As I wander over hill and through dale, through alpine passes and mountain streams…

A knight striding with flag, bear, and sword. (Bern, Switzerland)

… I’m seeing a kind of exterior artwork on the outside walls of many Swiss buildings. This is such a common thing that surely there must be a specific name for these kinds of paintings that appear on the buildings. Sometimes they’re old, sometimes relatively new. Some fancy, but most are stylized in a way that I cannot describe easily–they’re often noble, or heroic, frequently bucolic, sometimes civic in design, almost always in a kind of flattened, non-realistic rendering.

The Swiss Mystery for this week is this…

1. Is there a name for this particularly Swiss kind of artwork-on-the-walls? Is there a particular name of the style in which most of them are drawn?

I admit that I do not know the answer yet, but I feel as though there MUST be a rather specific term for these images on the walls of greater Switzerland.

Here are a few examples:

What do you call these? More importantly, what do the LOCALS call this kind of artwork?

I’d like to learn more about this artistic tradition, but don’t know quite where to start. Any ideas from the SearchResearch crowd?

When you find the answer(s), let us all know HOW you found them! Let notes in the comments field.

Keep searching!