United States or Dominican Republic ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
She had been, she said, to the English cemetery; but she declared that nobody whom she had known was buried there. They visited American ladies who had married into the Roman nobility. In those historic palaces the great rooms were cool, dim, and resonant, the women's voices died away in space between the tapestried walls and the ceilings frescoed with pagan deities.
The floors were all mosaic, the walls were stuccoed, or frescoed, or ornamented with bas-reliefs, and here and there were statues, large and small, and little fish-pools, and cascades of sparkling water that sprang from secret places in the colonnade of handsome pillars that surrounded the court, and kept the flower-beds fresh and the air cool.
One of its frontages forms the side of a forecourt flanked by grandiose outbuildings estate offices, stables, and a great frescoed ballroom. Elsewhere round the house was a very untidy flower garden, which half the old women of the little town spent, so it seemed to me, most of their days in weeding herein reviving my recollections of Dartington Hall and Denbury.
The old gentlewoman took a dreary and proud satisfaction in leading Phoebe from room to room of the house, and recounting the traditions with which, as we may say, the walls were lugubriously frescoed.
The Galerie de Diane, built by Napoleon I. and Louis XVIII., replaces the famous frescoed gallery of Henri IV. It is now turned into a library for the use of the town. In the center is a picture of Henri IV. on horseback, by Mauzaise.
He helped to build a bridge over the Arno, he had his palace in the Corso frescoed by Masaccio, he framed sumptuary laws, and he wrote sonnets, charming sonnets that are still read by the people who care for such things. The fifth centenary of his birthday, on the twenty-eighth of November, was to be kept with great rejoicings therefore.
He dropped his head and stood shifting from one foot to the other, as if he was ashamed. "At times," he said hesitatingly; "at times I have to, I can't help it, I have to express myself. Look!" He stepped suddenly across the room and slid the curtains back along the rail. The wall was frescoed from floor to ceiling. "Julian!" Lady Tamworth cried.
Quickly the great iron-studded door was opened by an elderly Englishman in livery, to whom I gave my card, and asked to see his master. The man, without hesitation, ushered me through a huge marble-built hall, with a wonderfully frescoed ceiling, into a large room hung with priceless tapestry, and furnished with old gilt chairs covered with faded green silk damask.
And to-day, when so many of his noblest creations have perished, when the glorious pile of the Castello of Milan, with its stately towers and frescoed halls, rich decorations and vast gardens, has been defaced and battered by the hands of barbarian invaders, when Leonardo's fresco is a wreck and the tomb of Beatrice broken to pieces, when Vigevano and Cussago are in ruins, and the matchless library of Pavia has been scattered to the winds, we rejoice to think that the Certosa remains to show us how splendid were the dreams and how rare the skill of artists in the days when Lodovico Sforza reigned over Milan.
The ceiling, supported by eight slender marble columns, was richly frescoed with scenes from Ariosto's poems, some of the figures being still warm with colour and instinct with life and on the walls were the fading remains of other pictures, the freshest among them being a laughing Cupid poised on a knot of honeysuckle, and shooting his arrow at random into the sky.
Word Of The Day