Man with a Two-Handed Sword

This is a piece of somebody's wall. Around 1486 Gaspare Ambrogio Visconti, a counsellor at the Sforza court in Milan, had the hall of his house on via Lanzone painted with armed men, and the painter he used was Bramante, 20 years before the popes handed him the rebuilding of St Peter's in Rome. He treated the room as a building problem. Each figure stands nearly three metres tall in a feigned stone niche, foreshortened so the architecture seems to open backwards into the plaster, and the antique military dress makes them read as statues rather than guests. Eight fragments of that decoration survive, among them a singer, a poet, and the philosophers Heraclitus and Democritus, which a Milanese writer of the next century recorded hanging over a door. The house on via Lanzone is gone; the frescoes were cut off the walls and moved onto canvas in 1901.