introduced by Cambyses into Persepolis, influenced the painting and sculpture of the great Persian Empire and throughout the valley of the Euphrates. In a lesser degree the art of Babylon and Nineveh had felt considerable Egyptian influence several centuries earlier. The same influence affected the early art of the Greeks and the Etrurians, and it was not till the middle of the 5th century B.C. that the further development and perfecting of art in Greece obliterated the old traces of Egyptian mannerism. After the death of Alexander the Great, when Egypt came into the possession of the Lagidae (320 B.C.), the tide of influence flowed the other way, and Greek art modified though it did not seriously alter the characteristics of Egyptian painting and sculpture, which retained much of their early formalism and severity. Yet the increased sense of beauty, especially in the human face, derived from the Greeks was counterbalanced by loss of vigour; art under the Ptolemies became a dull copyism of earlier traditions. The general scheme of mural painting in the buildings of ancient Egypt was complete and magnificent. Columns, mouldings and other architectural features were enriched with patterns in brilliant colours; the flat wall-spaces were covered with figure-subjects, generally in horizontal bands, and the ceilings were ornamented with sacred symbols, such as the vulture or painted blue and studded with gold stars to symbolize the sky. The wall-paintings are executed in tempera on a thin skin gais FIG. 6.-Early 18th-century Wall-Paper. (22 in. wide.) example of 18th-century wall-paper printed on squares of stout hand-made paper 22 in. wide. The design is apparently copied from an Indian chintz. In the 19th century in England, a great advance in the designing of wall-papers was made by William Morris and his school. 9. Painting. This is naturally the most important and the most widely used of all forms of wall-decoration, as well as perhaps the earliest. Egypt (see EGYPT: Art and Archaeology) is the chief storehouse of ancient specimens of this, as of almost all the arts. Owing to the intimate connexion between the Egyptian Paintings, sculpture and painting of early times, the remarks above as to subjects and treatment under the head of Egyptian wall-sculpture will to a great extent apply also to the paintings. It is an important fact, which testifies to the antiquity of Egyptian civilization, that the earliest paintings, dating more than 4000 years before our era, are also the cleverest both in drawing and execution. In later times the influence of Egyptian art, especially in painting, was important even among The rock-cut sepulchres of the Etrurians supply the only existing specimens of their mural painting; and, unlike the tombs of Egypt, only a small proportion appear to have been decorated in this way. The actual dates Painting. of these paintings are very uncertain, but they range possibly from about the 8th century B.C. down to almost the Christian era. The tombs which possess these paintings are mostly square-shaped rooms, with slightly-arched or gabled roofs, | excavated in soft sandstone or tufa hillsides. The earlier ones show Egyptian influence in drawing and in composition: they are broadly designed with flat unshaded tints, the faces in profile, except the eyes, which are drawn as if seen in front. Colours, as in Egypt, are used conventionally-male flesh red, white or pale yellow for the females, black for demons. In one respect these paintings differ from those of the Egyptians; few colours are used-red, brown, and yellow ochres, carbon-black, lime or chalk-white, and occasionally blue are the only pigments. The rock-walls are prepared by being covered with a thin skin of lime stucco, and lime or chalk is mixed in small quantities with all the colours; hence the restriction to "earth pigments," made necessary by the dampness of these subterranean chambers. The process employed was in fact a kind of fresco, though the stucco ground was not applied in small patches only sufficient for the day's work; the dampness of the rock was enough to keep the stucco skin moist, and so allow the necessary infiltration of colour from the surface. Many of these paintings when first discovered were fresh in tint and uninjured by time, but they are soon dulled by exposure to light. In the course of centuries great changes of style naturally took place; the early Egyptian influence, probably brought to Etruria through the Phoenician traders, was succeeded by an even more strongly-marked Greek influence at first archaic and stiff, then developing into great beauty of drawing, and finally yielding to the Roman spirit, as the degradation of Greek art advanced under their powerful but inartistic Roman conquerors. Throughout this succession of styles-Egyptian, Greek and Graeco-Roman-there runs a distinct undercurrent of individuality due to the Etruscans themselves. This appears not only in the drawing but also in the choice of subjects. In addition to pictures of banquets with musicians and dancers, hunting and racing scenes, the workshops of different craftsmen and other domestic subjects, all thoroughly Hellenic in sentiment, other paintings occur which are very un-Greek in feeling. These represent the judgment and punishment of souls in a future life. Mantus, Charun and other infernal deities of the Rasena, hideous in aspect and armed with hammers, or furies depicted as black-bearded demons winged and brandishing live snakes, terrify or torture shrinking human souls. Others, not the earliest | in date, represent human sacrifices, such as those at the tomb of Patroclus-a class of subjects which, though Homeric, appears rarely to have been selected by Greek painters. The constant import into Etruria of large quantities of fine Greek painted vases appears to have contributed to keep up the supremacy of Hellenic influence during many centuries, and by their artistic superiority to have prevented the development of a more original and native school of art. Though we now know Etruscan painting only from the tombs, yet Pliny mentions (H. N. xxxv. 3) that fine wall-paintings existed in his time, with colours yet fresh, on the walls of ruined temples at Ardea and Lanuvium, executed, he says, before the founding of Rome. As before mentioned, the actual dates of the existing paintings are uncertain. It cannot therefore be asserted that any existing specimens are much older than 600 B.C., though some, especially at Veii, certainly appear to have the characteristics of more remote antiquity. The most important of these paintings have been discovered in the cemeteries of Veii, Caere, Tarquinii, Vulci, Cervetri and other Etruscan cities. Greek Even in Egypt the use of colour does not appear to have been more universal than it was among the Greeks (see, GREEK ART), who applied it freely to their marble statues and Palating. reliefs, the whole of their buildings inside and out, as well as for the decoration of flat wall-surfaces. They appear to have cared little for pure form, and not to have valued the delicate ivory-like tint and beautiful texture of their fine Pentelic and Parian marbles, except as a ground for coloured ornament. A whole class of artists, called ayaλuáтwv kykavσrai, were occupied in colouring marble sculpture, and their services were very highly valued. In some cases, probably for the sake of This process, circumlitio, is mentioned by Pliny (H. N. xxxv. 40). hiding the joints and getting a more absorbent surface, the marble, however pure and fine in texture, was covered with a thin skin of stucco made of mixed lime and powdered marble. An alabaster sarcophagus, found in a tomb near Corneto, and now in the Etruscan museum at Florence, is decorated outside with beautiful purely Greek paintings, executed on a stucco skin as hard and smooth as the alabaster. The pictures represent combats of the Greeks and Amazons. The colouring, though rather brilliant, is simply treated, and the figures are kept strictly to one plane without any attempt at complicated perspective. Other valuable specimens of Greek art, found at Herculaneum and now in the Naples Museum, are some small paintings, one of girls playing with dice, another of Theseus and the Minotaur. These are painted with miniature-like delicacy on the bare surface of marble slabs; they are almost monochromatic, and are of the highest beauty both in drawing and in gradations of shadow-quite unlike any of the Greek vase-paintings. The first-mentioned painting is signed AAEZANAPO2 AÕHNAIO2. It is probable that the strictly archaic paintings of the Greeks, such as those of Polygnotus in the 5th century B.C., executed with few and simple colours, had much resemblance to those on vases, but Pliny is wrong when he asserts that, till the time of | Apelles (c. 350-310 B.C.), the Greek painters only used black, white, red and yellow.2 Judging from the peculiar way in which the Greeks and their imitators the Romans used the names of colours, it appears that they paid more attention to tones and relations of colour than to actual hues. Thus most Greek and Latin colour-names are now untranslatable. Homer's "winelike sea (oiro), Sophocles's wine-coloured ivy " (Ed. Col.), and Horace's "purpureus olor" probably refer less to what we should call colour than to the chromatic strength of the various objects and their more or less strong powers of reflecting light, either in motion or when at rest. Nor have we any word like Virgil's "flavus," which could be applied both to a lady's hair and to the leaf of an olive-tree.3 During the best periods of Greek art the favourite classes of subjects were scenes from poetry, especially Homer and contemporary history. The names waкolkη and σтoà πokiλn were given to many public buildings from their walls being covered with paintings. Additional interest was given to the historical subjects by the introduction of portraits; e.g. in the great picture of the battle of Marathon (490 B.C.), on the walls of the σToà Toxin in Athens, portraits were given of the Greek generals Miltiades, Callimachus, and others. This picture was painted about forty years after the battle by Polygnotus and Micon. One of the earliest pictures recorded by Pliny (xxxv. 8) represented a battle of the Magnesians (c. 716 B.C.); it was painted by Bularchus, a Lydian artist, and bought at a high price by King Candaules. Many other important Greek historical paintings are mentioned by Pausanias and earlier writers. The Pompeian mosaic of the defeat of the Persians by Alexander is probably a Romanized copy from some celebrated Greek painting; it obviously was not designed for mosaic work. Landscape painting appears to have been unknown among the Greeks, even as a background to figure-subjects. The poems especially of Homer and Sophocles show that this was not through want of appreciation of the beauties of nature, but partly, probably, because the main object of Greek painting was to tell some definite story, and also from their just sense of artistic fitness, which prevented them from attempting in their mural decorations to disguise the flat solidity of the walls by delusive effects of aerial perspective and distance. It is interesting to note that even in the time of Alexander the Great the somewhat archaic works of the earlier painters were still appreciated. In particular Aristotle praises Polygnotus, Pliny's remarks on subjects such as this should be received with caution. He was neither a scientific archaeologist nor a practical artist. words-by rovos they meant, not So also a meaning unlike ours is attached to Greek technical "tone," but the gradations of light and shade, and by apuoh the relations of colour. See Pliny. H. N. xxxv. 5; and Ruskin, Mod. Painters, pt. w. cap. 13. MURAL DECORATION both for his power of combining truth with idealization | We have reason to think that some at least of the Pompeian in his portraits and for his skill in depicting men's mental pictures are copies, probably at third or fourth hand, from characteristics; on this account he calls him doypȧpos. celebrated Greek originals. The frequently repeated subjects Lucian too praises Polygnotus alike for his grace, drawing and of Medea meditating the murder of her children and Iphigenia colouring. Later painters, such as Zeuxis and Apelles, appear at the shrine of the Tauric Artemis suggest that the motive to have produced easel pictures more than mural paintings, and composition were taken from the originals of these subjects and these, being easy to move, were mostly carried off to Rome by Timanthes. Those of Io and Argus, the finest example of by the early emperors. Hence Pausanias, who visited Greece which is in the Palatine "villa of Livia in the time of Hadrian, mentions but few works of the later and Perseus, often repeated on Pompeian walls, may be from artists. Owing to the lack of existing specimens of Greek the originals by Nicias. " and of Andromeda 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' 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 Roman houses and baths of Pompeii, nearly all dating Painting. 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 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 or fanciful patterns of scroll-work and pilasters mixed with 66 grotesques 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, chietty trom Greek sources, occur most frequently: the myths of Eros and Dionysus are especial favourites. Only five or six relate to purely Roman mythology. 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. 44 merit, though they are probably not the work of the most distinguished painters of the time, but rather of a humbler In many cases these mural paintings are of high artistic class of decorators, who reproduced, without much original invention, stock designs out of some pattern-book. They it were, flung on to the walls with few but effective touches. are, however, all remarkable for the rapid skill and extreme Though in some cases the motive and composition are superior verve" and freedom of hand with which the designs are, as 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. broken up into a series of panels by pilasters, columns, or other In the usual scheme of decoration the broad wall-surfaces are 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. 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 In the architectural perspective, and the space is broken up by comscales which have little relation to their surroundings. The colouring is on the whole pleasant and harmonious-unlike the plicated schemes of design,, studded with pictures in varying red are the favourite colours for the main ground of the walls, the pictures in the panels being treated separately, each with its usual chromo-lithographic copies. Black, yellow, or a rich deep own background. in various catacombs, especially those of Rome and Naples. They are of value both as an important link in the An interesting series of early Christian mural paintings exists mental state of the early Christians, which was dis- Painting la tinctly influenced by the older faith. Thus in the Italy. history of art and also as throwing light on the Christian Early earlier paintings of about the 4th century we find Christ represented as a beardless youth, beautiful as the artist could make him, with a lingering tradition of Greek idealization, in no degree like the "Man of Sorrows" of medieval painters, but rather just as certain distinct attributes were typified in the persons a kind of genius of Christianity in whose fair outward form. the peace and purity of the new faith were visibly symbolized, of the gods of ancient Greece. The favourite early subject, 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 "Christ the Good Shepherd " (fig. 8), is represented as Orpheus 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 Bocotia. Here again the pagan origin of the type pipes and pedum, special attributes of Hermes, but quite foreign to the notion of Christ. Though in a degraded form, a good is shown by the presence in the catacomb paintings of the pandeal survives in some of these paintings, especially in the earlier drawing, notably in the above-mentioned representations where meaning. Those of the 5th and 6th centuries follow the classical ones, of the old classical grace of composition and beauty of old models were copied without any adaptation to their new A WALL PAINTING IN THE MUSEO NAZIONALE, AT ROME, FROM A ROMAN VILLA DISCOVERED IN 1878, EARLY IMPERIAL STYLE |