A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, ArchitectureWaters, Clara Erskine Clement
History
A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture
Waters, Clara Erskine Clement
Art -- History
The variety of subjects at Pompeii is large: there are landscapes, hunting
scenes, mythological subjects, numerous kinds of single figures, such as
dancing girls, the hours, or seasons, graces, satyrs, and many others;
devotional pictures, such as representations of the ancient divinities,
lares, penates, and genii; pictures of tavern scenes, of mechanics at
their work; rope-dancers and representations of various games,
gladiatorial contests, _genre_ scenes from the lives of children, youths,
and women, festival ceremonies, actors, poets, and stage scenes, and last,
but not least, many caricatures, of which I here give you an example (Fig.
9).
[Illustration: FIG. 9.--THE FLIGHT OF AENEAS. _From a wall-painting._]
The largest dog is AEneas, who leads the little Ascanius by the hand and
carries his father, Anchises, on his shoulder. Frequently in the ancient
caricatures monkeys are made to take the part of historical and imaginary
heroes.
[Illustration: FIG. 10.--DEMETER ENTHRONED. _From a Pompeian
wall-painting._]
[Illustration: FIG. 11.--POMPEIAN WALL-PAINTING.]
Fig. 11 shows you how these painted walls were sometimes divided; the
principal subjects were surrounded by ornamental borders, and the spaces
between filled in with all sorts of little compartments. The small spaces
in this picture are quite regular in form; but frequently they are of
varied shapes, and give a very decorative effect to the whole work. The
colors used upon these different panels, as they may be called, were
usually red, yellow, black, and white--more rarely blue and green.
Sometimes the entire decoration consisted of these small, variously
colored spaces, divided by some graceful little border, with a very small
figure, plant, or other object in the centre of each space.
[Illustration: FIG. 12.--NEST OF CUPIDS. _From a Pompeian
wall-painting._]
Fig. 10, of Demeter, or Ceres, enthroned is an example of such devotional
paintings as were placed above the altars and shrines for private worship
in the houses of Pompeii, or at the street corners, just as we now see
pictures and sacred figures in street shrines in Roman Catholic countries.
In ancient days, as now, these pictures were often done in a coarse and
careless manner, as if religious use, and not art, was the object in the
mind of the artist.
Fig. 12, of a Nest of Cupids is a very interesting example of Pompeian
painting, and to my mind it more nearly resembles pictures of later times
than does any other ancient painting of which I know.
MOSAICS.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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