WOMAN IN ART
Again, on Babylonian walls, pictures tell us of ideas and developments of a later civilization, another conception of deity, another style of architecture, other modes of life, other sorts of men. Hence we see mural painting, an outgrowth of the dim past, has been engrafted from time to time with more modern ideas. It is a practical and harmonious application of decorative painting to architecture. It may be merely decorative, but great art will have something to say or to suggest that will be in harmony with the building or room it is to adorn. Such building or room will naturally suggest a subject appropriate to its use.
On the walls of the throne room of Queen Hatasu is a painting of her Egyptian majesty, her head supporting a two-story crown, emblem of her sovereignty over the two kingdoms, Upper and Lower Egypt.
In the period of the Renaissance, before the art of printing was discovered, scripture themes and stories painted on church and cloister walls were a means of religious education. Old and young can read pictures, and the more clear the pictures the more alert the unlettered mind.
The arts were non-essentials of life, but were very important as adornment and even aggrandizement, as were the brilliantly colored walls of Babylonian pyramidal palaces and temples.
Each civilization has expressed its progress, ideals of beauty and deity, to an extent, on its public walls. Recent explorations have added to modern knowledge concerning the antiquity of wall painting. The explorations of Sir Arthur Evans and Mr. Noal Heaton, on the Island of Crete, prove that the Minoans practiced mural painting—simple colors on plaster—three thousand or four thousand years before Christ, and it seems to have been purely decorative. Hence we infer that there must have been a school for that art, and for them it must have reached a high-water mark. Therefore, color was for them as for the Greeks a means of enrichment, the Greeks using it to add beauty to their statuary in many cases; and more often the beauty was enhanced by a colored background, or a length of soft silk draped over some piece of Parian marble.
Beauty and art, as twin sisters, have touched earth now and again through rolling ages, imbuing the spirit of mankind. Even in the study of history as writ amid the ruins, we discover those diaphanous beings alighted at Tyre, at Carthage, reflecting their glory in the clear blue of the Middle Sea; at Rome and her pleasure towns, Tivali, Baiea, Pompeii, and Herculaneum—all too near the mountain of fire—and later they made themselves
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