132 The Ancient Roof Painting in Salisbury Cathedral. 
be attempted for their recovery before permission is given for their 
destruction.! 
The question of the date of these roof-pictures is one of some in- 
terest. It was chiefly with a view to getting that question decided 
by an assembly of learned men that I brought the subject before the 
Society of Antiquaries of London, early in the present year (1876). 
It is generally admitted that. medizval artists decorated with some 
kind of purpose and method: that they decorated most highly those 
parts of their building which they considered most important and 
most sacred. Hence, if you knew for certain what their decoration 
was, you knew at once a good deal about the kind of arrangement 
they intended to give to their Church. But then there was always 
the question whether this decoration was contemporaneous with the 
building, or whether it was an after-thought that belonged to some 
subsequent century. I hope that question may be considered to be 
set at rest. The tracings were lying for some days in the library at 
Burlington House, where they were examined and criticised by 
several well-known experts in such matters, and at a considerable 
meeting in the lecture-room there I asked for the expression of 
learned opinion upon the point. All seemed to be agreed in saying 
that the pictures belong to the latter part of the thirteenth century, 
or shortly after the consecration of the Cathedral. 
It is indeed to be regretted that the tracings are not more ample 
than they are. But Mr. Bell assures me that it was impossible to 
get more. You could get a broad idea of a picture, when the eye 
took in a considerable area, from the pavement, but when you 
mounted close to it on the scaffolding, you got, in some cases, only 
a blurred mass, which was scarcely intelligible at all.? 
1It is proper to say that the surviving paintings in the eastern transepts have 
not been so summarily swept away by the hand of the mason and are still 
waiting to be dealt with as science may suggest. This is perhaps due to the 
attention which learned societies have given to the subject, 
21Tt is this fact which accounts for there being no tracing of the Majesty, 
Mr. Clayton states his impression that only a little of the vesica and aureole 
were visible at all, and that these were so faint as to disappear altogether when 
you mounted close to them. 
