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Updated: June 22, 2025
"Il Perugino a rare and singular artist, most excellent in wall-painting. His faces have an air of the most angelic sweetness. "Domenico de Grillandaio a good master in panels and a better one in wall-painting. His figures are good, and he is an industrious and active master, who produces much work.
These are massed together and robed in the style of Masaccio, and have his virile dignity of form and action. Indeed this interesting wall-painting furnishes an epitome of Florentine art, in its intentions and achievements, during the first half of the fifteenth century. The colour is strong and brilliant, and the execution solid.
The archaisms of old Greece are not better than such works; and as we can trace the onward course of those ancient masters of art from the rude outlines on the vases of Etruria, to the glorious works of Phidias and Praxiteles even so, if we wish to know the true course of the revival of modern art, must we trace it in the sculpture, wall-painting, and missal-drawing, of the middle ages, until we find it assume a more definite and better-regulated style in the fifteenth century; that period of the revival of classical tastes, and bright day-spring of art in Italy, from which we ourselves still drink inspiration as from the “well undefiled.”
The descriptions of this great work lead to the belief that this Pompeian wall-painting, from which we give a cut, closely resembles that of Timanthes, which no longer exists. The story of Iphigenia says that when her father, King Agamemnon, killed a hart which was sacred to Diana, or Artemis, that goddess becalmed his fleet so that he could not sail to Troy.
Further than this went the sentence, for Thomas of Canterbury was to be a saint no longer, and his name and memory were to be wiped out. The remains were not burned, but throughout the land every statue, wall-painting, and window to the said Thomas Becket was rigorously searched out and destroyed, and from every record his name was carefully erased.
Assyrian tile-painting was more durable than the wall-painting; but in all the excavations that have been made these have been found only in fragments, and from these fragments no complete picture has been put together. The largest one was found at Nimrud, and our illustration is taken from it. It represents a king, as we know by the tiara he wears, and two servants who follow him.
The fact of the excellence of Assyrian art at a somewhat earlier date lends however support to the view that the wall-painting of the Babylonians had some real artistic excellence.
Brunn and other good authorities believe that the wall-painting of Prima Porta, in Rome, was executed by Ludius. It represents a garden, and covers the four walls of a room. It is of the decorative order of painting, as Pliny well understood, for he speaks of the difference between the work of Ludius and that of the true artists who painted panel pictures and not wall-paintings.
But there was one thing more which lay still nearer to Lodovico's heart. Leonardo's great wall-painting for the convent refectory was well-nigh completed.
"I have seen his portrait in the Greek churches, in a large wall-painting, and there he is represented as a bandy-legged, ox-tailed, black-faced monster, with a pair of big horns on his forehead.
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