both for his power of combining truth with idealization in his portraits and for his skill in depicting men's mental characteristics; on this account he calls him ὁ ἠθογράφος. Lucian too praises Polygnotus alike for his grace, drawing and colouring. Later painters, such as Zeuxis and Apelles, appear to have produced easel pictures more than mural paintings, and these, being easy to move, were mostly carried off to Rome by the early emperors. Hence Pausanias, who visited Greece in the time of Hadrian, mentions but few works of the later artists. Owing to the lack of existing specimens of Greek painting it would be idle to attempt an account of their technical methods, but no doubt those employed by the Romans described below were derived with the rest of their art from the Greeks. Speaking of their stucco, Pliny refers its superiority over that made by the Romans to the fact that it was always made of lime at least three years old, and that it was well mixed and pounded in a mortar before being laid on the wall; he is here speaking of the thick stucco in many coats, not of the thin skin mentioned above as being laid on marble. Greek mural painting, like their sculpture, was chiefly used to decorate temples and public buildings, and comparatively rarely either for tombs[1] or private buildings—at least in the days of their early republican simplicity.
A large number of Roman mural paintings (see also Roman Art) now exist, of which many were discovered in the private houses and baths of Pompeii, nearly all dating between A.D. 63, when the city was ruined by an earthquake, and A.D. 79, when it was buried by Vesuvius. A catalogue of these and similar paintings from Herculaneum Romain Painting. and Stabiae, compiled by Professor Helbig, comprises 1966 specimens. The excavations in the baths of Titus and other ancient buildings in Rome, made in the early part of the 16th century, excited the keenest interest and admiration among the painters of that time, and largely influenced the later art of the Renaissance. These paintings, especially the “grotesques” or fanciful patterns of scroll-work and pilasters mixed with semi-realistic foliage and figures of boys, animals and birds, designed with great freedom of touch and inventive power, seem to have fascinated Raphael during his later period, and many of his pupils and contemporaries. The “loggie” of the Vatican and of the Farnesina palace are full of carefully studied 16th-century reproductions of these highly decorative paintings. The excavations in Rome have brought to light some mural paintings of the 1st century A.D., perhaps superior in execution even to the best of the Pompeian series (see Plate).
The range of subjects found in Roman mural paintings is large—mythology, religious ceremonies, genre, still life and even landscape (the latter generally on a small scale, and treated in an artificial and purely decorative way), and lastly history. Pliny mentions several large and important historical paintings, such as those with which Valerius Maximus Messala decorated the walls of the Curia Hostilia, to commemorate his own victory over Hiero II. and the Carthaginians in Sicily in the 3rd century B.C. The earliest Roman painting recorded by Pliny was by Fabius, surnamed Pictor, on the walls of the temple of Salus, executed about 300 B.C. (H.N. xxxv. 4).
Pliny (xxxv. 1) laments the fact that the wealthy Romans of his time preferred the costly splendours of marble and porphyry wall-linings to the more artistic decoration of paintings by good artists. Historical painting seems then to have gone out of fashion; among the numerous specimens now existing few from Pompeii represent historical subjects; one has the scene of Massinissa and Sophonisba. before Scipio, and another of a riot between the people of Pompeii and Nocera, which happened 59 A.D.
Mythological scenes, chiefly from Greek sources, occur most frequently: the myths of Eros and Dionysus are especial favourites. Only five or six relate to purely Roman mythology. We have reason to think that some at least of the Pompeian pictures are copies, probably at third or fourth hand, from celebrated Greek originals. The frequently repeated subjects of Medea meditating the murder of her children and Iphigenia at the shrine of the Tauric Artemis suggest that the motive and composition were taken from the originals of these subjects by Timanthes. Those of Io and Argus, the finest example of which is in the Palatine “villa of Livia” and of Andromeda and Perseus, often repeated on Pompeian walls, may be from the originals by Nicias.
In many cases these mural paintings are of high artistic merit, though they are probably not the work of the most distinguished painters of the time, but rather of a humbler class of decorators, who reproduced, without much original invention, stock designs out of some pattern-book. They are, however, all remarkable for the rapid skill and extreme “verve” and freedom of hand with which the designs are, as it were, flung on to the walls with few but effective touches. Though in some cases the motive and composition are superior to the execution, yet many of the paintings are remarkable both for their realistic truth and technical skill. The great painting of Ceres from Pompeii, now in the Naples Museum, is a work of the highest merit.
In the usual scheme of decoration the broad wall-surfaces are broken up into a series of panels by pilasters, columns, or other architectural forms. Some of the panels contain pictures with figure-subjects; others have conventional ornament, or hanging festoons of fruit and flowers. The lower part of the wall is painted one plain colour, forming a dado; the upper part sometimes has a well-designed frieze of flowing ornaments. In the better class of painted walls the whole is kept flat in treatment, and is free from too great subdivision, but in many cases great want of taste is shown by the introduction of violent effects of architectural perspective, and the space is broken up by complicated schemes of design, studded with pictures in varying scales which have little relation to their surroundings. The colouring is on the whole pleasant and harmonious—unlike the usual chromo-lithographic copies. Black, yellow, or a rich deep red are the favourite colours for the main ground of the walls, the pictures in the panels being treated separately, each with its own background.
An interesting series of early Christian mural paintings exists in various catacombs, especially those of Rome and Naples. They are of value both as an important link in the history of art and also as throwing light on the mental state of the early Christians, which was distinctly influenced by the older faith. Thus in the Early Christian Painting in Italy. earlier paintings of about the 4th century we find Christ represented as a beardless youth, beautiful as the artist could make him, with lingering tradition of Greek idealization, in no degree like the “Man of Sorrows” of medieval painters, but rather a kind of genius of Christianity in whose fair outward form the peace and purity of the new faith were visibly symbolized, just as certain distinct attributes were typified in the persons of the gods of ancient Greece. The favourite early subject, “Christ the Good Shepherd” (fig. 8), is represented as Orpheus playing on his lyre to a circle of beasts, the pagan origin of the picture being shown by the Phrygian cap and by the presence of lions, panthers and other incongruous animals among the listening sheep. In other cases Christ is depicted standing with a sheep borne on His shoulders like Hermes Criophoros or Hermes Psychopompos—favourite Greek subjects, especially the former, a statue of which Pausanias (ix. 22) mentions as existing at Tanagra in Boeotia. Here again the pagan origin of the type is shown by the presence in the catacomb paintings of the panpipes and pedum, special attributes of Hermes, but quite foreign to the notion of Christ. Though in a degraded form, a good deal survives in some of these paintings, especially in the earlier ones, of the old classical grace of composition and beauty of drawing, notably in the above-mentioned representations where old models were copied without any adaptation to their new meaning. Those of the 5th and 6th centuries follow the classical
- ↑ One instance only of a tomb-painting is mentioned by Pausanias (vii. 22). Some fine specimens have been discovered in the Crimea, but not of a very early date; see Stephani, Compte rendu, &c., (St Petersburg, 1878), &c.
