Mural monument

“ The background of the clouds and the rain, the dark blues and the green and the pink; and the kites catching some of the color, and the lovely color of the mill and of the grass dried by the sun. And see that figure up there on the steps, all windblown and rushing under cover. It's all beautiful and yet there's not one face or figure there that would be considered beautiful by the painter who works for prettiness. He has no interest whatever in what the average mural decorator considers beautiful. And yet he sees beauty everywhere and he makes it felt. ”

“ In long marble galleries, open to the air and the sun, the monuments at first give the cemetery the appearance of an art exhibition. You fancy you have wandered into a sculpture gallery by mistake; but the wreaths of flowers with broad silk sashes attached, the swinging lamps, and the memorial tablets undeceive you.{158} Each monument has, as it were, an arch of the gallery to itself, and is placed against the back wall. The figures are rarely allegorical. A man in his habit as he lived stands life-size in white marble above his own tomb. ”

“ The walls are covered with inscriptions in Gothic characters in a framework of leaves and very delicate arabesques. Wherever one looks one finds grace mingled with riches in enchanting harmony: it would not be possible to accumulate in an equal space and with more exquisite art a larger number of the most delicate and beautiful objects. It is a luxuriant garden of sculpture, a grand saloon embroidered, quilted, and brocaded in marble, a great monument, majestic as a temple, magnificent as a palace, delicate as a toy, and graceful as a flower. ”

“ The brilliance of the mural paintings and richly coloured sculpture and mouldings was in harmony with the splendour of the oak-work—screens, stalls, and roofs—all decorated with gilding and painting, while the light, passing through stained glass, softened and helped to combine the whole into one mass of decorative effect. Colour was boldly applied everywhere, and thus the patchy effect was avoided which is so often the result of the modern timid and partial use of painted ornament. ”

“ All this mural decoration was made in the spirit of the architecture, intended to complete the iconography of the great door and to amplify still further the cyclic character,—the general theme being the history of Christ and the glorification of the Virgin, with the accessory scenes that belong to it.
Let us cross the threshold: we are outside, before the façade. We must walk farther away in order to embrace all the lines and take in the masterly idea of the whole. It is most celebrated, that is well-known; for a long time, its richness has been a synonym of beauty in mediæval art. ”

“ Every statue was hurled from its niche, every picture torn from the wall, every wonderfully-painted window shivered to atoms, every ancient monument shattered, every sculptured decoration, however inaccessible in appearance, hurled to the ground. ”

“ The monument speaks for itself— simple in form, admirable in proportions, composed of enduring marble and granite, resting upon foundations broad and deep, it rises into the skies higher than any work of human art. ”

“ Painting and sculpture, imitating generally the human figure or some object existing in nature, awaken in our soul perfectly clear and positive ideas; but a beautiful architectural monument has not any determinate meaning, if it may be so expressed, so that we are seized, in contemplating it, with that kind of aimless reverie, which leads us into a boundless ocean of thought. The sound of fountains harmonises with all these vague and deep impressions; it is uniform as the edifice is regular.
"Eternal motion, and eternal rest,"
are thus blended with each other. ”

“ Court of Palms, illumination of towers from searchlights. Only direct light, from single white globes painted to imitate Travertine, and Roman hanging lamps around in corridors; faint red shines through from below.
Reflections in circular and rectangular pools; north, east, and west portals; the columns, the colonnades at sides of entrances, the murals above doorways; pinks, blues, reds, orange.
Murals above east, west, and north doorways, best effect at night. Illumination at base of arches throws light on upper part of mural, shading softly and gradually down to base. ”

“ Internal rough stonework was invariably concealed by stucco, forming a smooth ground for possible future paintings. Unhappily a great proportion of mural paintings have been destroyed, though many in a more or less mutilated state still exist in England. It is difficult (and doubly so since the so-called “restoration” of most old buildings) to realize the splendour of effect once possessed by every important medieval church. From the tiled floor to the roof all was one mass of gold and colour. ”

“ I have as yet made no mention of mural painting, which is, of course, destined to occupy a very important place in the art of the future. Thousands of new public and private buildings all over the country will call for decoration, and I have no hesitation in predicting that the opportunity thus afforded will result in some bewilderingly great discovery in advance of our present-day knowledge of that art—a step in advance at least as important as that made by Puvis de Chavannes when he painted the out-of-door atmosphere upon the walls of the Panthéon in Paris. ”

“ The magnitude and beauty will accord with the skill of the times. Hence arise sources of determining the relative antiquity of monuments, and the circumstances of the age. Under almost every privation of means, and in all countries, 'heaped earth' would present a durable and an accessible material. Hence the universality of this species of monument throughout the globe. This primitive accumulation of efforts—for an earthen mound can be considered as nothing more—seems to have given origin to the most gigantic labours of human architecture. ”

“ It served to show, in a manner sufficiently striking, how much more indelibly nature inscribes her monuments of the dead than art. The limestone slab had existed as a churchyard monument for perhaps a thousand years ”

“ But, in any case, whatever may be the future of architecture, in whatever manner our young architects may one day solve the question of their art, let us, while waiting for new monument, preserve the ancient monuments. ”

“ We will first speak of the mural, or wall-paintings, as they are the most important and interesting remains of ancient painting. We shall only consider such as have been found in Italy, as those of other countries are few and unimportant.
The Etruscan tombs which have been opened contain many beautiful objects of various kinds, and were frequently decorated with mural pictures. They often consist of several rooms, and have the appearance of being prepared as a home for the living rather than for the dead. ”

“ This temple belongs to the florid age of architecture; its ornaments are exuberant and exceedingly rich; the doorway is decorated with vines and foliage, amid which children are sporting; the pannels of the ceiling are occupied by figures of gods and goddesses in relief; in short, Sculpture has here joined her graver sister Architecture, and they have worked together harmoniously, and have produced—what is very seldom produced—a building where great exuberance of ornament is united with delicacy, and chasteness, and simplicity. ”

“ On the great steeple—surmounting the myriad of spires—inside of the spires—over the doors, the windows—in nooks and corners—every where that a niche or a perch can be found about the enormous building, from summit to base, there is a marble statue, and every statue is a study in itself! ”

“ Mural painting occupies a position alone and by itself, midway between the purely conventional decoration and the realistic easel picture. It must be sufficiently real to tell its story; it must not be so real as to destroy the flatness and solidity of the surface upon which it is painted. Mural painting, in fact, must be considered as an adjunct of architecture, and not as a self-dependent creation. ”

“ It is one of the most valuable qualities which mural painting can possess—mural painting which fluctuates between the flatness which is also feebleness and a kind of realism which carries with it the effect of out-of-doors—of a hole in the wall. The same thing obtains in his minor work, and here the background, the temple, or rock, forty feet away, is as perfectly detached from the foreground figures as would be a distant and airy mountain miles away, while still the picture remains flat cardboard or flat canvass invested with light and shade and color. ”

“ And, finally, "in creating a monument, the problem is mainly to give expression to the acts performed within its walls, which is done by giving the structure a form which will correspond with the groups performing those acts, and to its parts such masses, modeling, carved and color decoration as will express precisely the degree of stability, dignity, and elegance which corresponds with the import of the acts to be expressed." ”

“ Altars of great variety in form, covered with sculptures and the mysterious hieroglyphic writing; rectangular court-yards, with ranges of steps ascending to raised terraces; and the scattered remains of gigantic sculpture, are the most striking features in the existing ruins. The carvings in stone display almost a perfection in the mere manual art, and show that the metallic substitutes for modern tools must have been excellent; while the beautiful representations of dresses and ornaments contrast agreeably with those repulsive forms in which they chose to embody their ideas of divine beings. ”

“ Thus, in the most effective treatment in mural decoration, one sees only the grand forms, the movement, the intention, those things which most befit the inner surface of the building being also those which bear the greater importance. The fact is used as an argument for the assumption that painting should, after all, be an art of two dimensions, length and breadth, reserving thickness and its representation, for sculpture. ”

“ It is a mixture of the Gothic and Romanesque styles; the body of the structure is entirely covered with statues and richly wrought sculpture, with needle-like spires of white marble rising up from every corner. But of the exquisite, airy look of the whole mass, although so solid and vast, it is impossible to convey an idea. It appears like some fabric of frost-work which winter traces on the window-panes. There is a unity of beauty about the whole, which the eye takes in with a feeling of perfect and satisfied delight. ”

“ The hieratic tradition was set aside for the direct teaching and inspiration of nature. But as the mastery of the painter increased, the mural spaces available for the application of his new methods diminished rapidly, till, by the thirteenth century, the only wall surfaces left to him were those beneath the windows, and some few [181] triangular spaces in the vault, where the interlacing network of arches became gradually closer and closer. ”

“ We can therefore always select a spot where that part of human or inanimate nature is most peculiarly manifested, and we should always do this in preference to selecting any scenes of celebrated passages in the individual's life; for those scenes are in themselves the best monuments, and are injured by every addition. Let us observe a few examples. The monument to the Swiss who fell at Paris, defending the king, in 1790, is not in the halls of the Tuileries, which they fortified with their bodies ”

“ A born artist, she seems to have found her most pleasurable art expression in depicting large masses of light and shade, working them into suggestive groupings, as when a huge cathedral full of imprisoned shadows becomes softly illumined by a stray sunbeam, and its reflected glory from polished marble ”

“ It is built wholly of marble, and overlaid, inside and out, with florid ornaments of exquisite beauty. There are no flying buttresses, no pinnacles, no deep and fretted doorways, such as form the charm of French and English architecture; but instead of this, the lines of party-coloured marbles, the scrolls and wreaths of foliage, the mosaics and the frescoes which meet the eye in every direction, satisfy our sense of variety, producing most agreeable combinations of blending hues and harmoniously connected forms. ”

“ At the foot of these structures, and in different parts of the quadrangular area, are numerous remains of sculpture. At the point marked E (see the plan) is a colossal monument, richly sculptured, fallen, and ruined. ”

“ But when you reach the edifice itself, and perceive that its simplicity is combined with lavish richness of decoration, marble and precious stones being so woven together that they form one gorgeous and splendid whole, you can only admire the affection that planned this memorial to a beloved wife, and the art which has succeeded in constructing an edifice which, after six centuries, is still recognized as a wonder of the world. ”

“ A great flood of sunlight, such as sometimes occurs at four o’clock in the afternoon, fell on the stained-glass rose-window, threw on the sand tracks of rainbow-coloured lights, softly bathing the bronze or the marble of the statues, imparting an iridescent hue to the nudity of a beautiful figure, giving to the vast museum something of the luminous life of a garden. ”