All Manner of Murals

Terrifying beasts, imaginary landscapes, portraits and ornaments – All Manner of Murals celebrates the many ways we have decorated our day-to-day lives with wall paintings. Murals by their very nature must remain in the buildings for which they were designed, inextricably at one with their surroundings, and so offer glimpses of vanished ways of living. Whether painted in a humble cottage or a grand palace, they illustrate the march not only of history, but of our view of ourselves. At once strange and strangely familiar, the ancient wall painting emerging from under layers of whitewash has much to tell us about how our predecessors saw the world around them. The tradition of wall painting, arguably the oldest of art forms, continues to this day, and our descendants may find our own values and views reflected in the murals, private and public, that we leave behind. The twenty papers collected in this book explore over 500 years of secular wall paintings, right up to contemporary work, looking at why and how they were painted, and the best ways of caring for them to ensure that future generations can also find in “all manner of murals” a source of wonder and of kinship to their past. One hundred color illustrations demonstrate the very best examples. The editors Robert Gowing and Dr Robyn Pender are both Senior Architectural Conservators in the Conservation Department of English Heritage.