"Fresco" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pillars of composition marble. The floors are inlaid, and immense mirrors in sumptuous frames hang on the walls. Vice can see her own image all over the establishment. The ceiling is superbly decorated with bas-reliefs in carton-pierre, like those in Mr Barry's new Covent Garden Theatre; and fresco paintings, executed by Viotti, of Milan, and Conti, of Munich; whilst the whole is lighted up by enormous and gorgeous chandeliers. The apartment to the right is called the Salle Japanese, and is used as a dining-room ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... Solomon in all his glory, and she was conveyed in a perfectly new motor car. When Margaret, looking on from beyond the pond, saw her descend from the machine, she could not help thinking of a dreadful fresco she had once seen on the ceiling of an Italian villa, representing a very florid, double-chinned, powerful eighteenth-century Juno apparently in the act of getting down into the room from her car, to the great inconvenience ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... of the Governor's Palace at Valetta we left behind us a fresco memorial of our short sojourn on the island. For many generations it has been the custom of regiments stationed in Malta to paint or draw regimental crests, portraits (and caricatures), etc., on the interior walls of this "Main Guard," and on its ...
— A Soldier's Sketches Under Fire • Harold Harvey
... such moments of despondency in the face of a great task? In such moments I have often called to mind one of those parables of Nature which are everywhere around us, unseen and unheeded, like those exquisite fresco angels of the old masters, in dim corners of ancient churches, blowing silent trumpets of praise and adoration and touching mute viols into mystic melodies which are lost to us. So thin has the material veil grown under the touch ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... virgin or any saints appeared; the other pictures, besides the two large works of "The Delivery of the Law" and "The Judgment of Daniel," painted for the nation, being historical subjects, such as the "Lear Disinheriting Cordelia," a fresco of which is in the House of Lords; "The Acquittal of the Seven Bishops," which the Corporation of Salford purchased for their gallery of art; and several fine works of his youth, such as the "Brides of Venice," a "Procession in Venice, 1528," and others, which won for him his ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... a boarding-house in the world where the seemingly prosaic table had not a living fresco for its background, where you could see, if you had eyes, the smoke and fire of some upheaving sentiment, or the dreary craters of smouldering or burnt-out passions? You look on the black bombazine and high-necked decorum of your neighbor, and no more think of the real life that underlies this despoiled ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... Italian Renaissance has worn the ill-fitting disguise prepared for him by a literary 'breeches-maker.' In fact, Michael Angelo the poet suffered no less from his grandnephew than Michael Angelo the fresco painter from his follower ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... think it needful to speak here; neither of the level of sublime temperament and unselfish heroism to which the dangers of commercial enterprise have exalted Mr. Smith. But the five consecutive heads in the third fresco are a very notable piece of English history, representing the polished and more or less lustrous type of lout; which is indeed a kind of rolled shingle of former English noblesse capable of nothing now in the way of resistance to Atlantic liberalism, except of getting ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... west-end clubs a fresco has lately been exhibited as a suggestion to the members, shewing the easy and graceful costume ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... have I found 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
... delicious 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 Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... arches are exquisite in their simple proportion, and the delicate charm of the fresco of their vaulted passages. The quality of this interior decoration is enhanced by the beauty of the staff work, which throughout this court is the most successful found in the Exposition. Here this plaster is soft, rich and warm, and looks more real ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... made no answer. 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 ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... Michelangelo's large altar-piece in the Sistine Chapel, 'The Last Judgement'; here the figures forming the upper group, with our Lord in judgement surrounded by saints, are about four times the size, that is, about twice the height, of those at the lower part of the fresco. The figures on the ceiling of the same chapel are studied not only according to their height from the pavement, which is 60 ft., but to suit the arched form of it. For instance, the head of the figure of Jonah at the end over the altar is thrown back in ...
— The Theory and Practice of Perspective • George Adolphus Storey
... a vast cathedral is opened before my gaze. The lofty white marble columns support a vaulted roof painted in fresco, from which are suspended a thousand lamps that emit a mild and steady effulgence. The great altar is illuminated; the priests, in glittering raiment, pace slowly to and fro. The large voice of the organ, murmuring to itself awhile, breaks forth ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... 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 ran round ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... expounder may find in the face of an intelligent listener. It is probably thoughtless, not intentional, disrespect—but still disrespect—for a person to spend "sermon time" studying the stained-glass windows or the symbolical fresco, interesting as ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... corner in 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
... that Gypsy and I both liked best of anything. One is called the Marble Room, and the other the Fresco Room. The Marble Room is all made of marble,—walls, floor, window-sills, everything but the furniture. The marble is of different colors and patterns, and just as beautiful! The furniture is covered with ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... nineteenth century are concerned, the author has comparatively little to say; but the work is valuable as regards the subject generally, and might have been published with advantage to the public. The artist delivered also lectures on "The Beautiful and the Picturesque," as well as on "Fresco Painting." ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... son de piedra. Muchas casas en 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 ...
— A First Spanish Reader • Erwin W. Roessler and Alfred Remy
... als ir dort woldt geurtheilt werden," in the German and Latin languages, and below this motto, urging the magistrates to justice, was a large fresco representing the unjust judge Sisamnes being flayed by an executioner in the costume of the Nuremberg Leben—[Executioner's assistant. Really "Lowen."]—before the eyes of King Cambyses, in order to cover the judgment seat with his skin. Another picture represented this lofty throne, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... I stopped at the principal inn, two centuries old, the quaint front painted in fresco, the interior neat and fresh as a new toy,—a very gem of a house! The floor upon which I entered from the street was paved with flat stones; a solid wooden staircase, dark with age, led to the guests' room in the second story. One side of this room was given up to the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... completely overcome by the resources of the graver, the camera and the printer in colors. Only on the shelves of the museum can it be studied understandingly. It must speak for itself. The chromo undertakes to duplicate, with more or less success, the painting in oil or fresco, but the vase is a picture and something more. It is the joint product of the painter and the sculptor, and the substance whereon they bestow their labor has a special and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... 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
... 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
... 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 up, ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... art are in fresco, a mode of painting which excludes attention to minute elegancies: yet these works in fresco are the productions on which the fame of the greatest masters depend: such are the pictures of Michael Angelo and Raffaelle in the Vatican, to which we may add the cartoons, ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... man of sixty-five when he produced the "Creation." Murillo became Murillo only at forty years of age. Poussin was seventy when he painted "The Deluge," which is the most poetically great of all his noble pictures. Michael Angelo counted more than sixty years when he encrusted his incomparable fresco, "The Last Judgment," upon the walls of the Sistine Chapel; and he was eighty-seven when he raised the cupola of St. Peter's to the heavens. And our own Milton was sixty-three when he wrote ...
— Sketch of Handel and Beethoven • Thomas Hanly Ball
... an independent life, is now Brighton; but nothing can harm its little English church, noticeable for a fresco of the murder of Thomas a Becket, a representation dating probably from the reign ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... Bunker pacing up and down and avoiding his helpmeet's eye, but at last he ripped out a smothered oath and racked off down the street to his stable. This was an al fresco affair, consisting of a big stone corral within the walls of what had once been the dancehall, and as he saddled up his horse and rode out the narrow gate he found his wife ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... original; not only in their type of beauty, which is terrestrial and peculiar to Ferrari, without a touch of Correggio's sensuality; but also in the intensity of their emotion, the realisation of their vitality. Those which hover round the Cross in the fresco of the 'Crucifixion' are as passionate as any angels of the Giottesque masters in Assisi. Those again which crowd the Stable of Bethlehem in the 'Nativity' yield no point of idyllic charm to Gozzoli's ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... my particular friend suggested. And from his tone, at once modestly content and artificially careless, I knew that that nursery-rhyme fresco was one of the sights of the pleasure quarter of New York, and that I ought to admire it. Well, I did admire it. I found it rather fine and apposite. But the free-luncheon counter, as a sight, took my fancy more. Here it was, the free-luncheon counter of which the European reads—generously ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... see painted upon a sovereign sky. I want to have painted a giant carpenter of the village as I once saw him, his great bare arms upholding a huge white pillar, while blue figures hung above and set the acanthus capital.... Some day we shall see these things in their own surprising values and fresco our village libraries with them." [Footnote: Zona Gale, "Friendship Village Love Stories," p. 47.] That appreciation and expression of the beautiful is something that the French explorers in that other world—the valley reached of the pioneers of the seeing ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... apse 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 huddled clusters ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... beautiful costume ball the other evening, which I must tell you about, because it was so original. The stables were connected with the salons by a long, carpeted gallery, at the end of which was a huge fresco on the walls, representing a horse-race in a very lifelike manner. Through a large plate-glass window one could see the whole stable, which was, as you may imagine, in spick-and-span order; and Count Castellane's favorite horse was ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... exercise of his knowledge and skill and for the exhibition of lovely color and significant form. A change in the mechanical methods of painting, also, had its influence on a change in the conception of the function of art. With a very few exceptions, the works of Giotto were executed in fresco as wall decorations. The principles of mural painting require that the composition shall be subordinated to the architectural conditions of the space it is to fill and that the color shall be kept flat. The fresco method meets these requirements admirably, but because ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... 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 on ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... Raphael, the painter, wrote a volume of sonnets to be seen only by one. Dante, poet of the "Inferno," drew an angel in memory of the one (of Beatrice). He—Mr. Browning—has only his verse to offer. But as the fresco painter steals a camel's hair brush to paint flowerets on his lady's missal—as he who blows through bronze may also breathe through silver for the purpose of a serenade, so may he lend his talent to a different use. He has completed his volume of "Men" and "Women." ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... the destruction of fortresses and cathedrals—even of Rheims, with its titanic granite lace. She had read, or might have read, of the airship that dropped a bomb through the great fresco in Venice where Tiepolo revealed his unequaled mastery of aerial perspective, taking the eye up through the dome and the human witnesses, cloud by cloud, past the hierarchies of angels, past Christ and the Mother of God, on up to Jehovah himself, bending down from infinite heights. ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... later years has the scene come back to Honora. It was not a large ball, by no means on the scale of Mr. Chamberlin's, for instance. The great room reminded one of the gallery of a royal French chateau, with its dished ceiling, in the oval of which the colours of a pastoral fresco glowed in the ruby lights of the heavy chandeliers; its grey panelling, hidden here and there by tapestries, and its series of deep, arched windows that gave glimpses of a lantern-hung terrace. Out there, beyond a marble balustrade, the lights of fishing schooners tossed on a ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... successful trilogy—representing Inglewood recognizing Inglewood, Inglewood prostrating himself before Inglewood, and Inglewood severely beating Inglewood with an umbrella— Innocent Smith wanted to have enlarged and put up in the hall, like a sort of fresco, with the inscription,— ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... of Bugiardini in Museo Buonarotti. Here comes to view the 'flecked' appearance of the iris, especially in the right eye. The left may be described as almost wholly blue." And so on, and so on, and so on. "In the Museo Civico at Pavia, is a fresco likeness by an unknown hand, in which this fresh red is distinctly recognisable on the face. Taking all these bodily characteristics into consideration, it must be said from an anthropological point of view that though originally of German family he was a hybrid ...
— The Appetite of Tyranny - Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian • G.K. Chesterton
... as the parlor or sitting-room; the other side is arranged for bedroom conveniences. Of this, Fig. 4 shows the front side;—covered first with strong canvas, stretched and nailed on. Over this is pasted panel-paper, and the upper part is made to resemble an ornamental cornice by fresco-paper. Pictures can be hung in the panels, or be pasted on and varnished with white varnish. To prevent the absorption of the varnish, a wash of gum isinglass (fish-glue) ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... were in the Certosa of Florence; none such exist there now. His earliest extant performances, in considerable number, are at Cortona, whither he was sent during his novitiate, and here apparently he spent all the opening years of his monastic life. His first works executed in fresco were probably those, now destroyed, which he painted in the convent of S. Domenico in this city; as a fresco-painter, he may have worked under, or as a follower of, Gherardo Starnina. From 1418 to 1436 he was back at Fiesole; in 1436 he was transferred to the Dominican convent ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... most celebrated pictures in the world are to be seen in the picture galleries at Milan, the Marriage of Mary and Joseph, by Raphael, is considered the most valuable. We went to see the fresco of the Lord's Supper, by Leonardo da Vinci, on the walls of an old convent. But the wall is crumbled and the picture is faded and worn; besides artists have tried to retouch it with just about as much ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... palace; and the only way to recover the plan was by baring the ground, and tracing the bedding of the stones which are gone. For this I have cleared all the site of the buildings, and in course of the work several rooms with portions of painted fresco pavements have been found. One room which was nearly entire, about 51 by 16 feet, and two others more injured, have now been entirely exposed to view, and protected by a substantial house, well lighted, and accessible to visitors, erected ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various
... with one arm broken, and the other raised in the air with a long shell to its mouth. It seemed that in old days it might have been a fountain. At the end of the plot the blind side of a house offered a high wall which had once been painted in fresco. Though much of the coloured plaster had cracked and peeled away, and all that remained was stained and faded, still some traces of the original design might yet be detected: festive wreaths, the colonnades and perspective ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... sofas; while straw-matting covered the floor. Inside of it was a smaller well-furnished room, called the quadro, which was the usual reception-room; and beyond it were the dining and sleeping rooms, and the nursery. They all opened into an inner court-yard, the walls of which were ornamented with fresco paintings; and part of it was laid out as a flower-garden, with a fountain in the centre. From it one door led to the kitchen, and another to the stable. The windows were mostly in the roof, as were those in Pompeii and many ancient cities; indeed it was very similar ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... be held at Pisa. We were 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, here as elsewhere, ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... air of seriousness over all her 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 wall with the most brilliant and lovely designs. And what true votary ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... gone out of Amenti, actually, like Osiris, rose from the dead. The picture which a papyrus forty centuries old presents, is the dream of a vision that Michel Angelo displayed, a sketch for a papal fresco. Such indeed was the conformity between the underlying conceptions, that, at almost the first monition, Isis, whose veil no mortal had raised, lifted it from her black breast and suckled there the infant Jesus. Then, presently, ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... one-third; James J. Jones one-sixth; William Moore one-sixth. Our box is fitted up with great taste with light blue hangings, gilded panels and cornice, armchairs, and a sofa. Some of the others have rich silk ornaments, some are painted in fresco, and each proprietor seems to have tried to outdo the rest in comfort and magnificence. The scenery is beautiful. The dome and the fronts of the boxes are painted in the most superb classical designs, and the sofa seats are exceedingly commodious. Will this splendid and refined amusement be ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... saloons, destined for grand balls, ought to have a different character from rooms in ordinary occupation: there is between the two species of apartments the same difference as between a splendid fresco and a cabinet picture." ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... way all the painters who hold up their heads so proudly in the Academy of St. Luke[2.4] here—Tiarini,[2.5] Gessi,[2.6] Sementa,[2.7] and all the rest of them, not even excepting Lanfranco[2.8] himself, for he only understands fresco-painting. And yet, Antonio, and yet, if I were in your place, I should deliberate awhile before throwing away the lancet altogether, and confining myself entirely to the pencil That sounds rather strange, but ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... above. Some of the painted glass is in the oldest style: dispersed patterns in a black outline, on a grey ground. In a side-chapel are painted tiles, brown and yellow as usual, displaying knots and armorial bearings. In the same chapel are fresco paintings: many more are on the east side of the wall that divides the last choir-aisle from the south transept. They represent St. Michael and the Devil, the Deity between angels, &c. In all of them, the outline is formed ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... public audiences. To his taste and love of splendor Rome owes the Farnese palace. He employed Cellini, and forced Michelangelo to paint the Last Judgment. On ascending the Papal throne he complained that this mighty genius had been too long occupied for Delia Roveres and Medici. When the fresco was finished, he set the old artist upon his last great task ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... those frescoes we went to see when we were at Padua have the remotest chance of being hung, if it were sent in for exhibition now? Why, the Academy people would be so outraged that they would not even write to poor Giotto to tell him to come and take his fresco away. Phew!" continued he, waxing warm, "if old Pontifex had had Cromwell's chances he would have done all that Cromwell did, and have done it better; if he had had Giotto's chances he would have done all that Giotto did, and done ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... high altar of the church, whence it was afterwards removed to make way for the picture of Alesso Baldovinetti, which is there to-day. It was afterwards placed in a small chapel of the south aisle in that church. Cimabue next worked in fresco at the hospital of the Porcellana, at the corner of the via Nuova which leads to the Borgo Ognissanti. On one side of the facade, in the middle of which is the principal door, he represented an Annunciation, and on the other side, Jesus Christ with ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... 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, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... average share of stiff dinner parties when in town: we never saw people who seemed so completely to enjoy the freshness and absence of formality which characterize the well-assorted entertainment al fresco. We were at one or two of these; and we cannot describe the universal gaiety and light-heartedness, extending to grave Presbyterian divines and learned Glasgow professors; the blue sea and the smiling sky; the rocky promontory where our ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... period of erection; the windows had ornamental frames of great depth, but some were blocked up, which gave the facades a sinister aspect; the walls had not only ornamental tablets in stucco, but, in a better light, would have shown rude fresco paintings not unworthy mediaeval Italian dwellings. Many of the fronts resembled the high poops of the castellated ships of three hundred years ago, and they cast a shadow on the muddy pavement. As they resembled ships, the slimy footway seemed the ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... waning glories of these gatherings, from the great Bartholomew Fair itself down to that which, on the Friday of which I write, converted many miles of thoroughfare at the East End of London, as well as one of the prettiest forest scenes still surrounding the metropolis, into a vast al fresco tavern, where the "worship of Bacchus" was as freely indulged as in any heathen temple of ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... thus visible appeared the commencement of a flight of steps, evidently leading far downwards into the cavity. On the abruptly sloping walls, which bounded it on all sides, were painted, in the brilliant hues of ancient fresco, representations of the deities of the mythology—all in the attitude of descending into the vault, and all followed by figures of nymphs bearing wreaths of flowers, beautiful birds, and other similar ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... outer walls of the principal temple are wretched daubs in fresco, representing the state of eternal punishment. Some of the figures are being roasted, twitched with red-hot pincers, partly baked, or forced to swallow fire. Others again, are jammed between rocks, or having pieces of flesh cut out of their bodies, etc., but fire appears to play the ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... paved in black and white stone, not ceiled, and its beams painted, was furnished with one of those enormous sideboards with marble tops, required by the war waged in the provinces against the human stomach. The walls, painted in fresco, represented a flowery trellis. The seats were of varnished cane, and the doors of natural wood. All things about the place carried out the patriarchal air which emanated from the inside as well as the outside of the house. ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... adapted for getting in a subject, as affording means of great rapidity of execution. We allude to the admixture of starch and oil—the less oil the more like distemper will it be; or, we should rather say, fresco, which it much more resembles; but oil may be used with it in any proportion. The starch should be made as for domestic use, with water saturated with borax, and the oil added by degrees, and the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... that thing?" I asked, as he tum-tummed in vain, for the eggs had glued into a fresco showing a rising and setting sun on ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... ball-room, etc. On entering the first hall, designed for the lackeys and royal servants, we were all obliged to thrust our feet into cloth slippers to walk over the polished mosaic floor. The walls are of scagliola marble and the ceilings ornamented brilliantly in fresco. The second hall, also for servants, gives tokens of increasing splendors in the richer decorations of the walls and the more elaborate mosaic of the floor. We next entered the audience chamber, in which the court-marshal receives the guests. The ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... every one finding something that delighted him above all other things. She herself took a great pleasure in watching a painter, who was standing upon a balcony a little way above her, painting upon a great fresco: and when he saw this he asked her to come up beside him and see his work. She asked him a great many questions about it, and why it was that he was working only at the draperies of the figures, and did not touch their faces, some of which were already finished ...
— A Little Pilgrim • Mrs. Oliphant
... most curiously marked: in addition to the black and white of his mother's skin, he had gray and yellow mottled in all over him. Jim thought it looked as if his skin had been painted, so he named him Fresco. ...
— The Hunter Cats of Connorloa • Helen Jackson
... After pointing out that in the matter of drawing and composition the artist would scarcely have won a reputation, the writer goes on to say: "To Correggio belongs the great praise of having attained the highest point of perfection in coloring, whether his works were executed in oil or in fresco." In another place he writes, "No artist has handled the colors more effectually than himself, nor has any painted with a more charming manner or given a more perfect relief to his figures." Color and chiaroscuro were undoubtedly, as Vasari indicates, the ...
— Correggio - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... 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. ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... art were all applied. Stone carving was applied to architecture, thus colored stones, called mosaics, as wall decorations; from these to the fresco; from the fresco to the pictorial form of painting. To-day the final degeneration of art is in the easel picture, which as an object detached and disassociated from its surroundings, takes refuge in the story-telling phase to justify its raison d'etre. But, alas for the easel picture! alas, also, ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 3, May 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... he executed a little panel containing the Madonna, S. Stephen, and S. John the Baptist, which has been much extolled. On the Canto al Mercatale, also in Prato, in a shrine opposite to the Nuns of S. Margherita, and near some houses belonging to them, he painted in fresco a very beautiful Madonna, with a choir of seraphim, on a ground of dazzling light. In this work, among other things, he showed art and beautiful judgment in a dragon that is at the feet of S. Margaret, which ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... 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. He would still look at it, however, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... are painted on the walls of historical cubiculi. In a fresco of the crypts of Lucina, in the Catacombs of Callixtus, are painted birds, symbolizing souls who have been separated from their bodies, and are playing in fields of roses around the Tree of Life. As the word Paradeisos signifies a garden, ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... us," he said, "that Queen Mary paddled over this lake, or Cromwell's soldiers whitewashed that fresco? Give me a clean, new American church, anyhow, before all of your mouldy, tomby cathedrals. These things are so many cancelled cheques to me. I have nothing to pay on them. It is live issues that draw on my ...
— Frances Waldeaux • Rebecca Harding Davis
... and, as is very likely, think 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 ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... 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 ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... in keeping with the coterie's spiritual make-up that they should know a restaurant in the vieux carre, which "that pewblic" knew not, and whose best merits were not music and fresco, but serenity, hospitality, and cuisine—-a haven not ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... all sat gracefully about, while Sir Lionel and the chauffeur worked—Young Nick under the car, looking sometimes like a contortionist tying himself into lover's knots, sometimes like a miniature Michelangelo lying on his back to paint a fresco. I hope, though, that Michael never had half the trouble finding his paints and brushes that Nick had to get at his tommies and jemmies, and dozens of strange little instruments. He lay with his mouth bristling ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... the Gardens of the Tuileries sleeping in the moon glow and Sacre Coeur sentinelled against the springtime sky and the tables of the cafes along the Grand Boulevards agog and a-glitter and the green-yellow lights of the Ambassadeurs tucked away in the trees and the al fresco amours at Fouquet's and the gay crowds on the Avenue de l'Opera and the massive splendour of Notre Dame blessing the night with its towered hands and girls shooting ebony arrows from the bows of ebony eyes? And ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... a semblance of 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 through bronze, may breathe through silver, Fitly ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... frontal, discoid. extraregarding[obs3]; excentric[obs3], 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 • Peter Mark Roget
... group, with his arms folded and his feet well apart, in an attitude of easy admiration: 'The Wounded Adonis, attended by the Loves and Graces. Familiar Pompeiian fresco.' ...
— The Garotters • William D. Howells
... petroleum 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
... reach the great saloon, which is finely ornamented with fresco paintings by Baptiste. Here are a variety of Roman remains, such as dice, tickets for the Roman theatres, mirrors, seals for the wine casks, lamps, &c. and a beautiful bronze head of Homer, which was ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... spectators. The place was imperfectly lighted by only one of the eight chandeliers, which revolved slowly, like huge spiders, each on its long cord. But the light struck upon the gilt stuccoes opposite me, and on a large expanse of fresco, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, with Agamemnon and Achilles in Roman helmets, lappets, and knee-breeches. It discovered also one of the oil panels let into the moldings of the roof, a goddess in lemon and lilac draperies, foreshortened over a great green peacock. ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... 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 alt round ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... back court, upon a filthy canal, you chance on a house, the curiously frescoed front of which tempts you within. A building which has a lady and gentleman painted in fresco, and making love from balcony to balcony, on the facade, as well as Arlecchino depicted in the act of leaping from the second to the third story, promises something. Promises something, but does not fulfill the promise. The interior is fresh, clean, and new, and cold ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... their Warden, instead of the Protestant whom they had elected. They were not of so stern a stuff as the Fellows of Magdalen, who, despite His Majesty's menaces, had just rejected Bishop Farmer. The Papist was elected, there and then, al fresco, without dissent. Cannot one see them, these Fellows of Judas, huddled together round the sun-dial, like so many sheep in a storm? The King's wrath, according to a contemporary record, was so appeased by their pliancy that he deigned ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... Strehla children, born to nothing else, were all born with beauty; white or brown, they were equally lovely to look upon, and when they went into the church to Mass, with their curling locks and their clasped hands, they stood under the grim statues like cherubs flown down off some fresco. ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... all the same, and I don't say that I won't thank ye. This yer world is too crowded for yer and me, Lacy Bassett. I've believed in ye, trusted in ye, lied for ye, and fought for ye. From the time I took ye up—a feller-passenger to 'Fresco—believin' there wor the makin's of a man in ye, to now, you fooled me,—fooled me afore the Eureka boys; fooled me afore Gilead; fooled me afore HER; fooled me afore God! It's got to end here. Ye've got to take the curse of that foolishness ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... I did not think it meet to see A dame of lengthy pedigree, A Baronet and K.C.B. A Doctor of Divinity, And that respectable Q.C., All fast asleep, al-fresco-ly, And so I had them taken home And put to bed respectably! I trust ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... and the geraniums blossoming through the balustrade. A delicate touch is given by the Fountain of the Winged Boy with the Fish, by Verrocchio, which occupies the center of the stone-flagged court. To the left of the staircase is a mural fresco depicting the "Return from ...
— The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition • Louis Christian Mullgardt
... 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 others. A lukewarm sun disappears in a slot in the mountains and a ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... play on the name of the Dominicans (Domini Canes) which was accepted by themselves, and which is pictorially represented in a fresco painted for them by ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... remarkable fact, worthy of high relief in the fresco of weird and startling events then vaguely grouping themselves, that Royson first dreamed of love, even as a fantastic idyll where Irene Fenshawe was concerned, while he was hurrying through the native quarter of Massowah on a mission destined to change the whole ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... Mecenas having his palace on this hill, Horace, Propertius and Tibullus dwelt there also. Not far from here are the ruins of the Thermae of Titus, and of Trajan. It is believed that Raphael took the model of his arabesques from the fresco paintings of the Thermae of Titus. It is there, also, that was discovered the group of the Laocoon. The freshness of water affords such pleasure in hot countries that delight is taken in assembling together all the pomp of luxury, and every enjoyment of ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... against the Renaissance have an easy case against its great representative. What did he do in thought compared with St. Thomas, or in art compared with the builders of Chartres or Bourges? He filled notebooks with sketches and conjectures; he modelled a statue that was never cast; he painted a fresco on a wall, and with a medium so unsuited to fresco that it was a ruin in a few years. Even in his own day there was a doubt about him; it is expressed in the young Michelangelo's sudden taunt that he could not cast the statue he had modelled. Michelangelo was one of those who see in life ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... Alice and Bertha were our chain-men, intelligent and obedient. I drove for George his stakes, or I cut away his brush, or I raised and lowered the shield at which he sighted and at noon Polly appeared with her baskets, and we would dine al fresco, on a pretty point which, not many months after, was wholly covered by the eastern end of the dam. When the field- work was finished we retired to the cabin for days, and calculated and drew, and drew and calculated. Estimates for feeding Irishmen, estimates of hay for mules,—George was ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... sufficed to empty the citizens' pockets. But in Yoshimasa's time there Were nine of such fetes in five years, and four of them had no warrant whatever except pleasure seeking—as a performance of the Sarugaku mime on an immense scale; a flower-viewing party; an al-fresco entertainment, and a visit to the cherry blossoms. On each of these occasions the court officials and the military men had to pawn their estates and sell their heirlooms in order to supply themselves with sufficiently gorgeous robes, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... motives and groupings repeated in a way which shows that the painter—or rather the collaborating painters—must have been reproducing or adapting an original which was particularly admired or had obtained a fashionable vogue. The wall-pictures, done in fresco or distemper and in various dimensions, fall into four main classes. There are landscapes, from a pretty realistic garden scene to a fantastic stretch of sea and land diversified with woods, rocks, ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... the sun; and I still see your look of absolute unconcern. You wore a long blue apron that came all round you and a bodice of the same colour. In that blue faded by the sun, with your hair a pale cloud in the gold of the sunset, you looked like an archangel taken from some Italian fresco. ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... in palaces, surrounded with art and luxury. Here in Rome on every side was to be found the Cult of the Beautiful. Wonderful temples, gems of classical sculpture, masterpieces of colour in oil and fresco—the genius and the aspirations of men rendered permanent for us by Art; but the Temples, those silent emblems of man's worship of an Unknown God, with their surroundings of lovely nature, affected me far the most deeply: indeed, I do not pretend that sculptures and pictures affected me ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... the first great exhibition of cartoons for the Houses of Parliament was held. These gigantic designs handled the loftiest subjects, executed in the most elevated spirit of the highest art, with a view to ultimate execution in fresco on the walls of the palace of Westminster. It was not in nature for Punch to allow so excellent an opportunity to pass by without taking sarcastic advantage of it. He—conformably with his role of Sir Oracle, omniscient and omnifarious—must ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... and my bed to be sent on to 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 to me that it was ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... hardly fail to produce a deep impression on any one of thought and feeling; yet even here there would be a first shock, to any untrained eye, from the faded colors, the defaced and spotted surface; and this must be got over before the fresco can be even seen. Moreover, in my experience, there is no pleasure connected with the whole business of seeing galleries like that of revisiting them: not only should we return to them daily on first acquaintance, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... really good one among them, and yet I don't like to think of her no longer having them. I have also a nice selection of photographs just sent out, among which the cartoons from Hampton Court are especially good. That grand figure of St. Paul at Athens, which Raphael copied from Masaccio's fresco, always ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... him so closely with it, and made the connection patent to all? She fused everything, and filled him with it and it with him: the mounting tones of violins and trumpets, the sparkling quincunxes of the girdling balcony-front, the wide band of fresco which ran in unison with the arches of glittering bulbs above their heads, the circling and swaying throng—all the sheen and splendor of a vast ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... so much study to enjoy Lionardo da Vinci's great fresco, of which he wrote long and elaborately, and, altogether, Milan afforded him very great delight and was a new world to him. It was the farthest limit of his travels on this occasion. The party returned by way of Geneva; and Coley, ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... entering a place of worship, and, in 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 ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... in this most glittering of countries, and saw most of the usual wonders,—the Paestan Temples being to me much the most valuable. But Pompeii and all that it has yielded, especially the Fresco Paintings, have also an infinite interest. When one considers that this prodigious series of beautiful designs supplied the place of our common room-papers,—the wealth of poetic imagery among the Ancients, and the corresponding ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... After a photograph from the fresco by His friend Giotto, discovered under the whitewash on a watt of the Bargello palace; now in the ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... according to their years, were pictures of health and good 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 and a ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... Jan, insomuch as that he was rather given to assure his patients they would soon be strong enough to enjoy the al fresco delights of a gipsy party, even though he knew that they had not an hour's prolonged life left in them. Not so Jan. Never did a more cheering doctor enter a sick-room than Jan, so long as there was the faintest shade of hope. But, when the closing scene was actually ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... north side of this room a pointed doorway leads into the chapel, which keeps some of its special characteristics. At the east end a square space is sunk in the wall above the spot where the altar stood, and in this space the faint traces of a fresco can still just be seen. In the wall that shuts off the guard-room is a cinquefoiled piscina and a four-light window, the stonework of which is like that in the east window, and this window allowed anyone in the guard-room to join ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote |
