Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/197

MURAL PAINTING Panthéon cut the color-scale and the value-scale in half, we were all conscious of an unaccustomed and quite peculiar fitness of the means to the end; of a truth that was higher than the truth of nature, because it was the truth of art. But although the color-scale of a mural painting may be limited or attenuated, it must still remain true within its limits. Even the tapestry is true so far as it goes. The human eye would repudiate scarlet grass or a grass-green sky. The elements of the decoration must come from nature exactly as they do in the easel picture, the difference being that in the latter case the painter accepts and utilizes practically all that nature gives him, while the mural painter takes from nature only those elements which will best subserve his ends. [151]