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324 Painting walls are coloured in fresco. The best and most important of the mural paintings of Pompeii (supposed to date from the first period of Roman painting) are collected in the museum of Naples, and have many of them been admirably reproduced in the Crystal Palace. The house known as that of the Tragic Poet (described in Bulwer's 'Last Days of Pompeii'), discovered in 1824-6, was especially remarkable for the grace and dig- nified style of its paintings, most of which represented Homeric subjects : amongst others, the Marriage of Peleus and Thetis, the Parting of Achilles and Briseis (Fig. 119), the Departure of Chryseis, the Fall of Icarus, etc. The frieze of the atrium (i. e. court) of the Pompeian Court at the Crystal Palace is copied from a cubiculum (i. e. a small room opening from the atrium) of this house : it represents a Battle of the Amazons. The Sacrifice of Iphigenia, the Deserted Ariadne, Leda presenting her first-born child to her husband Tyndareus, and other paintings, adorned the less important rooms of this celebrated residence. The mural decorations of the " house of the Dioscuri " are even more remarkable than those enumerated above : the figures of the twin sons of Leda reining-in their horses, on one of the walls, are especially fine ; and the groups of Perseus and Andromeda, and Medea and her Children, found on the piers of the great central peristyle, are scarcely less beautiful. The " house of the Female Dancer " must also be mentioned, on account of the elegance and grandeur of its decorative paintings, several of which are copied in the Pompeian Court of the Crystal Palace. And recent ex- cavations have brought to light a large house with wall decorations of singular beauty — foliage, flowers, birds, animals, fishes ; many of which are represented in violent