| It is generally believed that not until the discovery of Nero's Domus Aurea around 1400 was a significant influence of Ancient Roman wall-painting exerted on Italian art. It is proposed here that ancient Roman wall-painting was influential centuries before this, as evidenced by the painting of the upper church of S. Francesco in Assisi.;Two major and interrelated ideas emerge. First, in the late thirteenth-century the medieval conception of pictorial space and the means of creating pictorial depth are profoundly altered. The wall surface is illusionistically penetrated and made transparent. It is known that a similar spatial concept existed in ancient Roman wall-painting. Yet up to now there has been no effort to make concrete the relationship between ancient and late thirteenth-century pictorial space.;Proceeding from the spatial alterations is a second and equally profound change in the conception of artistic harmony in the late thirteenth-century. There is a rapid move away from the homogeneity of the Romanesque depictions of materials, and the treatment of pictorial space and the picture plane as synonymous. Instead, in the upper church there is established a complex series of transitional and linking devices that form a new range of relationships between the elements within the scenes; between pictorial space and the wall surface; and between the scenes and their surroundings, i.e., the actual architecture and space of the upper church as well as the spectator.;Many elements of the decoration here can be traced back to sources in ancient Roman wall-painting. For some of these, such as spatial concepts and painted architectural motifs used to frame scenes, there are forerunners in the centuries between the decline of ancient Roman wall-painting and the decoration of the upper church. However, it is in the later thirteenth-century, and especially in the upper church, that these elements return to more genuinely antique forms. Other elements, such as small decorative architectural motifs, including little figures, garlands, and lattice-work structures, and certain compositional concepts and aesthetic principles, appear in the upper church seemingly without earlier medieval intermediaries. Thus ancient mural elements appear in the upper church via routes of varying directness. |
