It is no exaggeration to say that decorative painting was, as a conscious aesthetic effect, misinterpreted by the great painters of the Renaissance. The interest in natural form, the discovery of Greek sculpture, and the very fact that the painters educated themselves from these sculptural models account for the fact that the solid qualities of the figure, the suggestion of the third di mension, became the preoccupation of these masters, who aimed at realism and, it may be added, were expected to do so. In Correggio's agreement for the frescoes in the Parma cathedral, dated Nov. 3, 1522, it was expressly stipulated: "That he shall engage to paint the choir, the arcades and arches with their mouldings and all the wall space in the chapel decorating these with given subjects which shall either be imitations of life or of bronze or marble, according as the place may demand. . . ." It is for such reasons that all the famous masters of the Renaissance as, for example, Piero della Francesca, with his deco rations in S. Francesco, Arezzo, Signorelli in the cathedral of Orvieto, Pinturicchio in the Appartamenti Borgia in the Vatican, Raphael in the Stanze there, Michelangelo in the Sistine chapel, must all be appreciated as painters, as creative artists, but not decorators pure and simple. Their object was to create an illu sion of space which should destroy the architecture, not preserve it. This architecture-destroying aim is visible also in the work of one of their best masters, Correggio, though his earlier work, the decoration of the convent of S. Paolo in Parma, shows, especially in the ceiling of the dome, a better compromise, since by means of a trellis work of vine leaves from which are hung branches of fruit he preserves the structure of the architecture. If illusion creating and architecture-destroying qualities are to be regarded as characteristic of mural decoration then Raphael, Michelangelo, Correggio, Tintoretto were great decorators and Tiepolo the last and perhaps greatest of them all.
How confused the ideas in this respect were may be judged from the fact that when in the i7th century tapestries (Gobelins) once more replaced mural paintings they were designed in imita tion of oil paintings and bordered not by "verdures"—the flow ered pattern of the earlier tapestries—but by imitations of the carved and gilt frames of the time.
The 18th Century.—What is probably the best period in European decoration is the French of the i8th century, in which a perfect consistency ran through every part of interior architec ture and every piece of furniture, down to the smallest article— such as a snuffbox. Although painting was widely used for the decoration of almost every conceivable object, it is significant that wall paintings fell into comparative disfavour, mirrors being preferred as wall decorations. Boucher, however, is typical of such painted decoration as there was in France. It is also to be noted that serious easel picture painting had almost ceased; Chardin, the only serious painter of the age, was soon "despised and rejected." This attitude is also characteristic of the only complete English style of decoration, that of the brothers Adam. The great English portrait painters certainly furnished
the walls with their portraits, but the decorative picture was hung over the mantelpiece and doors—often not even properly filling the space of the panel—or let into medallions in the ceiling where it soon blackened and became unsightly. Mention must, however, be made of the hand painted wallpaper, done in imitation of Chinese models, or even imported from China.
The 19th Century.—As a result of the industrial and political revolutions, decoration, and with it mural painting, disappeared as a natural expression of culture from civilization. Where there is not one dominating spirit such as that of the tribe, the village community, the church, the prince, the aristocracy, there the soil out of which the life of decoration grows becomes sterile and has to be artificially fed. This happened in European civiliza tion during the i9th century. There was no class which de manded mural painting as an expression of its social significance, however laudably, if wrongly, artists like Haydon tried to press its need. Commercial manufacture took the place of the hand; the craft of decoration slipped into the offices of commercial con tractors who employed "hands," no longer craftsmen with a tradition behind them.
Individual efforts at the resuscitation of mural decoration were made by German artists, notably Peter von Cornelius (1783 1867) who painted the Casa Bartholdy in Rome in 1811 and many others in Munich and Berlin, and his pupil Wilhelm von Kaul bach (1805-74), whose decorations in the Neues museum, painted in a kind of fresco, are his chefs-d'oeuvre.
Under German influence Lord Leighton painted his two lun ettes in the Victoria and Albert museum, London, of which one, "the Arts of War," is a really admirable example of true mural painting, both in design and technique. Ford Madox Brown de serves mention in this connection on account of his wall paintings in the Manchester town hall, though they are more successful as story-telling pictures than as decoration.
To William Morris is mainly due the revival of the interest in interior decoration which has spread throughout the world, but, in his scheme, mural painting as such was not understood, he having rather Gothic stained glass, tapestries and textiles in mind for the purpose, and employing Burne-Jones to design the for mer. During this time Puvis de Chavannes made a noble attempt to create a new logic of mural painting which would exclude any tricks of illusion, but would preserve the sense of the wall. To that end he simplified his drawing, distributed his points of in terest by the arrangement of his figures and bound the composi tion together by a landscape setting which fulfilled its function as a foil and background without "making a hole in the wall." The principal means by which he achieved the desired flatness was the restriction of his palette to a scheme of grey-blues and grey greens. One of his ablest successors is Maurice Denis who, acting on similar principles of simplification, added nevertheless more gaiety—rose pinks—to his palette.