"Fresco" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... should do so distinctly, and provoke the observer to take pleasure in seeing how completely the workman is master of the particular material he has used, and how beautiful and desirable a substance it was, for work of that kind. In oil painting, its unctuous quality is to be delighted in; in fresco, its chalky quality; in glass, its transparency; in wood, its grain; in marble, its softness; in porphyry, its hardness; in iron, its toughness. In a flint country, one should feel the delightfulness of having flints to pick ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... soul in its choice between what is material and that other something which transcends it. The only pictures now in my study are a few frescoes done for me by Abanindra Nath Tagore and Nanda Lal Bose. The first fresco represents Her, who is the Sustainer of the Universe. She stands pedestalled on the lotus of our heart. The world was at peace; but a change has come. And She under whose Veil of Compassion we had been protected so long, suddenly flings us to the world of conflict. ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... a painter called Bonamico, who was engaged by Cardinal Aretino to paint a series of pictures in his chapel. He began with a beautiful fresco of Jesus Christ. A day or two afterwards, when he came to his work in the morning, he found his picture smeared all over with dabs of colour, red, and black, and blue, and yellow, and utterly defaced and spoiled. The painter was so angry that he refused ...
— The Village Pulpit, Volume II. Trinity to Advent • S. Baring-Gould
... to the number of six, were each ornamented by a cupola painted in fresco, and statues in marble by the greatest masters, which, after being left for some time exposed to the injuries of the air in the court looking towards the country, are at length deposited in the ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... a modern painter invariably thinks of the grace and beauty of his work first, and unites afterwards as much truth as he can with its conventional graces. I will give you a single strong instance to make my meaning plainer. In Orcagna's great fresco of the Triumph of Death, one of the incidents is that three kings,[35] when out hunting, are met by a spirit, which, desiring them to follow it, leads them to a churchyard, and points out to them, in open coffins, ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... euphorbus. No scented happy Tuscan things. And deep below, the arches of Nero's Villa—with demons no doubt galore. Those giottesque chapels hold in them, all hung with lamps, a small tufo grotto, the one down which, as in Sodoma's fresco, the angels sent baskets of provisions and the devils made ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... shoulders, and her face in its ethereal delicacy of feature and brilliant coloring looked almost too beautiful to be human. Dr. Dean did not reply for a moment; he was thinking what a singular resemblance there was between Armand Gervase and one of the figures on a certain Egyptian fresco in the British Museum. ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... exact attention; and the grotesques, with which the stucco ceilings are covered, equal the celebrated loggios of the Vatican. I don't recollect ever having seen these elegant designs engraven, and believe it would be perfectly worth the pains of some capital artist to copy them. Being in fresco upon damp neglected walls, each year diminishes their number, and every winter ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... Her thoughts had drifted away, back through her weary past, to a little village church where a fresco painting stood on the wall, sketched in days long before, of a company of guests at a feast, clad in Saxon robes; and of One, behind whom knelt a woman weeping and kissing His feet, while her flowing hair almost hid them from ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... the shadow of Cape Eternity to restore the spirit to self-possession, and perhaps none turns from it wholly dismayed. Kitty, at any rate, took heart from some works of art which the cliff wall displayed near the water's edge. One of these was a lively fresco portrait of Lieutenant-General Sherman, with the insignia of his rank, and the other was an even more striking effigy of General O'Neil, of the Armies of the Irish Republic, wearing a threatening aspect, and designed ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... Stable-Door; so that every Customer was alike well served according to his Chance, and every Horse ridden with the same Justice: From whence it became a Proverb, when what ought to be your Election was forced upon you, to say, Hobson's Choice. This memorable Man stands drawn in Fresco at an Inn (which he used) in Bishopsgate-street, with an hundred Pound Bag under his Arm, with this Inscription upon the ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... decoration of the new Houses of Parliament, had an exhibition of prize cartoons in Westminster Hall during the summer of 1843. Great expectations were entertained of the effect of such patronage on painting in its higher branches. Many careful investigations were made into the best processes of fresco painting, of which the Prince had a high opinion, and this mode of decoration was ultimately adopted, unfortunately, as it proved, for in spite of every precaution, and the greatest care on the part of the painters—some of whom, like Dyce, were learned in ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... us back, then, into that old Greek life of the vineyards, as we see it on many painted vases, with much there as we should find it now, as we see it in Bennozzo Gozzoli's mediaeval fresco of the Invention of Wine in the Campo Santo at Pisa- -the family of Noah presented among all the circumstances of a Tuscan vineyard, around the press from which the first wine is flowing, a painted idyll, with its vintage colours still opulent in decay, and not without ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... the attitude of supplicating the pity and interest of another maiden in Paradise who accepted Bastianino, and who consequently has no mercy on her that snubbed him. But I counted of far more value than this fresco the sincere old sculptures on the facade of the cathedral, in which the same subject is treated, beginning from the moment the archangel's trump has sounded. The people getting suddenly out of their graves at the summons ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... found himself in a narrow, high room, lighted by one window, which showed the enormous thickness of the walls in the deep embrasure. The vaulted ceiling was painted in fresco with a representation of Apollo in the act of drawing his bow, arrayed for the time being in his quiver, while his other garments, of yellow and blue, floated everywhere save over his body. The floor of the room was of red bricks, which had once been waxed, and the furniture was scanty, ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... upholstered in heavy embroidered silk. Polychrome figures of saints and Eighteenth Century hangings with mythological scenes were reflected in the deep azure mirrors above the consoles. The vaulted ceiling was painted in fresco, with an assemblage of gods and goddesses seated on clouds, whose rosy nudity and bold gestures contrasted sharply with the dolorous visage of a great Christ which seemed to preside over the salon, occupying ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... - Fresco admonishes his niece not to look at herself in the glass, if 'tis, as she says, grievous to her ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... so yourself, be yet assured of this, that though certain effects of glow and transparencies of gloom are not to be reached without transparent color, those glows and glooms are not the noblest aim of art. After many years' study of the various results of fresco and oil painting in Italy, and of body-color and transparent color in England, I am now entirely convinced that the greatest things that are to be done in art must be done in dead color. The habit of depending on varnish or on lucid tints for transparency, makes the painter comparatively ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... untold horrors. The quaint dwarfs perched on Vathek's shoulders, the children chasing blue butterflies, Nouronihar and her maidens on tiptoe, with their hair floating in the breeze, stand out in clear relief, as if painted on a fresco. The imagery is so lucid that we are able to follow with effortless pleasure the intricate windings of a plot which at Beckford's whim twists and turns through scenes of wonderful variety. Amid his wild, erratic excursions he never loses sight of the end in view; the story, ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... of the old cathedral of Salamanca is a fresco of the Last Judgment, perhaps by the Castilian painter Gallegos. Over the retablo on a black ground a tremendous figure of the avenging angel brandishes a sword while behind him unrolls the scroll of the Dies Irae and ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... fellow had impressed him—great range, real genius! Highly as the chap ranked, he would rank even higher before they had finished with him. The second Goya craze would be greater even than the first; oh, yes! And he had bought. On that visit he had—as never before—commissioned a copy of a fresco painting called "La Vendimia," wherein was the figure of a girl with an arm akimbo, who had reminded him of his daughter. He had it now in the Gallery at Mapledurham, and rather poor it was—you couldn't copy Goya. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... two others—the death of S. Filippo and the children cured by touching his garment,—all the five works being completed before the close of 1510. The youth of twenty-three was already in technique about the best fresco-painter of central Italy, barely rivalled by Raphael, who was the elder by four years. Michelangelo's Sixtine frescoes were then only in a preliminary stage. Andrea always worked in the simplest, most typical and most ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... group of some half-dozen forest giants that arch overhead with such superb loftiness. But in all the world there is no cathedral whose marble or onyx columns can vie with those straight, clean, brown tree-boles that teem with the sap and blood of life. There is no fresco that can rival the delicacy of lace-work they have festooned between you and the far skies. No tiles, no mosaic or inlaid marbles, are as fascinating as the bare, russet, fragrant floor outspreading about their feet. ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... marrying beneath the family dignity. 'Gad, she got off a rather neat one at that. Said I might marry under the family tree if I felt like it. Rather good, eh, for mother? I said I preferred a church. Nothing al fresco ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... woods, fort, cannon, pacing sentries, endless wilds, In dulcet streams, in flutes' and cornets' notes, Electric, pensive, turbulent, artificial, (Yet strangely fitting even here, meanings unknown before, Subtler than ever, more harmony, as if born here, related here, Not to the city's fresco'd rooms, not to the audience of the opera house, Sounds, echoes, wandering strains, as really here at home, Sonnambula's innocent love, trios with Norma's anguish, And thy ecstatic chorus Poliuto;) Ray'd in the limpid yellow slanting sundown, Music, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... save solitude. I stood to-day before the mutilated fresco of Morone, my rapture of six years ago, and hated it with unreasoning hatred. The Madonna belied the wreath-supported inscription above her head, "Miseratrix virginum Regina nostri miserere," and greeted me with a pitiless simper. The unidentified martyr on the left stared ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... refreshments, and were told that the ancient building we saw was Kilnsey Old Hall, where, if we had come earlier in the year, before the hay was put in the building, we could have seen some beautiful fresco-work over the inside ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... with a vaulted half-dome, over the high altar. The pillars supporting these arches are Corinthian, with richly sculptured capitals; and wherever gilding might adorn the church, it is lavished like sunshine; and within the sweeps of the arches there are fresco paintings of sacred subjects, and a beautiful picture covers the hollow of the vault over the altar; all this, besides much sculpture; and especially a group above and around the high altar, representing the Magdalen smiling down upon angels ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... occasion above referred to, I also dissented from Lowell's statement, in "Al Fresco," that in early summer the dandelion blooms, in general, with the buttercup and the clover. I am aware that such criticism of the poets is small game, and not worth the powder. General truth, and not specific fact, is what we are to expect of the poets. Bryant's "Yellow Violet" ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... Botticelli painted her portrait many centuries ago when by some necromancy she appeared to him in this phase of herself. There is in the Chicago Art Institute at the top of the stairs on the north wall a noble copy of a fresco by that painter, the copy by Mrs. MacMonnies. It is very near the Winged Victory of Samothrace. In the picture the muses sit enthroned. The loveliest of them all is a ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... Diana, with an involuntary lift of the eyebrows, and she looked round the immense hall, with its costly furniture, its glaring electric lights, and the band of bad fresco which ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... wall (gh), nearly opposite to the door of entrance, was occupied by the fresco on which Melozzo da Forli was working in 1477. It was intended to commemorate the establishment of the Library in a permanent home by Sixtus the Fourth. The Pope is seated on the right of the spectator. On his ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... addition, induces all the other ladies present to turn round, or look on one side, for the purpose of seeing what she is wearing; is more of a conversationalist than a speaker; likes chit- chat; would be at home in a conversazione or al fresco tea party, where the attendants walk about, gossip merrily, and, whilst holding a tea cup in one hand, poise with two fingers a piece of delicately- buttered toast in the other—a continental style quite aesthetic and refined in comparison with our feeding, and ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... than a crystal brook, he represented the union of the West and South. Few accurate pictures of his kind have been made, for art galleries are so small and the mutoscope is as yet unknown in Texas. After all, the only possible medium of portrayal of Raidler's kind would be the fresco—something high and simple ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... its aisles, and the conspicuous grace and precision of its traceries, combine to give you the sensation of having entered a true Gothic cloister. And if you walk round it hastily, and, glancing only at a fresco or two, and the confused tombs erected against them, return to the uncloistered sunlight of the piazza, you may quite easily carry away with you, and ever afterwards retain, the notion that the Campo Santo of Pisa is the same kind of thing as the ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... but sullen and malicious-looking urchin of about fifteen, who appeared to be her son. She came from Toro, a place about a day's journey from Valladolid, and celebrated for its wine. One night, as we were seated in the court of the inn enjoying the fresco, the ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... doing a marvellous stroke of business at Garafield's, even if the times are bad? Mrs. Garafield was down to tea a few evenings since, and she was greatly encouraged. There is such a rage about the new style of papering. Everybody has run mad on dados and friezes, and fresco patterns, bordering, and harmonies of color," laughingly. "And they have ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... gave herself so many airs that she did nought but make wry faces, as if there came to her a stench from whomsoever she saw or met. But, letting be many other vexatious and tiresome fashions of hers, it chanced one day that she came back to the house, where Fresco was, and seating herself near him, all full of airs and grimaces, did nothing but puff and blow; whereupon quoth he, 'What meaneth this, Ciesca, that, to-day being a holiday, thou comest home so early?' To which she answered, all like to die away with affectation, ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... me, as, with regard to the latter, I felt that I should find out what cold meant in Venice. In addition to this, the grey-washed walls of my large room soon annoyed me, as they were so little suited to the ceiling, which was covered with a fresco which I thought was rather tasteful. I decided to have the walls of the large room covered with hangings of a dark-red shade, even if they were of quite common quality. This immediately caused much trouble; but it seemed ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... call your dog?" I asked a ragamuffin who was playing with a nice little terrier in a village street where we ate an at fresco meal of jam-sandwiches with a ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett
... spot, for they are in a narrow, dirty court, to which light can scarcely find access. The Ducal Palace now belongs to the Governor. It has been modernised, but in the dark alleys adjoining there are remains demonstrative of its former extent—pictures of the different Doges in fresco on the walls half erased, and little bridges extending from the windows (or doors) of the palace to the public prisons and other adjoining buildings. The view from my albergo (della villa) is the gayest imaginable, looking ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... At Thebes a fresco, dating 1700-1000 B.C., represents three men weaving at an upright loom. A small rug, discovered in that city some time between the years 666 and 358 B.C., and now in the possession of Mr. Hay in England, is described by Sir J. Gardner Wilkinson as follows: "This rug is eleven ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... were drawn from youth and womanhood, it was not because he did not understand the purely masculine. The AEneas of the Borgo fresco, the Paul of the Cecilia altar-piece, and the Sixtus of the Sistine Madonna show, in three ages, what is best and most distinctive in ...
— Raphael - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... physics, descriptive geometry, botany, and physical geography. In the third year the course is extended to the theory of decoration, color, form, and proportion; conventionalism, symbolism, the decorative arts, stained glass, fresco painting, tiles, terra-cotta, original designs, specifications, integral calculus, strength of materials, dynamics, bridges and roofs, stereotomy. In the fourth year the student is turned out a finished architect, after a course of the history of ornament, the theory of architecture, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various
... should not meet immediately. Burrill will see if there is any such place as we wish about you. I have not much hope of his success. The scent of the roses will not depart, though the many are scattered. I hardly hope to say directly how very beautiful it lies in my memory. What a heart-fresco it has become! All the dignity, the strength, the devotion will be preserved by you; that graceful "aimlessness" comes no more. And yet that was necessary. Long before I knew of the changes I perceived that the growth of the place would ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... principal prayer to Mary, which was introduced into all churches. The Italian Franciscan monk, Bonaventura, and Peter Damiani, were above all others instrumental in spreading the worship of the Virgin, and Damiani said of her: "To Thee has been given all power in heaven and on earth." The fresco of the Camposanto at Pisa, ascribed to Orcagna, shows the transfigured Virgin sitting by the side of Christ, not below Him. The numerous legends in which Mary, often regardless of justice and propriety, delivers her faithful worshippers from ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... went into Wolsey's great Hall, up a most spacious staircase, the walls and ceiling of which were covered with an allegorical fresco by Verrio, wonderfully bright and well preserved; and without caring about the design or execution, I greatly liked the brilliancy of the colors. The great Hall is a most noble and beautiful room, above a hundred feet long and sixty ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... good tesselated work, made by Minton, in England; as the tiles made in this country do not preserve their colour like the English ones. The ceilings of some of the passages are beautifully decorated; and one of the committee rooms, appropriated to agricultural matters, is remarkably well painted in fresco; all the subjects have allusion to agricultural pursuits. In the centre of the building, round the circular part, under the dome, are some very indifferent pictures, representing subjects connected with the history of America, beginning with the landing of Columbus. ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... left, by the great workmen in their large works, to be corrected by the kind of bloom which the distance of thirty or forty feet sheds over them. I say, "sometimes," because this optical effect is a very subtle one, and seems to take place chiefly on certain colors, dead fresco colors especially; also the practice of the great workmen is very different, and seems much to be regulated by the time at their disposal. Tintoret's picture of Paradise, with 500 figures in it, adapted to a supposed distance of from fifty to a hundred feet, is yet colored so ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... the busiest, most bustling part of the town, its fresco and bronze and iron quaintly suggestive of mediaeval times. Within, all was cool and dim and restful, with the faintest whiff of lingering incense rising and pervading the gray arches. Yes, the Virgin would know and have pity; the sweet, white-robed ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... striking, perhaps, than if their faces still remained. And they have preserved too, in an extraordinary degree, the brightness of their antique paintings, the fresh tints of their costumes, of their robes of turquoise blue, or lapis, or emerald-green, or golden-yellow. It is an artless kind of fresco-work, which nevertheless amazes us by remaining perfect after thirty-five centuries. All that these people did seems as if made for immortality. It is true, however, that such brilliant colours are not found in ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... another part of the town, which he had chanced upon in one of his first walks—an angle of a lonely terrace that abutted upon the city-wall, where three or four superannuated objects seemed to slumber in the sunshine—the open door of an empty church, with a faded fresco exposed to the air in the arch above it, and an ancient beggar-woman sitting beside it on a three-legged stool. The little terrace had an old polished parapet, about as high as a man's breast, above which was a view of strange, sad-colored hills. Outside, to ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... the girl chatted merrily all through the al fresco meal, in her turn inwardly giving thanks for the Arab's perfect manners and knowledge of table methods, for in her heart she, particular to the point of becoming finicky about the usually so unpleasant process of eating, had looked forward with absolute horror to the ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... a fresco by SPINELLO ARETINI, in the Municipal Palace at Siena, representing a GALLEY FIGHT (perhaps imaginary) between the Venetians and the fleet of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, and illustrating the arrangements of mediaeval galleys. Drawn from a very dim and imperfect photograph, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... own times of judging for himself the interior of a Roman dwelling in full working order, and with all its furniture, paintings, and utensils complete. Up to this, almost every object of value had been removed at once for safety, every fresco even of importance had been cut bodily out of its setting and placed in one of those immense halls on the ground floor of the Museum in Naples. How well do we remember those gaunt chilly chambers, filled from pavement to ceiling with painted fragments of all sizes, a ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... "is so rarified that the kettle refuses to boil properly. That is why we always have cold tea at literary gatherings. My dear fellow, it's a damned world. It talks all day and does nothing all night. The ragged Italian in front of the fresco in his village church or at the back of the gallery at the opera of his town knows more essentials of painting and music than any of us. It's a hollow sham of a world filled with empty words. I ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... of a great hall with a vaulted roof, and over the altar is a large painting in fresco, the subject of which I did not trouble myself to make out. More appropriate adornments of the place, dedicated as well to martial reminiscences as religious worship, are the long ranges of dusty and tattered banners that hang from their staves ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... altar is of grey marble, relieved, by a scarlet curtain behind, the effect of which is simple, singular, and good. Round the choir is a row of chapels, which are wholly wanting to the nave. The walls of these chapels have also been covered with fresco paintings; some with figures, others with foliage. The chapels contain many grave-stones displaying indented outlines of figures under canopies, and in other respects ornamented; but neglected, and ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... Forties. One article of criticism praised to the skies Stendhal's Chartreuse de Parme published in the previous year. A letter he had addressed to Stendhal in April 1839 was more moderate in its tone, though eulogistic with its well-turned compliment: "I make a fresco, and you have made Italian statues." He blamed the writer in his letter for situating the plot of the Chartreuse in Parma. "Neither state or town," he told him, "should have been named. It should have been left ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... of this sacrament is called a sacrifice for two reasons. First, because, as Augustine says (Ad Simplician. ii), "the images of things are called by the names of the things whereof they are the images; as when we look upon a picture or a fresco, we say, 'This is Cicero and that is Sallust.'" But, as was said above (Q. 79, A. 1), the celebration of this sacrament is an image representing Christ's Passion, which is His true sacrifice. Accordingly the celebration of this sacrament is called Christ's ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... face, only belied by a laughing gleam in her dark eyes, she would aver that the spectre (who had been an artist in his mortal lifetime) had promised to teach her a long-lost, but invaluable secret of old Roman fresco painting. The knowledge of this process would place Miriam at the head of modern art; the sole condition being agreed upon, that she should return with him into his sightless gloom, after enriching a certain extent of stuccoed ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of the Apennines, close to the sea-coast between Genoa and Spezzia, is a marine villa, that once belonged to the Malaspina family, in olden time the friends and patrons of Dante. It is rather a fantastic pile, painted in fresco, but spacious, in good repair, and convenient. Although little more than a mile from Spezzia, a glimpse of the blue sea can only be caught from one particular spot, so completely is the land locked with ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... house of the Dioscuri was visited next. It is in the Via dei Mercurii, and is a very interesting and extensive ruin, and contains some handsome fresco paintings. After this they visited many other houses, a description of which is not necessary; they were all like the Villa of Diomede, though less interesting; and among them all there was the same general character. In all these only the lower stories ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... the parallel of architecture, which, be it observed, they formerly defended obstinately, and have now intrenched themselves in the citadel of sculpture, intending to hold it against all evidence. The only other object of much interest was a Pompeian fresco, representing two actors, whose attitudes and masks are so strikingly adapted to express the first scene of the "Heautontimorumenos," between Menalcas and Chremes, that it seems scarcely doubtful that this is actually ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... handsome, you know, and all that," they said deprecatingly, "and her figure is quite splendid; but she's on such a very large scale. She ought to be painted in fresco, you know, on a high cornice. As Autumn, or Plenty, or Ceres, or something of that kind, carrying a cornucopia. But in a drawing-room ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... khaki fresco on the cab and sides of the giant commissary trucks that raise the dust along the winding white road over the hills. Snorting motorcycles with two men over the motor and an officer in the side car skim over the ground, passing all ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... with the crowd at the audiences of the burgomasters. But whatever related to the election and coronation of the emperors possessed a greater charm. We managed to gain the favor of the keepers, so as to be allowed to mount the new gay imperial staircase, which was painted in fresco, and on other occasions closed with a grating. The election-chamber, with its purple hangings and admirably fringed gold borders, filled us with awe. The representations of animals, on which little children or genii, clothed in the imperial ornaments ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... first through the royal palace. The new chapel, which is being built by the present prince, is circular in form, with a dome one hundred and thirty feet high. The space between the doors is occupied by three circular recesses, with figures of prophets and apostles in fresco. Over one door is the Nativity,—over the other, the Resurrection,—also in fresco. On the walls around were pictures somewhat miscellaneous, I thought; for example, John Huss, St. Cecilia, Melanchthon, Luther, several women, saints, apostles, and ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Virgin in the fresco of the Judgment in the Strozzi Chapel, so grand and majestic in its simplicity, is again recognisable in the panels of Fra Angelico, imitated with his own especial character and spiritual feeling, full of grace and humility, the ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... made their way up town and presently entered the door of a ramshackle structure standing midway of a block lined by similar buildings. They walked into a darkened room, and the Wildcat saw a fresco of gleaming ...
— Lady Luck • Hugh Wiley
... of the guard, received them in an antechamber. And then they passed into a room which ran nearly the whole length of the kiosk, opening on one side to the gardens, and on the other supported by an ivory wall, with niches painted in green fresco, and in each niche a rose-tree. Each niche, also, was covered with an almost invisible golden grate, which confined a nightingale, and made him constant to the rose he loved. At the foot of each niche was a fountain, but, instead of water, each basin was replenished with the purest quicksilver.[31] ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... reluctance to introduce into the world a son "as old as myself" he would say pathetically. The news of his death, which happened at Baden after a short attack of bronchitis caught in a supper 'al fresco' at the old castle, was duly transmitted to Rochebriant by the Princess; and the shock to Alain and his aunt was the greater because they had seen so little of the departed that they regarded him as a heroic myth, an impersonation of ancient chivalry, condemning ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... carriages, and young bloods dashing by in their curricles. The tables before the coffee-houses were thronged with idlers taking their chocolate and reading the gazettes; and here and there the arched doorway of a palace showed some gay party supping al fresco in ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... resource avails us— Shade so finely touched, love's sense must seize it. Take these lines, look lovingly and nearly, Lines I write the first time and the last time. He who works in fresco, steals a hair-brush, Curbs the liberal hand, subservient proudly, Cramps his spirit, crowds its all in little, Makes a strange art of an art familiar, Fills his lady's missal-marge with flowerets. He who blows thro' bronze, ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... large lanterns above every door, and both are painted in bright colors, with the characters signifying happiness, or with birds, butterflies, flowers, or landscapes. The shop wall which faces the door invariably has upon it a gigantic fresco or portrait of the tutelary god of the building, or a sheet of red paper on which the characters forming his name are placed, or the character Shan, which implies all gods, and these and the altars below are seen from the street. ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... testators. If we are drowned, will it not be drowned too? Prithee, who will transmit it to the executors? Some kind wave will throw it ashore, like Ulysses, replied Panurge; and some king's daughter, going to fetch a walk in the fresco, on the evening will find it, and take care to have it proved and fulfilled; nay, and have some stately cenotaph erected to my memory, as Dido had to that of her goodman Sichaeus; Aeneas to Deiphobus, upon the Trojan shore, near Rhoete; Andromache to Hector, in the city of Buthrot; ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... and you'll enjoy it as most people usually enjoy those horrid al fresco entertainments. I don't believe there's the slightest real necessity for it, but," she added in a lower voice, "the Irish and Chinese servants are so demoralized now, they wouldn't stay indoors with us. It's a common practice here, I believe, for a day or two after the shock, and ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... magnificent bas-reliefs, representing his totem and that of his wife—dying warriors—the whole being surrounded by the image of a feathered serpent—Can, his family name, whilst the walls of the two apartments, or funeral chambers, in the monument raised to his memory, were decorated with fresco paintings, representing not only Chaacmol's own life, but the manners, customs, mode of dressing of his contemporaries; as those of the different nations with which they were in communication: distinctly recognizable ...
— Vestiges of the Mayas • Augustus Le Plongeon
... too, was remarkable. A fresco at the left of the choir, with a portrait of Robert de Bethune, Count of Flanders, who died at Ypres in 1322 and was buried in the church, was uncovered early in the eighties during a restoration; this had been most villainously repainted ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... outstretched left leg is raised high in air. We have several similar representations on objects of the Mycenaean period, the most interesting of which will be presently described (see page 67). The comparison of these with one another leaves little room for doubt that the Tirynthian fresco was intended to portray the chase of a wild bull. But what does the man's position signify? Has he been tossed into the air by the infuriated animal? Has he adventurously vaulted upon the creature's back? Or did the painter mean ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... presented to the Grand Duchess, who was very civil. We spent the summer at Siena, and had a cheerful airy apartment with a fine view of the hills of Santa Fiora, and with very pretty arabesques in fresco on the walls of all the rooms, some so very artistic that I made sketches of them. In these old cities many of the palaces and houses are decorated with that artistic taste which formerly prevailed to such an extent in Italy, and, which has now yielded, ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... eccentric; outstanding; extrinsic &c. 6; ecdemic[Med], exomorphic[obs3]. Adv. externally &c. adj.; out, with out, over, outwards, ab extra, out of doors; extra muros[Lat]. in the open air; sub Jove, sub dio[Lat]; a la belle etoile[Fr], al fresco. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... with haymakers, a few scattered trees and a distant town fill the charming valley. Virginia creepers hang on the walls, and gay flowers fill pretty balconies and peep through sunny little casements. All is simple and neat, and the bright fresco pictures on the fronts of many houses ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... to the student are not often found out of Bologna. The "St. Francis in the midst of his Friars," "The Transfiguration," "The Birth of St. John the Baptist," "The Calling of St. Matthew," the "St. Jerome," the fresco paintings in the Zampieri Palace, are all worthy the attention of the student. And I think those who travel would do well to allot a much greater portion of their time to that city than it has been hitherto the custom ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... highly. He was not, indeed, a loose or sketchy painter, but he was by no means a delicate one. His lines, as the story of the circle would lead us to expect, are always firm, but they are never fine. Even in his smallest tempera pictures the touch is bold and somewhat heavy: in his fresco work the handling is much broader than that of contemporary painters, corresponding somewhat to the character of many of the figures, representing plain, masculine kind of people, and never reaching any thing like the ideal refinement of the conceptions even of Benozzo Gozzoli, far less of Angelico ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... fresco peels and drops, Wherever an outline weakens and wanes Till the latest life in the painting stops, Stands One whom each fainter pulse-tick pains; One, wishful each scrap should clutch the brick, 45 Each tinge not wholly escape ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... very beautiful goose called the Egyptian Goose, or goose of the Nile. Its feathers are very handsomely marked with black, brown, green, and white. It is the goose so often represented, in old fresco paintings of heathen temples, by the ancients. This goose is famous for its devotion to its young. The old birds will remain with their offspring during times of most imminent danger, refusing to save themselves and leave ...
— Mamma's Stories about Birds • Anonymous (AKA the author of "Chickseed without Chickweed")
... humour, as they sate in rows at their little desks, or marched about, singing in choruses. One exercise, through which a number of them, from six to eight years old, were conducted by two of the Sisters, might have been studied from a fresco by Fra Angelico representing the heavenly choirs, and gave the most intense delight evidently to the singing children as well as to the smiling and kindly Sisters. There is a large church, too, at St.-Waast ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... is of Siena marble "with moulded bases and carved Ionic capitals of white statuary." The general scheme of decoration is of a free Renaissance colour. The restoration cost L14,000. The ceiling is very elaborately decorated, and in a side chapel is a large fresco painting. The choir is ornamented by beautiful inlaid wood, in the same style as the font cover. There is an excellent bust of Keats, presented by ...
— Hampstead and Marylebone - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... would like to see for myself about this fountain of Saint Elias and, incidentally, enjoy a little al fresco luncheon by the shore. Now I wonder whether there will be enough food for both of us in ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... the stairs, though the window was partly open. The air from the street fluttered the dusty curtains, which were carefully drawn so as to hide the window bay, where former tenants had testified to their presence by various ornamental additions—a sort of domestic fresco. ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... "A fresco painting represents, in a hemicycle, the Empress in her bridal dress, offering to the Virgin a diamond necklace; young girls are kneeling around her in prayer; admiration and fervent faith are depicted on ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... indeed, in our latitude, the pledge of May. It comes when the grass is short, and the fresh turf sets off its "ring of gold" with admirable effect; hence we know the poet is a month or more out of the season when, in "Al Fresco," he makes it bloom with the ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... calling King Ferdinand any thing but a gentleman, of all which the invalid heard nothing, and the lazzarone took no notice. They visited the Via dei Sepolchri, the houses of Diomedes and Cicero. At last they came to Sallust's house, in one of the rooms of which was a fresco that hit the Englishman's fancy exceedingly. He immediately sat down, took a pencil and a blank book from his pocket, and began copying it. He had scarcely made a stroke, however, when the soldier and the lazzarone approached him. The former was going to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... about him. He establishes himself firmly in the land with great joy and plenty; and he gathers round him all that makes life full-toned and harmonious, from the grand timbre of draught-ale and the organ-thunder of hunting, to the piccolo and tintinnabulum of Poker and maraschino. His life is a fresco-painting, on which some Cyclopaean Raphaelite has poured his rainbows from a fire-engine of ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... the fresco of the "Ascension of St. John." Inside, the lecturer's voice faltered, as well it might. The audience shifted uneasily, and so did Lucy. She was sure that she ought not to be with these men; but they had cast a spell over her. They were so serious and so ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... idea, sent for Michelangelo, and ordered him to begin forthwith. Buonarroti had had no practice in fresco-painting since his student days under Ghirlandajo. He knew that the painting of a ceiling was not an easy matter. He pleaded every excuse, proposed that the commission should be given to Raphael, saying that for ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... small monastery of Sant' Onofrio, where he spent the last short month of his life, used to be a lonely and beautiful place, and is remembered only for his sake, though it has treasures of its own—the one fresco painted in Rome by Lionardo da Vinci, and paintings by Domenichino and Pinturicchio in its portico and little church, as well as memories of Saint Philip Neri, the Roman-born patron saint of Rome. All these things barely sufficed ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... panel-work within had all been rent away, to give place to plaster glossy as marble, or fine French papers, gilded and painted, or fresco-paintings done with great cost and labor, and indifferent success. The lofty ceilings and massive walls formed outlines of strength and beauty to the large and well-ventilated apartments, which made it easy to render them almost ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... thing that they have to show you, at Greenwich Hospital, is the Painted Hall. It is a splendid and spacious room, at least a hundred feet long and half as high, with a ceiling painted in fresco by Sir James Thornhill. As a work of art, I presume, this frescoed canopy has little merit, though it produces an exceedingly rich effect by its brilliant coloring and as a specimen of magnificent upholstery. ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... lamp, placed on a table, lighted the ante-room, a large apartment with bare fresco-painted walls, simulating hangings of red and gold, draped regularly all around in the antique fashion. A few men's overcoats and two ladies' mantles lay on the chairs, whilst a pier table was littered with hats, and a servant sat there dozing, with ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... and never gave another look to the cup or the poster; and that Perugino or Wagner would have died of despair if his suggestion of the Madonna's sorrows or of Isolde's love-agonies had been so efficacious as to prevent anybody from looking twice at the fresco or listening to the end of the opera. This inversion of the question is worth inquiring into, because, like the analogous paradox about the pictorial "realisation" of cubic existence, it affords an illustration of some of ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... la otra mitad: y aquello dizen q haze la amistad inuiolable. Co todo esto tuuiero ciertas passiones, y robaro vn lugarejo: y en vna casa pobre hallaron vn nino Iesus, destos que traen de Flandes, con su velo, y pomo enla mano, tan fresco como si se acabara de hazer entonces. En aquella isla qui sieron poblar, porq es muy abundate de todos los mantenimientos, y comencaron a hazer vn fuerte, y hiziero fuera del vna yglesia, dopusieron el nino Iesus, y la llamaro del nombre de Iesus: y la isla la llaman sant Miguel, porque ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume II, 1521-1569 • Emma Helen Blair
... of construction is similar everywhere, but the use of what we may regard as the pigment has possibilities similar to the colours of a painter. The manipulation being of necessity slow, it is more difficult to convey the idea of spontaneity in design than it is in a fresco painting. ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... be treated as a background or as a decoration in themselves. In the latter case any pictures should be set in specially arranged panels and should be pictures of importance, or fresco painting. The walls of the great periods were of this decorative order. They were treated architecturally and the feeling of absolute support which they gave was most satisfactory. The pilasters ran from ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... delightful ease! What a series of charming portraits, each more lifelike, more animated, still better than all the others! "These little miniatures—due to the brush of a woman of the world—are better worth studying than is many a picture or fresco." ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... remain in part, and there are faint traces of a fresco painting on the east wall, which is said to have represented scenes in the life ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Abbey Church of Tewkesbury - with some Account of the Priory Church of Deerhurst Gloucestershire • H. J. L. J. Masse
... of decorating the outside whitewashed walls of their temples and houses with mural paintings. They often present a quaint mixture of hunting-scenes, and animals and gods, and soldiers and Indians and Europeans. One such fresco, on the wall of the house of the headman of Yerandawana village, is a most comical reproduction of the garden front of Windsor Castle, taken from an Illustrated London News, but embellished with many Indian characteristics. The purely decorative part of these wall pictures ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... without a cloth, in the inn-parlor, kitchen, laundry, and dining-room, all in one, just over against the end of the lake; and enjoy a rasher of bacon and eggs with as much gusto as if we were in the midst of a palace of fresco. Ornamental eating has become with us a species of gaudy, ostentatious vulgarity; and a dining-room a sort of fool's paradise. I never think of the little simple meal at St. Peter's ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... avail the seed-bearing Bach and his fugues—emotional mathematics, all of them! Of what avail the decorative efforts of tonal fresco painters, breeders of an hour's pleasure, soon forgotten in the grave's muddy disdain! Had not the stage lowered music to the position of a lascivious handmaiden? To the sound of cymbals, it postured for the weary debauchee. No; music must ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... military monks, with coats of arms in clusters on the lofty roof, marble warriors and their wives without noses occupying a large proportion of the area, and the twelve apostles with their heads very much on one side, holding didactic ribbons, painted in fresco ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... the name of the Dominicans (Domini Canes) which was accepted by themselves, and which is pictorially represented in a fresco painted ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... nuestro pais son de madera. El tejado de nuestra casa es plano. No son planos todos los tejados. Los tejados de las iglesias son generalmente en declive. En el verano subimos al tejado por la noche, porque alli hace mas fresco que en la casa. En frente de la casa esta un pequeno parque. Alli jugamos a la pelota en la primavera y en el verano. Jugamos tambien al tenis y en el ...
— A First Spanish Reader • Erwin W. Roessler and Alfred Remy
... hand," of which the ruined fortress is now the only reminder; but there is a more beautiful monument of old days and usages in the thirteenth-century church of St. Martin, not badly restored, where the stained-glass windows are genuinely mediaeval, as well as the fresco on gold ground representing the "Seven Joys of Mary," painted in 1463. Just above Remagen lies the Victoria-berg, named after the crown-princess of Prussia, the princess-royal of England, and this is the evening resort of weary ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... was gathered round A time-worn fresco, world-renowned, Whose central glory once had been The face of Christ, ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... creature.... Ah, then the duenna made me deeper in love. I grew curious. On Saturday, nobody. And here I am to-day waiting for this girl whose chimera I am, asking nothing better than to pose as the monster in the fresco." ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... another. With the rambling gait of the preoccupied or the idle, he took his way toward the Plaza de Binondo. Nothing was changed. It was the same street, with the same blue and white houses, the same white walls with their slate-colored fresco, poor imitations of granite. The church tower showed the same clock with transparent face. The Chinese shop had the same soiled curtains, the same iron triangles. One day, long ago, imitating the street urchins of Manila, he had twisted one of these triangles: nobody had ever straightened ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... during which (as well as when I was in Ireland) I made such sketches as will make you throw down your brush in despair. I wish you would ask at Molteno's or Colnaghi's for a new Lithographic print of a head of Dante, after a fresco by Giotto, lately discovered in some chapel {90b} at Florence. It is the most wonderful head that ever was seen—Dante at about twenty-seven years old: rather younger. The Edgeworths had a print in Ireland: got by great interest ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... confession of Mr. Browning's creed with respect to art in the poem entitled 'Old Pictures in Florence'. He sees the ghosts of the early Christian masters, whose work has never been duly appreciated, standing sadly by each mouldering Italian Fresco; and when an imagined interlocutor inquires what is admirable in such work as this, the poet answers that the glory of Christian art lies in its rejecting a limited perfection, such as that of the art of ancient Greece, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... crooked and legs slightly bent, the said billiard players were taking the most careful aim, but succeeding only in making abortive strokes in the air. Each emporium of the sort had written over it: "This is the best establishment of its kind in the town." Also, al fresco in the streets there stood tables heaped with nuts, soap, and gingerbread (the latter but little distinguishable from the soap), and at an eating-house there was displayed the sign of a plump fish transfixed with a gaff. But the sign most frequently ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... were invitations of themselves. The articles of furniture, which stood out from the walls, were duplicated on the floor distinctly as if they floated unrippled water; even the panelling of the walls, the figures upon them in painting and bas-relief, and the fresco of the ceiling were reflected on the floor. The ceiling curved up towards the centre, where there was an opening through which the sunlight poured without hindrance, and the sky, ever so blue, seemed ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... In places the shadow deepens: death intrudes itself on the scene, as among other [175] things "a great disguiser," blanching the features of youth and spoiling its goodly hair, touching the fine Claudio even with its disgraceful associations. As in Orcagna's fresco at Pisa, it comes capriciously, giving many and long reprieves to Barnardine, who has been waiting for it nine years in prison, taking another thence by fever, another by mistake of judgment, embracing others in the midst of their music and song. The little ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... canoe-men on the coast. They ship only on board the Bristol ships, and they have more than once flogged a cruel skipper caught ashore. Passing King George's Town, we halted (11 A.M., January 23) opposite the river and settlement of Fresco, where two barques and a cutter were awaiting supplies. Fresco-land is beautified by perpendicular red cliffs, and the fine broad beach is feathered with cocoas which suggest kopra—the dried meat of the split kernel. At 3.15 P.M. came Grand Lahou—Bosman's ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... wanting in grandeur. The floors are sometimes of wood tessellated after the fashion of France. The palace of Sir Robert Clayton, in the Old Jewry, contained a superb banqueting room wainscoted with cedar, and adorned with battles of gods and giants in fresco. [108] Sir Dudley North expended four thousand pounds, a sum which would then have been important to a Duke, on the rich furniture of his reception rooms in Basinghall Street. [109] In such abodes, under the last Stuarts, the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of the house there were fresco-paintings, evidently by a native artist, rudely representing persons and birds. The most prominent figures were the King, seated in a chair, and seven wives standing in a row before him, most of them with pipes in their mouths. ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge |
