In most cases, each lunette, with its greater-than-life-size figures, was finished in three days, and one cannot help thinking of them in terms of speed, luminosity and bravura .
Where else can you see a Seurat in the same room as a Matisse lunette and a whole lot of Pennsylvania Dutch hardware? But the Barnes is sui generis.
Such figures as the majestic green-feathered angel and the rigid Madonna on the lunette fresco from Sant'Angelo in Formis (see color overleaf) are flesh-made-geometry.