men in the way in which we know to-day is the custom among many savage tribes.
Some other wall-pictures are essentially modern, and others have been restored, after Russian usage, in so reckless and wholesale a fashion as to be no longer of value as archæologic records. In the staircase leading to the galleries are some further wall-paintings, said to be contemporaneous with the building of the cathedral; the date, however, is wholly uncertain.
This was probably not less than 50,000 years ago, and may well have been much more. On this side of the Pyrenees the Reindeer men have left some wall-pictures, and new discoveries of great importance in the form of rock carvings of human figures as well as pictures and huge figures of horses, etc., are being made in France as I write these lines.
It is not difficult to distinguish between the truly artistic design and colouring of wall-pictures in the House of Vettii or of the "Tragic Poet" and the crude journeyman work in sundry other Pompeian houses which must have belonged to anything but connoisseurs. Paintings, it must be remembered, were the ancient wall-papers, as well as the ancient pictures.
In the Strozzi chapel are an altar-piece and several wall-pictures by Andrew Orgagna. They are not so grandly conceived as that wondrous composition of his, the Triumph of Death, in the Pisan Campo Santo; but they are additional proofs of his intense and Dante-like genius. No doubt Dante influenced him deeply, as he did all his contemporaries, whose minds were fertile enough to ripen such seed.
They did not reach their end by anatomy, analysis, and reconstruction. They undertook to paint just what they felt and saw. Very instructive are the wall-pictures of this period, painted not in fresco but on canvas by Carpaccio and Gentile Bellini, for the decoration of the Scuole of S. Ursula and S. Croce.
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