may form a pleasant background, as one may often
observe in libraries, especially when the bindings are rich and good in
tone: and here, too, we get our verticals and horizontals again.

[Illustration (f125): Pinturicchio: Fresco in the Appartimenti Borgia.]

So long as the feeling for the repose and flatness of the wall surface
is preserved, there are no special limitations in the choice of form. It
becomes far more a matter of _treatment of form and subject_ in
perfectly appropriate mural design. There is one principle, however,
which seems to hold good in the treatment of important figure subjects
to occupy the main wall surfaces as panels: while pictorial realization
of a kind may be carried quite far, it is desirable to avoid large
masses of light sky, or to attempt much in the way of atmospheric
effect. It is well to keep the horizon high, and, if sky is shown, to
break it with architecture and trees.

Still more important is it to observe this in tapestry. It is very
noticeable how tapestry design declined after the fifteenth century or
early years of the sixteenth, when perspective and pictorial planes were
introduced, and sky effects to emulate painting, and thus the peculiarly
mural feeling was lost, with its peculiar beauty, richness, and repose.

[Illustration (f124): Figure of Laura, from the Burgundian Tapestries:
The Triumphs of Petrarch (South Kensington Museum).]

In the translation into tapestry even of so tapestry-like a picture as
that of Botticelli's "Primavera," it is noteworthy how Mr. Morris has
felt the necessity of reducing the different planes, and the chiaroscuro
of the painting, by more leafy and floral detail; making it, in short,
more of a pattern than a picture.

[The Frieze]

A frieze is susceptible of a much more open, lighter, and freer
treatment than a field. A frieze is one of the mural decorator's
principal means of giving lightness and relief to his wall. In purely
floral and ornamental design the field of close pattern, formal diaper,
or sprigs at regular intervals may be appropriately relieved by bolder
lines and masses, and a more open treatment in the frieze. The frieze,
too, affords a means of contrast in line to the line system of the field
of the wall, its horizontal expression usefully opposing the verticals
or diagonals of the wall pattern below. The frieze may be regarded as a
horizontal border, and in b