ABSTRACT
Plans for the murals of the ‘Painted Hall’ at Greenwich Hospital – the dining hall of the hospital built for retired naval officers for which Queen Mary was the instigating patron – were first made in 1707, though not completed until 1726. The whole composition plays on the viewers’ perception of reality and illusion, with the west wall opening onto a fictive landscape, providing continuity with the affective intentions of earlier mural schemes. The viewer’s knowledge of the ancient text and its reception in contemporary literary works allow a kind of moral ekphrasis via the revelation of images and the experience of them in three-dimensional space. The lack of willingness to understand properly the basic iconographical tenets of mural paintings is perhaps due to their treatment as a genre, which has consistently failed to take into account their original functions, including who was to view the murals, and how.
