Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hello I’m Armand Morgan, museum instructor and artist at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural
History. It’s a pleasure for me to be able to talk
to you about Rudolph Zallinger and the creation of the “Age of Reptiles” mural.
Rudy was an artist I admired for many years and eventually got to know while working at
the Peabody.
This is a photograph of the Peabody’s Great Hall as it looks today.
And here, is a photograph of the Great Hall taken in the 1930’s before the creation
of the mural.
You may have noticed that several of the mounted skeletons have moved since then and that the
ceiling once had skylights.
In 1941 the director of the museum, Albert Parr, wanted to add a series of small paintings
on the East wall. These paintings would depict what some of
the skeletons below might have looked like when they were alive.
Lewis York, an art professor at the School of Fine Arts, suggested that one of his most
gifted students, a senior named Rudy Zallinger, would be up to the task.
So in 1942, Rudy was hired to create the small paintings - but soon he proposed a much grander
and more architecturally fitting project.
Rudy envisioned a giant mural on the entire wall that would function as a panoramic timeline.
This enormous undertaking would be completed as a fresco secco, or dry fresco, a painting
technique used during the 14th and 15th centuries.
Here is a preliminary sketch of Rudy’s mural proposal complete with onlookers to provide
a sense of scale. Rudy and his wife, artist Jean Zallinger and
2 children are illustrated on the far left.
It is interesting that the children were strictly imaginary at the time this was drawn, for
it would be another 2 years before Rudy and Jean started a family.
After receiving the director’s approval to pursue the much larger mural project, Rudy
began working with scientific advisors from Yale and Harvard to create an accurate portrayal
of roughly 350 million years of animal and plant evolution, including the rise and fall
of the dinosaurs.
After six months of intensive scientific training and numerous revisions, Rudy completed this
nearly 7-foot long preparatory drawing in pencil. He used tall trees to divide the mural
into the various periods of geologic time.
Following the way that medieval frescos were created, Rudy spent nearly a year on this
next step, a complete but much smaller painting of the mural in egg tempera. Egg tempera was
the primary medium for painters in 14th century Italy, before oils were widely used.
This stage of the mural process is called the ‘model’. Egg tempera painting involves
mixing pigments with egg yolk and water and then applying the mixture to a wooden panel.
While the egg tempera model was nearing completion, the east wall of the Great Hall was prepared
with several coats of plaster.
Using charcoal, Rudy drew a grid on the plaster wall to help transfer and enlarge the composition
of the finished model.
Rudy later reported that only when he first began to draw on the 110-foot long wall with
his tiny piece of charcoal did he feel any trepidation about the whole project.
In this photo you can also see the old (and incorrect) Apatosaurus skull that was eventually
replaced with the correct one 38 years later.
Here, Rudy is standing on the six-foot wide scaffolding erected at the bottom of the mural,
16 feet below the ceiling.
He is clearly drawing the outline of all of the plants and animals but he hasn’t added
any details yet.
After finishing the outline, Rudy applied a monochrome underpainting using burnt umber
and black pigments mixed with a solution of casein glue, instead of egg yolks, as the
binding medium.
This photo shows the finished underpainting, which Rudy completed sometime in the early
part of 1944.
He deliberately exaggerated the darks and lights so that when the next layers of color
were added, some shading from underneath would show through.
This photo was taken in October of 1946 when the painting was close to being completed.
The top of the mural looks finished, but if you look carefully at the plants and dinosaurs
just behind Rudy you can see the painting looks rather flat.
The underpainting appears to only have a single layer of color over it.
Finally, Rudy would add the darkest shadows, the brightest highlights and other details,
such as hundreds of scales on each dinosaur.
Rudy completed the mural in June of 1947. Two years later, his work on this magnificent
project was recognized with a Pulitzer Scholarship Award.
In 1953 this image of the Apatosaurus was featured on the cover of LIFE magazine when
they began a 13 part series on the history of life called “The World We Live In”.
Unknown to many, the Apatosaurus image was taken from the egg tempera model, not the
mural itself, which was too large and technically difficult to photograph in the 1950’s.
The image was also reversed so that the when the entire painting was reproduced inside
the magazine it could be read from left to right, unlike Rudy’s timeline, which runs
from right to left.
Although the egg tempera model and the mural look nearly identical at first glance, there
are several changes that Rudy made when he moved to the much larger painting on the wall.
For example, when painting the final mural, the larger size allowed Rudy to add much more
detail to the landscape.
Here is a scene from the Jurassic section of the model, compared to the same scene in
the mural.
Another difference is this Archaeopteryx - brightly colored in the egg tempera model but not as
brilliant in the mural.
A small but interesting detail is that in the model there is a leaf falling in mid-air
from the Apatosaurus mouth that Rudy decided to leave out of the mural.
This is also a clue that the LIFE magazine cover and all older posters were taken from
the egg tempera painting, not the actual mural.
Although mammals are known to have existed since the early Jurassic period, Rudy did
not include any in the model, and added only one to the mural - a Cimolestes just to the
right of his signature.
Thank you for joining me to hear about Rudy Zallinger and his masterpiece of art and science,
“The Age of Reptiles”.
As it has for generations, the mural continues to inspire and help define our view of the
prehistoric world.
Now you will be taken back to the main screen of this program, where you can choose a section
of the mural and learn more about each of the species found there.