MURAL PAINTING concerns that branch of art which has for its object the covering or "dressing" of a building so that its purpose may be "sweetened" or intensified by the decoration. This decoration, therefore, must be considered from two points of view : fitness and adornment. Fitness prescribes the nature; adornment the aesthetic design of such paintings. Most buildings are structures composed, roughly speaking, of two elements: the space-bearing and the space-enclosing. The tentpole and the four posts, or columns, with their transverse beams, are the space-bearing parts of architecture; the walls, whether of canvas, like a tent's, of wood, lath and plaster, brick or stone, are the space-enclosing but not necessarily structural elements ; nor are the roofing and the ceiling necessarily structural. The decora tions of architecture, therefore, naturally fall into two categories —those which are applied to the structural parts and those which cover the enclosing parts. In good architecture, at all events, these differences are discernible so that one may say that the structural elements are decorated with ornament whilst the en closing or mural parts are covered with some kind of "dressing," of which mural painting is, aesthetically, the most important, but to which must also be reckoned panelling, mosaic, tapestry, painted patterning and papering, and even stained glass, which after all is only a translucent wall.
Egypt.—Such painted architectural decoration appears to have found its earliest and certainly its most vital expression in Egypt. The Egyptians were, like all primitive races, symbolizers. The fitness of any given design would therefore be decided not merely by its natural derivation and consequent position, but also by its symbolic significance. They were thus the most logical mural decorators imaginable, for their ornament had its origin in nature, its position from its original place and its meaning from its associations with their religious belief. This also is true of the pictorial decoration of their walls. Aesthetic considera tions were here as little dominant as in their ornament. Every discovery of Egyptian art points to the fact that they had very logical but also very simple notions of aesthetic composition, which was founded upon symmetry. This symmetry is an ex
pression of the natural instinct for aesthetic order before it has become aware of more subtle modes of achieving balance.
Magnificent imitators of natural form as they were—at all events, at some periods of their six or seven thousand years of history—they never in their mural painting, as distinct from their sculpture, sacrificed clarity of meaning to beauty or truth of expression. Hence their custom of representing the human figure partly en face, partly in profile, so that one might see both legs and feet, both shoulders, arms and hands. To think of Egyptian mural decoration as an expression of aesthetic pleasure would therefore be manifestly wrong; what aesthetic pleasure might be derived was, if not an unconscious result, at all events no more than a means to an end. Indeed, Egyptian art appears to have been the source of all that kind of art which became eventually not only conscious but self-conscious and, so to speak, self-sufficient. What is true of Egyptian art is true to a great extent also of that of the neighbouring civilization of Mesopotamia corn prising the Babylonian, or Chaldaean, the Assyrian and the Per sian empires, and covering a period from 400o to 333 B.C.
Greece.—The Greeks painted the structural features of their temples and even coloured their sculpture, but we know little about their painting except from their literature. This may be because it was not truly mural, but hung on the walls in wooden frames. Moreover, from their habit of personifying time, place and event, and the addition in script of the names of the persons represented, which we notice on their vases, we may judge that their method of composition was not aesthetic but ideological. The Parthenon shows a curious contradiction in aesthetic notions; for, whilst the tympana or gable-fields are decorated with figures that are roughly symmetrical in arrangement and follow the triangular shape of the architecture, they have no organic rhythm, they do not belong together. On the other hand, the sculptured frieze, with its rhyth mical procession of horsemen, is the most magnificent decora tion of that part of architecture imaginable, precisely because it has the two fundamentals, continuity and variety.