After this fashion precisely did the painters of the earliest Italian schools depict within the one field, and in one uninterrupted sequence, the several episodes of a single narrative.

The scenes are irregularly dispersed over the surface of the wall, without any marked lines of separation, and, as with the bas-reliefs upon the column of Trajan, one is often in danger of dividing the groups in the wrong place, and of confusing the characters.

This method is reserved almost exclusively for official art.

In the interior decoration of temples and tombs, the various parts of the one subject are distributed in rows ranged one above the other, from the ground line to the cornice.

Thus another difficulty is added to the number of those which prevent us from understanding the style and intention of Egyptian design.