Faults like these shock the eye of purists; but let us constantly bear in mind that we are in a small city, the finest residence in which belonged to a wine-merchant.  We could not with fairness expect to find there the Parthenon, or even the Pantheon of Rome.  The Pompeian architects worked for simple burghers whose moderate wish was to own pretty houses, not too large nor too dear, but of rich external appearance and a gayety of look that gratified the eye.  These good tradesmen were served to their hearts’ content by skilful persons who turned everything to good account, cutting rooms by scores within a space that would not be sufficient for one large saloon in our palaces, profiting by all the accidents of the soil to raise their structures by stories into amphitheatres, devising one ingenious subterfuge after another to mask the defects of alignment, and, in a word, with feeble resources and narrow means, realizing what the ancients always dreamed—­art combined with every-day life.

For proof of this I point to their paintings covering those handsome stucco walls, which were so carefully prepared, so frequently overlaid with the finest mortar, so ingeniously dashed with shining powder, and, then, so often smoothed, repolished and repacked with wooden rollers that they, at last, looked like and passed for marble.  Whether painted in fresco or dry, in encaustic or by other processes, matters little—­that belongs to technical authorities to decide.[G]

However that may be, these mural decorations were nevertheless a feast for the eyes, and are so still.  They divided the walls into five or six panels, developing themselves between a socle and a frieze; the socle being deeper, the frieze clearer in tint, the interspace of a more vivid red and yellow, for instance, while the frieze was white and the socle black.  In plain houses these single panels were divided by simple lines; then gradually, as the house selected became more opulent, these lines were replaced by ornamental frames, garlands, pilasters, and, ere long, fantastic pavilions, in which the fancy of the decorative artist disported at will.  However, the socles became covered with foliage, the friezes with arabesques, and the panels with paintings, the latter quite simple at first, such as a flower, a fruit, a landscape; pretty soon a figure, then a group, then at last great historical or religious subjects that sometimes covered a whole piece of wall and to which the socle and the frieze served as a sort of showy and majestic framework.  Thus, the fancy of the decorator could rise even to the height of epic art.