A ghostly bearded face peers out from the wall of a bedroom, flanked by a pair of winged, snake-like beasts baring their teeth, their necks chained to an ermine roundel. The pattern repeats around the room like psychedelic wallpaper, featuring slithery creatures with long curling tongues, a jester in a horned cap, and mysterious figures with clownish faces and barrels for bodies, all crowned with a frieze of white Yorkshire roses.
This trippy scene, in Calverley Old Hall in West Yorkshire, is one of the most important surviving Tudor wall paintings in the country, thought to date from the 1550s, when it was likely inspired by decorations recently discovered in Emperor Nero’s Domus Aurea villa in Rome. It had been lost for centuries, hidden behind the floral wallpaper of a cottage bedroom.
