The wall paintings in this building by Puvis de Chavannes, in contrast to the works above-mentioned, are designed and executed in a truly decorative sense. Here he has painted a magnificent series of panels illustrating incidents in the life of St. Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris. The general colour of these pastoral works is a combination of grey greens, pale yellows, and pale purples, which produces an atmosphere that is silvery and tender. The compositions are dignified and impressive, and there is no crowding or complexity in the almost even distribution of the figures; the keynote is simplicity, which gives the monumental clearness of design that decorative painting demands. In this respect the work of Chavannes has much in common with the charm and naïveté of the work of the Italian Primitives.

At the Hôtel de Ville he has painted the subjects of “L’Hiver,” “L’Eté,” and “Victor Hugo offrant son Lyre à la Ville de Paris,” but perhaps his greatest achievement is his celebrated painting of the “Lettres, Arts et Muses” which decorates the hemicycle of the vast Amphitheatre of the Sorbonne at Paris. The subject was one that was entirely in harmony with the painter’s genius and powers. The composition contains forty-four life-sized figures, which are arranged in a series of cleverly designed groups, all connected with each other, and arranged symmetrically, but not with a dry symmetry, on either side of a central group of three figures—Mnemosyne, the mother of the Muses, seated, with boys on either side, who are evidently meant to personify Love and Fame. The other figures symbolise Literature, Art, and Poetry. The background scene is a sacred wood, where the graceful tree trunks are kept rather thin and slender, so as not to interfere with the figures, but these serried rows of trees give the requisite upright lines that steady and strengthen the composition, which is also helped immensely by a dark hedge, extending the whole length of the picture, above which a little sky is shown.

The colour scheme is a beautiful harmony of fairly strong half-tones of such colours as greens, reds, yellows, blues, orange, grey and purple, but as a whole the dominant harmony is that of green and purple, although neither of these colours appears in its full or positive hue. The general colour scheme of this work is unusually intense in comparison with the paler and more tender colouring of the other works of this painter. His figures are types or embodiments of his poetic ideas, for, like Blake and Botticelli, he used the human form in his designs, not in any realistic sense, but as a medium for the expression of his ideas and inward vision; in short, he subordinated form to his thought.

The staircase walls in the Museum at Lyons have been decorated with paintings by Puvis de Chavannes; he is also well represented in his important wall paintings in the museums of Rouen, Marseilles, and Amiens, and his latest work was the decorative paintings in the Library at Boston, in America. Some of his earliest works, and other later ones, are those that form the important wall decorations in the Picardy Museum at Amiens, and this museum affords an excellent opportunity for the student who wishes to study the art of Puvis de Chavannes, for it contains many and typical examples of his design, drawing, composition, and colour. There are some very large paintings of his which decorate the main staircase walls, and there is also here a special gallery devoted to his work, the walls of which are covered by his paintings, all of which are surrounded by richly coloured Pompeian borders and panels of ornament. The architectural mouldings and other features are also richly coloured, and this surrounding colour and ornament does not in any way interfere with the pictorial composition, but, on the other hand, unites the paintings with the architecture, the whole effect providing a fine example of colour finish to the gallery.

Generally speaking, the majority of painters who are called upon to execute wall paintings in public buildings are afraid to use colour or coloured ornament close to, or surrounding, their pictorial compositions; but the best Italian artists, and the Greeks also, invariably did surround their decorative pictures with coloured geometric patterns, and coloured the architectural mouldings as well. So when we find such a great decorator as Chavannes adopting the principle of using colour to aid the effect of his decorative picture, and thus following the practice of the old masters, we may be assured that ornamental bands, lines, and mouldings, if coloured in harmony with the pictorial compositions, will effectively assist the latter in their function of providing a true decoration of the building, and prevent them from having the isolated appearance of pictures fastened on the walls.

CHAPTER VIII
COLOUR DECORATION IN GERMANY

THERE was little, if any, art or architecture in Germany before the days of Charlemagne, except that which found expression in the various articles and objects of personal adornment, such as in brooches, rings, in the costume of the warriors and chiefs, and in some objects of general utility, where the lesser arts—die Kleinkünste—were developed and attained to high degrees of perfection, in the Romanesque period and Middle Ages. Charlemagne, who reigned from 768 to 814, was a great art-loving prince, and gave the first impulse to art in Germany when he built his stately church, which he also intended for his tomb, at Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle). Here he had also his chief palace, but of this, and of the many others he possessed on the banks of the Rhine, no definite traces remain but his palace-chapel, now the cathedral, or the round portion of the latter, which still exists in good preservation, and is a fitting monument to his greatness, and to his zeal for the promotion of art in Germany. This church is said to be a copy in plan of the Byzantine Church of St. Vitale at Ravenna, except that the latter is an octagon in the ground plan, and the former is a polygon of sixteen sides. This round type of building was used in Rome and the south not only for churches, but for baptisteries, and after Charlemagne’s Chapel was erected in Aachen it became the prototype of circular churches that were built in the Romanesque period and style in Germany. The church at Aix-la-Chapelle was decorated with mosaics, similar to those of St. Vitale at Ravenna, but the original mosaics have all perished, and the ones which now adorn the dome and pendentives of the church are modern works by Salviati of Venice, and were executed from a seventeenth-century copy of the old mosaic. The subject of the dome mosaic, on a gold ground, represents Christ and the twenty-four Elders of the Apocalypse. The rest of the central part of the church, ambulatory walls, etc., are adorned with mosaics within the last ten years. The choir of this interesting church is an addition, and is a Gothic building of the fifteenth century. Its walls and vaulted ceiling are richly adorned with ornamentation in colours and gold, the patterns of the ornament being similar to, or derived from, the silk tapestries of that period.

Mosaic as church decoration, except for floor pavements, was not much in use in Germany after the time of Charlemagne; in the northern countries of Europe wall painting in tempera became the characteristic method of decoration for the Romanesque churches, just as mosaic was the chief kind of decoration for churches in Italy and southern Europe in the same period.

In the Romanesque epoch in Germany, the period which is generally understood to extend from A.D. 1000 till about 1200, or a little later, no church was without its painted decoration. The subjects were similar to, and the general design and style of drawing were not unlike the mosaic decoration of churches in Italy and Sicily. Single figures, and scenes from the Old and New Testaments were enclosed in panels, having borders designed in elaborate ornamental forms, derived chiefly from conventional leafage. The figures were usually painted in flat tints, or almost so; very little shading or modelling of the forms were attempted, and the whole work was strongly outlined, so that the finished decoration appeared as an enlarged kind of illumination. The ribs or groups of mouldings of the vaulted ceilings and the soffits of the arches were decorated with conventional flowers, garlands and ribbon work. The apse usually contained a large figure of Christ, or the Madonna enthroned, surrounded with figures of the Apostles and Saints, and often on the other parts of the church, such as the triumphal arch, the ceilings and walls, there were paintings representing the visions of the Prophets, and the imaginative imagery of the Apocalypse.

The Romanesque churches of the Rhineland afford many examples of interior colour decoration, for it was in the region watered by the Rhine that German art was cradled, where it was carefully nursed, and where it developed to an early maturity. Mural painting as a handmaid, or as an auxiliary to Romanesque architecture, can still be studied in many of the old churches in the valley of the Rhine, where it was an important art as early as the eleventh century. The secular buildings also, such as the castles, guild-houses, town-halls, chateaux and private houses were all at this time decorated in colour, but nearly all of their colour decorations and paintings have been destroyed in the course of time, except some remaining fragments which have been removed to local museums. There are, however, a few churches of the Romanesque period that still have a considerable amount of the eleventh and twelfth century paintings on their walls, and though much of this work is greatly faded and has now very little of its former colour and beauty, yet the composition and outlines are still in evidence, and although we cannot well judge of their original colouring there are still much quaintness and charm attached to those examples which have not yet been restored.