Mural Painting

Mural Painting (Latin, murus, “wall”), decoration of walls or ceilings by various techniques. It may may be purely decorative or may be executed for religious or didactic purposes. It is very often used to decorate the inner walls of public buildings, particularly churches, and tends to portray religious, historic, or patriotic themes significant to a public audience. A characteristic of mural painting is its large scale. It is also closely allied to architectural and decorative schemes, and can be used to emphasize or enhance interior design, or through trompe l'oeil transform it, giving the illusion of different spatial dimensions.

Mural painting techniques include encaustic painting, fresco, oil painting, and tempera painting; the term fresco is in fact often used interchangeably with the terms mural or mural painting. Ceramics and, more recently, liquid silicates, acrylics, and fired porcelain enamel are other media often employed in mural art. Some modern murals have also been composed with photographs. Mosaics, often used to adorn walls and ceilings, are considered a separate genre, however.

Mural painting is a very ancient art form. It is found on the walls of prehistoric caves, most notably those in Altamira, Spain, and at Lascaux in south-west France, and forms an important aspect of Palaeolithic art. In the Far East, mural painting began in China about 1700 bc and from there spread to Korea and Japan. A remarkable series of paintings on Buddhist themes, executed in tempera (between the 2nd century bc and the 7th century ad), cover the walls of the Ajanta caves, in India.

Wall painting was one of the most highly developed arts of ancient Egypt; the walls and ceilings of tomb chambers were decorated in tempera with figures and motifs symbolizing life in the afterworld. The palace at Knossos in ancient Crete was enhanced with brightly coloured fresco paintings of flowers, animals, and human figures, and public edifices as well as private dwellings throughout ancient Greece were customarily decorated in tempera and encaustic; the tradition persisted into Hellenistic and Roman times. Particularly noteworthy are the illusionistic paintings of landscapes, still life, and the human figure found on the walls of buildings at Pompeii and Herculaneum.

In the Early Christian and Byzantine periods, basilica interiors were at first painted in tempera and fresco, but by about the 4th century the use of mosaic largely supplanted these techniques. In the early 14th century fresco painting was again revived, in the churches of southern Europe, and it flourished through the 16th century; in the north, mural painting was largely supplanted by the use of stained glass windows in Gothic churches and cathedrals and by tapestry hangings lining castle walls.

From the 17th to the 19th century, mural paintings by such artists as the Flemish Baroque master Peter Paul Rubens, the Italian Rococo painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, and the Spanish artist Francisco Goya were executed mainly for secular buildings and, with the notable exception of Tiepolo's work in Germany, were generally done in oil on canvas, which was then attached to a wall or ceiling.

In the 20th century mural painting was revived, largely by three Mexican artists, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, who worked in various media in Mexico City and at several locations in the United States beginning in the 1920s. In general, their works are vividly coloured compositions, celebrating the liberation of the masses and crowded with stylized figures and motifs that recall Pre-Columbian Mexican temple and palace frescos.