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Updated: June 22, 2025
The girlish painter was beautiful in person, frank and engaging in manner, and most attractive to the gentlemen of the tyrant's court. One day when alone and absorbed in the execution of a wall-painting, a dissolute young noble addressed her with insulting freedom. She could not escape, and in the struggle which ensued she drew a dagger and stabbed her assailant to the heart.
Fresco was his favourite vehicle; and in this preference he showed himself a true master of the school of Florence: but he is said to have maintained that mosaic, as more durable, was superior to wall-painting. This saying, if it be authentic, justifies our criticism of his cold achievement as a painter.
But perhaps the most interesting find was the remains of a great wall-painting in which a mighty bull is represented charging at full speed, while an athlete, clinging to the monster's horn with one hand, vaults over his back a picture which is the first important example of the now well-known and numerous set of similar representations which have given us a clue to something of the meaning of the old legend of the man-destroying Minotaur and his tribute of human victims.
We do so, because some people, even those who ought to know better, are in the habit of describing any wall-painting as a fresco; whereas so many of the wall-paintings, especially in Italy, are not frescoes at all, but distemper paintings on a dry surface. The real fresco consists of painting upon plaster, while it is wet.
The Loggie of the Vatican is the best original example of the style as perfected by Raffaelle and his scholars, and applied to wall-painting. It was a free rendering of the antique fresco ornament then just discovered in the Baths of Petus, where extensive excavations were undertaken in 1506, under the superintendence of the Papal authorities.
"Sandro de Botticelli a most excellent master, both in panel and wall-painting. His figures have a manly air, and are admirable in conception and proportion. "Filippino di Frati Filippo an excellent disciple of the above-named, and a son of the rarest master of our times. His heads have a gentler and more suave air; but, we are inclined to think, less art.
Here he gazed with admiration on the Cenacolo of Leonardo, that master of whose genius he had heard so much, and expressed his ardent wish to transfer the famous wall-painting to France, a sentiment which can hardly have gratified the Dominican friars or the Italian princes in his train. The painter was not present on this occasion.
He was the first to bring in a singularly delightful fashion of wall-painting villas, colonnades, examples of landscape-gardening, woods and sacred groves, reservoirs, straits, rivers, coasts, all according to the heart's desire and amidst them passengers of all kinds on foot, in boats, driving in carriages, or riding on asses to visit their country properties; furthermore fishermen, bird-catchers, hunters, vintagers; or, again, he exhibits stately villas, to which the approach is through a swamp, with men staggering under the weight of the frightened women whom they have bargained to carry on their shoulders; and many another excellent and entertaining device of the same kind.
The bricks of the pier are covered with green, like a wall-painting to the surface of the stream, mosses along the lines of the mortar, and among the moss little plants what are these? In the dry sunlit lane I look up to the top of the great wall about some domain, where the green figs look over upright on their stalks; there are dry plants on the coping what are these?
The "Triumph of S. Thomas Aquinas," in this cloister-chapel, has long been declared the work of Taddeo Gaddi. "The Triumph of the Church Militant," and the "Consecration of S. Dominic," used to be ascribed, on the faith of Vasari, to Simone Martini of Siena. Independently of its main subject, this vast wall-painting is specially interesting on account of its portraits.
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