ABSTRACT
Domestic wall paintings in the Tudor and Elizabethan periods mostly contained religious or moralising subjects and, bar a couple of famous examples, did not aim at effect – or affect – through illusionistic representation. The historical and other parts of the painted interior were usually distinguished one from the other, with the histories costing more. A persistent unwillingness to acknowledge the narrative content and ideas contained within murals, or the ways in which these were experienced by a viewer, is in large part due to the entrenched nomenclature used to describe the genre of mural painting. An understanding of the mutually animating effect of murals has since faded: partly for the reason that, as foreseen by the poem, they are particularly vulnerable to physical deterioration.
