Although there is some debate, most historians agree that the beautiful images of horses and lions on the walls of Chauvet cave in France are the oldest preserved pieces of human artwork at approximately 32,000 years old. To create their murals, early cave artists drew in clay, scratched with flint, or crushed colorful minerals to create pigments. iron oxide makes a red color. Cave painting reached an apex with the Magdalenians, who lived throughout Europe from 18,000 to 10,000 B.C.
Murals held an important place in Greek, Roman and Egyptian art. Egyptian tombs dating from around 3150 B.C. often contained wall art depicting gods, goddesses and royalty. Religious murals have also been found in China and India. The first known frescoes, or murals done in wet plaster, come from Greece in 1500 BC. When Mount Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79, the ash preserved a variety of Roman frescoes, including vivid landscapes on the walls of houses in the town of Pompeii.
Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling is perhaps the world's most famous mural, and was completed between 1508 and 1512. Other Italian fresco masters include Giotto, Raphael, and Tiepolo. The Arena Chapel in Padua, Italy, exhibits some of the finest examples of Giotto's fresco art. Most Renaissance frescoes were commissioned by wealthy families or the church and the vast majority depicted religious or mythological subjects.
In the early 20th century, mural painting gained political significance in Mexico after the country's revolution. Diego Rivera is perhaps the most famous Mexican muralista. A series of murals he painted at the Mexico City Ministry of Education celebrated Mexican heritage and culture. This revolutionary artist once painted a picture of Lenin at the Rockefeller Center in New York City and refused to remove it when authorities objected, according to "The Mexican and Chicano Mural Movements" by Maria Cardalliaguet Gomez-Malaga.
During the Great Depression in the 1930s and '40s, United States president Franklin D. Roosevelt commissioned public art in addition to parks and dams. The Federal Art Project, part of the Works Progress Administration, paid unemployed artists to paint upwards of 1,000 murals in post offices across the United States. These murals had to follow government guidelines and usually depicted local town history.
Today, the walls of cities around the world often contain advertising, graffiti or both. Although not always considered art, graffiti is a kind of urban mural echoing humankind's first handprints on cave walls. One modern artist, Julian Beever, has taken murals to a new level by painting sidewalk art that looks three-dimensional from certain angles. Large advertisements attached outside a building are called "wallscapes," and while not always classified as murals, certainly take the place of them in many cities.