Wall

Wall is a subject in art. The gallery holds 84 works in this subject in art, including works by Titian, Thomas Eakins and Jean Baptiste Camille Corot.

The wall is among the oldest of all artistic supports, and across millennia it has also become a subject in its own right. Long before the easel picture, the wall was where image-making began: in the painted caves of Lascaux (c. 17,000 BCE) artists worked pigment into damp limestone, while the tomb painters of ancient Egypt favoured the *fresco secco* method, applying color to dry plaster. The Romans elevated wall painting to an art of illusion. At Pompeii and Herculaneum, frescoes preserved under volcanic ash reveal that householders had their walls dissolved into painted vistas—architectural fantasies, gardens, and false windows that relieved the claustrophobia of windowless stone rooms.

This impulse to negate the wall's solidity matured during the Renaissance into a sophisticated art of perspective. Masaccio's *Holy Trinity* (c. 1427) in Santa Maria Novella, Florence, used the new linear perspective to open an illusory chapel within a flat surface, and Andrea Mantegna's ceiling for the Camera degli Sposi in Mantua (completed 1474) appears to pierce the room with an open sky. From these experiments grew the formal tradition of *trompe-l'œil*, the wall painted so as to deceive the eye, which survives in modern city murals—the American Richard Haas covered blank urban façades with painted architecture from the 1960s onward, and Lyon's *Mur des Canuts*, at roughly 1,200 square metres, ranks among the largest such frescoes in Europe.

The wall has also carried public and political meaning. After the Mexican Revolution, Diego Rivera and his contemporaries revived true fresco to turn government walls into instruments of mass education, fusing Italian technique with pre-Columbian imagery in cycles such as the *Detroit Industry* murals (1932–33). In the twentieth century the wall became a contested surface itself: along the Berlin Wall, French painter Thierry Noir began working on the western side in 1984, and after 1989 more than a hundred artists from some twenty-one countries created the East Side Gallery—home to Dmitri Vrubel's *My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love*.

From prehistoric caves to the spray-painted barriers of the Cold War and today's street art, the wall thus links some of art's most enduring concerns: permanence, illusion, public address, and the boundary between image and architecture.