Page:EB1911 - Volume 19.djvu/41

 specially recorded in the valuable series of accounts for the expenses of wall-paintings in the royal palace of Westminster during the reign of Henry III., printed in Vetusta monumenta, vol. vi. (1842). All the materials used, including charcoal to dry the paintings and the wages paid to the artists, are given. The materials mentioned are plumbum album et rubeum, viridus, vermilio, synople, ocre, azura, aurum, argentum, collis, oleum, vernix.



Two foreign painters were employed—Peter of Spain and William of Florence—at sixpence a day, but the English painters seem to have done most of the work and received higher pay. William, an English monk in the adjoining Benedictine abbey of Westminster, received two shillings a day. Walter of Durham and various members of the Otho family, royal goldsmiths and moneyers, worked for many years on the adornment of Henry III.’s palace and were well paid for their skill. Some fragments of paintings from the royal chapel of St Stephen are now in the British Museum. They are delicate and carefully painted subjects from the Old Testament, in rich colours, each with explanatory inscription underneath. The scale is small, the figures being scarcely a foot high. Their method of execution is curious. First the smooth stone wall was covered with a coat of red, painted in oil, probably to keep back the damp; on that a thin skin of fine gesso (stucco) has been applied, and the outlines of the figures marked with a point; the whole of the background, crowns, borders of dresses, and other ornamental parts have then been modelled and stamped with very minute patterns in slight relief, impressed on the surface of the gesso while it was yet soft. The figures have then been painted, apparently in tempera, gold leaf has been applied to the stamped reliefs, and the whole has been covered with an oil varnish. It is difficult to realize the labour required to cover large halls such as the above chapel and the “painted chamber,” the latter about 83 ft. by 27 ft., with this style of decoration.

In many cases the grounds were entirely covered with shining metal leaf, over which the paintings were executed; those parts, such as the draperies, where the metallic lustre was wanted, were painted in oil with transparent colours, while the flesh was painted in opaque tempera. The effect of the bright metal shining through the rich colouring is magnificent. This minuteness of much of the medieval wall-decoration is remarkable. Large wall-surfaces and intricate mouldings were often completely covered by elaborate gesso patterns in relief of almost microscopic delicacy (fig. 16). The cost of stamps for this is among the items in the Westminster accounts. These patterns when set and dry were further adorned with gold and colours. So also with the architectural painting; the artist was not content simply to pick out the various members of the mouldings in different colours, but he also frequently covered each bead or fillet with painted flowers and other patterns, as delicate as those in an illuminated MS.—so minute and highly finished that they are almost invisible at a little distance, but yet add greatly to the general richness of effect. All this is neglected in modern reproductions of medieval painting, in which both touch and colour are coarse and harsh—caricatures of the old work, such as disfigure the Sainte Chapelle in Paris, and many cathedrals in France, Germany and England. Gold was never used in large quantities without the ground on which it was laid being broken up by some such delicate reliefs as that shown in fig. 16, so its effect was never dazzling.

Mural painting in England fell into disuse in the 16th century, until attempts to revive it were made in the 19th century. For domestic purposes wood panelling, stamped leather, and tapestry were chiefly used as wall-coverings. In the reign of Henry VIII., probably in part through Holbein’s influence, a rather coarse tempera wall-painting, German in style, appears to have been common. A good example of arabesque painting of this period in black and white, rudely though boldly drawn and Holbeinesque in character, was discovered in 1881 behind the panelling in one of the canons’ houses at Westminster. Other examples exist at Haddon Hall (Derbyshire) and elsewhere.

Many efforts have been made in England to revive fresco painting. The Houses of Parliament bear witness to this, the principal works there being those of William Dyce and Daniel Maclise. That of G. F. Watts, whose easel work also is generally distinguished by its mural feeling, is full of serious purpose and dignity of conception. “Buono fresco” (the painting in tempera upon a freshly laid ground of plaster while wet), “spirit fresco” or Gambier-Parry method (the painting with a spirit medium upon a specially prepared plaster or canvas ground ), and “water glass” painting (wherein the method is similar to water-colour painting on a prepared plastered wall, the painting when finished being covered with a chemical solution which hardens and protects the surface), have all been tried. Other processes are also in the experimental stage, such as that known as Keim’s, which has been successfully tried by Mrs Merritt in a series of mural paintings in a church at Chilworth. Unless, however, some means can be found of enabling the actual painted wall to resist the natural dampness of the English climate, it does not seem likely that true fresco painting can ever be naturalized in Great Britain. Of two of the few modern artists entrusted with important mural work in England, Ford Madox Brown and Frederick J. Shields, the former distinguished especially for his fine series of mural paintings in the Manchester town-hall, in the later paintings there adopted the modern method of painting the design upon canvas in flat oil colour, using a wax medium, and afterwards affixing the canvas to the wall by means of white lead. This is a usual method with modern decorators. Mr Shields has painted the panels of his scheme of mural decoration in the chapel of the Ascension at Bayswater, London, also upon canvas in oils, and has adopted the method of fixing them to slabs of slate facing the Wall so as to avoid the risk of damp from the wall itself. Friezes and frieze panels or ceilings in private houses are usually painted upon canvas in oil and affixed to the wall or inserted upon their strainers, like pictures in a frame. (Walter Crane has used fibrous plaster panels, painting in ordinary oil colours with turpentine as a medium, as in Redcross Hall.) Recently there has been a revival of tempera painting, and a group of painters are producing works on panel and canvas painted in tempera or fresco secco, with yolk of egg as a medium, according to the practice of the early Italian painters and the directions of Cennino Cennini. A pure luminous quality of colour is produced, valuable in mural decoration and also durable, especially under varnish.

MURANO (anc. Ammariuno), an island in the Venetian lagoon about 1 m. north of Venice. It is 5 m. in circumference, and a large part of it is occupied by gardens. It contained 5436 inhabitants in 1901, but was once much more populous than it is at present, its inhabitants numbering 30,000. It was a favourite resort of the Venetian nobility before they began to build their villas on the mainland; and in the 15th and 16th centuries its gardens and casinos, of which some traces remain, were famous. It was here that the literary clubs of the Vigilanti, the Studiosi and the Occulti, used to meet. 