I i" llV THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES IN MEMORY OF EDWIN CORLE PRESENTED BY JEAN CORLE ART IN FRANCE ARS UNA: SPECIES MILLE GENERAL HISTORY OK ART Uniform with this \'olumic Already Published :— ART IN GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND. By Sin Wai.tei; Akmstrcikg. " We desire to recommend Sir Walter Arm- strong's book with all the emphasis at our command. " — l\In>/iiiii^ J^ost. ART IN NORTHERN ITALY. l!y CoRK.-\uo Ricci. "An entirely lucid outline of the develop- ment of architecture, sculpiure and painting in Northern Italy. " — Athciiirvm. For I)niiiediale Publicatioii : — ART IN FLANDERS. liy .Monsieur iM.w Roose.s. (Director of Plantin Moretus Museum, Antwerj).) ART IN EGYPT. l!y iMoNsiEi K M.xsi'KUO. (Director of Ghiz'.'h Museum.) /// l^ieparalioii : — BYZANTINE ART. THE ART OF INDIA. GERMAN ART. THE ART OF GREECE. ART IN HOLLAND. THE ART OF CHINA AND JAPAN. ART IN NORTH AMERICA. ROMAN ART. THE ART OF SOUTHERN ITALY. SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE ART. f Marquise de BogHofie. Nattier. (Collection of the Marquis de Chaponay.) ARS UNA: SPECIES MILLE GENERAL HISTORY OF ART ART IN FRANCE BY LOUIS H O U R T I C Q ACKflcA I)K I."UM\EHSrrE INSPECTOR (II'- KIXE AKIS I.\ THIi CITV OK TAU'IS p^Ut^- v--«i^-.' :,,-^ LONDON WILLIAM HP: IN EM ANN MCMXI ' ^ W This volume is published iiviiiltaneously in America by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York; in Englami by William Heinemann, London ; also in French by Hachette et Cie., Paris; in German by Julius Hoffmann, Stuttgart; in /talianby thel?.TiTVrolTAi.iAVSo iJ'Aifri Grafiche, Bergamo; iuSpanishhy the LiBRERiA Gutenberg de Jose Ruiz, Madrid. Co/ivright, 191 1. THE ArMSlLl->. MM EL ul- DolUvWAV l)F THU " OII.DKIJ \II;i,l.\," AMIENS CATI1EIJ1^\L {Photo. Ncuidein.) Colleg-e PREFACE -^^"^f: Certain kindly disposed confreres who have taken an interest in the following work have asked me now and then whether I intended to deal with French art in fifty volumes or fifty pages. I have written a good deal less and a good deal more — too much or too little, it may be objected. Compared with works which exhaust the material and those which condense it into a few drops of elixir, this little book has but one merit — that of existing. For the art of our country has never been treated as a whole, save in treatises on universal art, where the French chapters appear in their due order, or in general histories of France, where the names of artists defile at the end of a volume, like baggage at the rear of a convoy. Why has it not been thought necessary to co-ordinate these different chapters, as has been done so efficiently and so frequently in the history of our politics and our literature ? it may be that the very variety of French Art invites to special studies rather than to general appreciations. It does not present that unity of character which is so striking in most other countries. In England, in Germany, in Italy, in Holland, in Spain, art reveals itself as the work of a single race, and even in some cases of a single century. In France, artistic continuity embraces very different styles, all equally original and sincere. No one would hesitate to V 1%t^&A^P. PREFACE say which has been the golden age of Greece, Italy, Spain, England or Flanders. In France, it is impossible to pronounce without scruple ; each century, from Philip Augustus to our own day, has partisans. The individuality of France is very ancient. It has been con- tinually, and sometimes violently modified, but has very rarely shown signs of exhaustion. Art is distributed throughout its history, and has always been well adapted to its vicissitudes. It has not, as in other countries, expanded with that momentary exuberance which manifests the full vitality of the human plant and exhausts it. It reveals rather the changing forms of society than a fixed ethnical type. If there has not always been a French School, or in other words, a great family of artists and a sort of material kinship founded upon community of methods, there has always been a French Style, that is to say, a moral resemblance between works inspired by the same collective taste. Art has known periods of magnificent expansion, the bloom and fruition of a race ; but these have been for the most part brief and intermittent. France has had such periods ; the years of the past are full of the work of a society which has always been able to fashion an adornment to suit its taste ; our active civilization has never failed to supplement the repose of nature by its industry. Hence it is very difficult to include the art of France in a statical definition ; the best that can be given is the very law of its develop- ment : its essence is that suppleness and fidelity with which it has always adapted itself to a society in perpetual process of recon- struction. Above these minor variations, two great phases are easily discerned : the Christian, feudal, and communal France of the Middle Ages created Gothic Art as its form of expression ; the rationalistic and strongly centralised France of the Middle Ages adopted the language of Classic Art. These opposite styles express the successive aspects of the same soul with equal sincerity. Yet they would seem mutually exclusive ; the Classicists despise the Middle Ages, and the modern restorers of Gothic taste have not VI PREFACE yet forgiven those who superseded it. A trustworthy book on French Art is only possible if its writer abandons these exclusive predilections ; they are natural in artists who must either believe in the superiority of their ideal, or fall short of it ; they are inexcusable in the historian, who misses his function altogether if he does not make the past more intelligible. Our sympathies should follow French taste in its successive tendencies. To sacrifice Notre Dame to Versailles, or Poussin to the Master of Moulins is to renounce one half of the French soul ; our art, by its wealth and variety, invites its historian to show a supple intelligence and a catholic taste. The function of handbooks such as these, which cannot pursue the phenomena of the artistic spirit into all its objective ramifica- tions, must be to trace and explain those innate subjective charac- teristics which no fashion in external forms can wholly disguise. As we follow its evolution, we shall realise that the underlying character of French Art is no less persistent and apparent than that of other nations, and, in spite of those superficial variations which are so obvious, we shall recognise its essential unity. LOUIS HOURTICQ. Paris, 1911. VII BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE A survey of the bibliographical history of French Art would suffice in itself to show us what has been the special conception of art formed by successive genera- tions. In the Middle Ages, when Art was exclusively the handmaid of Religion, texts contain only passing allusions to its monuments. After the Renaissance, it becomes more independent, and a special literature is devoted to it. Finally, in the nineteenth century, the century of history, not only contemporary art, but all its manifestations in the past, interested amateurs and scholars. The most instructive of these works on French Art have been quoted at the end of each chapter to which they refer, arranged in the following order : original documents, general works, works on architecture, sculpture, painting, and the minor arts. Some, by reason of their extensive range, could not be connected with any special chapter. Such are : GENERAL WORKS S. Reinach, .-lpo//o. new edit.. I'aris. 1910; English ed., 1907. C. Bayet, Precis J'Hhtoire de I Art, new edit., Paris, 1906. K. Woermann, Geschichle der Kunsl alle Zeiten und loll^ern, Leipzig, 1900-1905, 2 vols, have appeared. X. Kraus, Geschichle der chrisllichen Kunsl. Freiburg, 1896, 1897, 2 vols. L. Courajod, Lemons professces a I'ccole du Louvre. Paris. 1899- 1903, 3 vols. A. Michel, Hisloire dc I'Arl. published under the direction of A. Michel, Paris, 1903, 6 vols, have appeared. The chapters by S. Rocheblave, in the l' Hisloire de la Lilleralure francaise. published under the direction of Petit de Julleville and by A. Michel, in I Hisloire de l-'rance. published under the direction of Lavisse and Rambaud. The chapters relating to Art in the History of France published by Lavisse The works of S. Reinach, K. Woermann, and A. Michel quoted above contain important bibliographies. DICTIONARIES. REVIEWS. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL INVENTORIES Memoires inedils sur la vie el les ouvrages des Membres de I'.Academie. Paris, 1854, 2 vols. P.-J. Mariette, Abecedario. Paris, 1831 et sq., 6 vols. A. Jal, Dic/ionnoire critique debiographic et d'histoire. Paris, 1872. L. Dussieux, Les .Artistes fran(;ais a la Eiranger. Paris. 3rd edit., 1876. E. Bellier de la Chavignerie. Diclionnaire general des Arlisles de I' Ecole francaise. Paris, 1882. 2 vols. The principal periodicals to consult for French Art history are : Les .4nnales archeologiqucs of Didron, which no longer appear. La Revue archeologique. La Gazette archeotogique. Le Bulletin monumental. La Collection des Congrcs archeologiques dc France. La Revue de I'.Art Chretien. Le Moyen Age. Les .Archives de I' art francais ar\d .\'ouvelles .Archives dc I'.Art fran(ais (an analytical Table is inserted in vol. xii. of the .Xouvclles .Archives). Les Reunions des Societies de Beaux- Arts des Dcparlemenls. Les Memoires de la Socicte des .Antiquaires — Reperlorium far Kunslwisscnschaft. Zeihchrifl fiir chrislliche Kunsl.- R. de Lasteyrie and E. Lefevre-Ponlalis have undertaken : Bibliographic general des Iravaux hisloriques el archeologiques publics par les Socielcs savanles de L rancc, I'ark, 1888. La Revue universelle des .Arts no longer appears, but the Gazette des Beaux-.Arls, with its supplement : la Chronique des .Arts et de la Curiosite, and the Revue de I'.Art ancien el moderne, with its supplement: \e Bulletin de I'.Art ancien el moderne. succeed in interesting the general public in archaeological research and art-history. ix BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE Ulncenlairc (unfinished) des richesses dart de la France and Y I noenlairc des richesse d art de la Ville de Paris contains catalogues of the works of art in civil and rehgious buildings. The titles of publications which have been very frequently quoted have been abbreviated as follows: R. A. — Revue archeologique ; B. M. = Bijllelin monumental ; A. A. F. -Archii'es de I' Art franfais; R . S. B. A. D. -^Reunion des Societes des Beaux-Arts des Deparlements ; G. B. A. = Gazeite des Beaux-Arts ; R. A. A. M. = Revue de I' Art ancien et moderne. GENERAL WORKS ON THE HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire de V Architecture fran(;aise, 10 vols., Paris, 1854-1869. — Viollet- le-Duc, £n/re/(cns sur I' Architecture, 2 \o\s..Par\'i„ 1858-1872. — Planat, £nci/c/opcJ(e d' Archi- tecture, Paris. W. Liibke, Geschichle der A rchitel(tur, l^eipzig, 1886. A. Choisy, /"/(s/o;rer/i/tU-S.) ART IN FRANCE Grenoble, the capitals surmounted by heavy impost blocks recall the art of Ravenna and Constantmople. The Carolmgian buildings of Germigny and Aix-la-Chapelle are also Byzantme. Nothmg durable save the Roman monuments has survived from these periods, in which art was almost non-existent ; the antique civilisation, as it decomposed, evolved in a Latin, and then in a Byzantine form. The founders of mediaeval art were to work upon the basis of a Roman building. BIBLIOGRAPHY S. Reinach, Description raisonnee dii Musee de Saint'Gcrmain, Paris, 1894 ; Lc% Gaulois dans I'Art antique. Paris, 1889. E. Esperandieu, Recueil general des bas-reliefs de la Gaule romaine (Collection of unpublished Documents), Paris, 1907, 2 vols, have appeared. C. Barriere Flavy,Les Arts industrieh de la Gaule du V" au VH'^ siecle, 3 vols., Toulouse, 1901. Leon Joulin, Les Etablissements gallo-romains de la plaine de MartresTolosanes.Parh. \90\. C. Jullian, /^oufes romaines el routes de France iRev. de Paris, 1900). J. Quicheral, Melanges d Archeologie et d Histoire, Paris, 1886. R. de Lasteyrie, La Basilique de Saint-Martin de Tours, Paris, 1892. — Marcel Reymond, La Chapelle Sainl-LaurenI de Grenoble, Pans, 1896. A. Marignan. Un Historien de I'Art franfais: Louis Courajod, les Temps francs, Paris, 1889. L. Brehier, Les Colonies d'Orientaux en Occident au commencement du Moyen Age (.Byzantinische Zeitschrift, 1903). 10 FK-.. ig. — CLDISIHRS Hi- MUISSAC. CHAPTER II MONASTIC OR ROMANESQUE ART Monastic Life : the Benedictines of Cluny and Citeaux. The Propagation of Art by means of Pilgrimages. The Origin of Romanesque Architecture. Regional Types : Aucergne- Langucdoc, Burgundy-Provence, Poilou-Saintonge, .Northern France. The Communilij of Religious Iconography and Regional Moliccs. The Continuity of Painting. The Renaissance of Sculpture ' Classic and Byzantine Influences: Decorative Richness; Dramatic Compositions. I he Romanesque Style the first Dcjinite lorm of French Art. The refined activity which gives birth to the arts is only possible m a well-organised society ; the best society in the eleventh century was that of the monks. Until the formation of the populous communes of Northern France, civilisation took refuge in the great monasteries. The southern cities which had preserved or developed within their walls some of the refinements of the antique world left no trace of it save in their gallant verses ; the plastic arts, after the downfall of paganism, existed only for the new religion. It was within the narrow limits of over-populous and strictly enclosed monasteries that the manual and intellectual activity necessary to the existence of art was concentrated. Architecture, sculpture, illumination, and painted glass during the Romanesque period were so many blossoms of the cloister. The monastery preserved the germs of the antique culture ; it received and kept alive some sparks from Byzantine altars ; elsewhere they were quenched in the whirlwind of a world of anarchy. The monastery was akin to the classic villa ; its cloistered court was an enlargement II ART IN FRANCE FIG. 20. — APSE OF NOTRE- UAME-DU-PORT, AT CLERMONT-FERRAND. of the ancient peristyle ; the monk's gown, his shaven face and close cropped head retained their Gallo- Roman cast among barbarian fashions. Even at the present day the old monasteries of Moissac, Toulouse and Aries remind us what places of tranquil happiness, what oases of sweetness and peace they were during the rude life of the age. Those who circulated under the beautiful arcades, around the little grassy courts, were attached to their domicile by all the more lofty aspirations of their souls ; they forgot the world, its tumults and adventures, and among their methods of singing God's praises, we must reckon that of the illuminators who carefully copied Byzantine miniatures ; that of the sculptors and glass-painters who patiently transferred these little scenes to the stone of capitals and the windows of churches. The monas- tery formed a city which had its individual means of existence and its industry. Difficult arts, such as that of the goldsmith, were at home there. Romanesque art betrays to some extent the fact that it was evolved m monastic cells ; it lacks youth and freshness ; its sincerest sentiments often take on a traditional form, like the phrases of prayers ; the most violent energy does not always succeed in break- ing down the discipline of the rule. The monks were also architects, and were the first who built vast, ele- gant and solid sanctuaries. The most important and the most richly decorated of the Romanesque Churches were the Ab- beys. To travel through France to see the finest monuments of Roman- esque architecture or decoration is to make a pilgrimage to the most famous Benedictine Abbeys, from St. Germain of Paris to St. 12 21. — CHURCH OF SAINT-NECTAIRE. {Photo. NcHrdi:in.) MONASTIC OR ROMANESQUE ART ■•^^S^ !i -AI'SK OK SAlNT-SIiNMN, AT TOULOUSE. Etienne of Caen, from St. Benigne of Dijon to the Madeleine of Vezelay, from St. Trophime of Aries to St. Gilles, from St. Sernm of Toulouse to Ste. Croix of Bordeaux, to St. Martial of Limoges, to Souillac, to Beaulieu, to Issoire, to St. Savm of Poitiers. The most powerful of these Abbeys have dis- appeared, Cluny, which in the eleventh century gave the law to Christendom, and Citeaux, which was predominant in the twelfth. Amidst the general anarchy, they formed mighty organisations ; and the black monks of Cluny, and later, the white monks of Citeaux, spread their skilful architecture and propagated the motives of their iconography throughout Gaul and even beyond its frontiers. It was in the wake of the monks that Romanesque art extended over the territory of ancient Gaul. The civilisation of the period was less brilliant, no doubt, than that of the third century A.D., but it was no longer entirely confined to the towns ; the monks had turned aside from the great highways to penetrate into the quarters of the pagani, ploughing up the soil and sowing the seed of Christianity. " They decorate the deserts with their holy perfections," writes Hughes de Saint Victor ; " they adorn solitudes with their justice, their pious enter- prises, their good exam- ples." They also took into these deserts the arts of building, carving and paint- ing. The relative community of style in an art so wide- ly disseminated as that of the eleventh and twelfth centuries would be inex- plicable, if we did not remember that the princi- pal buildings marked the stages of a society always in movement. The whole of Romanesque art was born of the worship of relics. 13 FK;. 23. — CHUKCH OK KDV.AT. {P/io/o. Xcufiichi.) ART IN FRANCE FIG. 24. — NAVE OF SAINT-SERNIN, AT TOULOUSE. FIG. 25. — FACADE OF NOTRE-DAIME-DU- ruv. (Photo. Neurdein.) It was necessary to take the pilgrim's staff continually in order to pay homage to them. The important rites of his existence brought man perpetually before tombs and shrines. Contact with these gave solemnity to an oath, and healed the sick ; a long and difficult pilgrimage atoned for serious faults and soothed troubled con- sciences. The more famous sanctuaries attracted so many of the faithful that the aisles of churches had to be en- larged and ambulatories created ; build- ings were made more spacious to receive the crowds who were huddled together in the small churches of the early Romanesque style. The imposing archi- tecture of Vezelay and Autun, of St. Gilles or Aries, is infinitely too vast for the requirements of an ordinary abbey church ; it was intended to serve wor- shippers far beyond the parochial limits, those itinerant populations which came to pray to the Magdalen, Lazarus, St. Gilles or St. Trophime. Offerings enriched the sanctuaries ; cures and miracles paid for costly churches, their sculptures, their goldsmiths' work, their ivories and 14 ^lii ^^^' '^ ^^Ksf!^^ si^H^^^^^I ||if( ^^^^^HSj^^. '"' -^ ' - 26. — HOTEL DE VILLE OF SAINT-ANTONIN. MONASTIC OR ROMANESQUE ART FIG. 27. -THE CI.OISTKR OF ELNES, NEAK I'EKl'H.N AN. {Photo. Neiirdehi.) precious stuffs. The bones of Sainte Foy, stolen and transported to Conques, kindled an altar-fire of Romanesque art in the heart of the desert ; a bold building, decked with sculptures and guarding a treasure. When the precious monolithic columns taken from the ancient monu- ments came to an end, as the art of turning them was lost, wooden posts or pillars of masonry were used to support the roofs of the basilicas ; for the same reason, the arch of small dressed stones took the place of the ancient entablature made of long, rigid slabs. Then the Latin basilica underwent the transformations which gradually developed into the Romanesque style. The build- ing, still serving the same purposes, retained its original plan, but the new method of construction was to change its appearance entirely. To the architecture which normally set a timber roof upon slight columns and walls succeeded that of the Etruscans and Romans, which set a roof with an oblique thrust upon massive walls. In the Carolmgian period, the basilica was slill covered with a timber roof after the antique fashion ; it was only in certain crypts that a low, narrow vault rested heavi- ly on sturdy pillars. It was not until the beginning of the eleventh century that architects began to suppress the timber roof and build their churches entirely of stone. Christi- anity then set to work to renew its churches. " About three years after A.D. 1000. the basilicas were renewed almost throughout 15 •'U;. 2{5.- NA\K 111" THE MADEI.EIM; ((joTnic ciiiiiic). {Photo. Ncurdciu.) ART IN FRANCE FIi;. 29. — KOIMANES()UE HOUSE AT SAINT-GILLES (gARD). (^Plioto. NeHtdein.') the universe, especially in Italy and in Gaul, although the greater part of these were still sufficiently fine to need no repairs. But the Christian nations seemed to rival each other in magnificence, in order to raise the most elegant churches. Then the faithful improved {in meliora permutavere) the metropolitan churches, as well as the abbeys, and the oratories of the smaller towns. " This famous text of a Burgundian Benedictine, Raoul Glaber, clearly states that the churches were not rebuilt of necessity, but because a new type of struc- ture had made its appearance, beside which the old seemed out of date. What was this " amelioration " ? It was, no doubt, building with dressed stones, and the use of the vault. The plan of the ancient basilica was retained ; a wide nave, sometimes double side-aisles, at the entrance a porch or narthex, and behind the choir, an apse ; in front of the choir the nave was traversed by the transept, which gave the church the form of a great cross laid upon the ground. But there is an essential difference between the Latin basilica and the Romanesque church ; the weight of the stone vault, and the pressure it brought to bear upon its points of support necessi- tated the use of massive pillars and thick, low walls, capable of resisting an oblique thrust. The whole building seems to gather itself together to support this solid masonry. The system of stability obtained simply by the verticality of the walls was replaced by another equi- librium, resulting from counterbalancing lateral forces. The antique temple rose from the ground, clear cut, alert, but without any 16 FIG. 30. — CI.OI!,TEKS OF .Muls J .M.iJUU K (nOUCHES-DU-KHONE). (Photo. Neiirdt-iii). MONASTIC OR ROMANESQUE ART HG. 31. — KACADE OF NOTEiK-DAMt-LA- GRANDE, AT I'OITIEKS. exaggerated elasticity or excessive lightness, as befits an architecture which is not concerned to minimise weight. The Romanesque church, not as yet freed from this servitude, rises with a certain timidity ; the walls betray the effort ; they rest heavily upon the soil ; they are sturdy and massive ; they reveal a kind of struggle between matter and form ; the history of this struggle is that of architecture in the Middle Ages ; in the eleventh century, it was the material which gave its aspect to architecture ; in the Gothic period, the constructor had mastered it ; from the inert mass he had disengaged a resistant ossature ; he reared a giddy vault upon the eviscerated walls. The earliest architects did not at first venture to throw walls and pillars into space ; their buildings keep close to the ground, as if they feared to lose contact with the soil. They built empirically, without nicely calculating the forces of the over-thick walls. And yet the vault is often badly fixed. Here and there, it has bent under its own weight, and has thrust away its points of support ; it has been necessary to shore up walls whose loins were broken ; if we may trust the ancient records, there were many collapses ; the Romanesque churches which survive at present rarely date from the beginning of the eleventh century ; they replaced an earlier generation of Roman- esque churches, those Raoul Glaber saw built, which are unknown to us. But progress was rapid. Very soon, the mediaeval architects recognised the mechanically essential points ; they reinforced them, and lightened the building in its passive parts. To prevent subsidences and cracks in the barrel vault, they reinforced it at intervals by projecting transverse arches, or arcs 17 c ^u ^... 12. — t'DKCH Ol' S.\1.N l-OlLLtS. {P/lo/o. Xciirtfii'/l) ART IN FRANCE —NAVE OF SAIN'I-l'lEK AT ANGOULEME. IE, douhleaux. These arches rested in the interior on dosserets, or impost blocks, and were strengthened on the exterior by buttresses. The long nave, divided into bays, was thus enclosed from place to place in a framework of arches and buttresses. Other systems of vaulting were employed. The vault on intersecting arches ; the groined vault, formed by the inter- penetration of two deml-cylmders. The cupola was employed more especially among the Byzantines. Spherical triangles, or pendentives, form the transition between its base and the square plan of the bay of the nave which it had to cover, or more frequently, corbels sustain the cupola when it reaches the angles. At the junction between two ribbed vaults or two cupolas, a strongly projecting transverse arch {arc doubleau) receives its share of the thrust and transmits it to the buttresses. Nevertheless, the building failed to conceal effort. The lateral aisles, which in the ancient basilicas were designed to add to the proportions of the nave, now served to buttress it by means of their half-barrel vaults ; the thickness of the walls and pillars made the free space appear yet more confined. The outline of the exterior tended to be- come pyramidal ; the base of the edifice is broad and spreading ; the central nave rests upon the side- aisles, and the apse extends to the apsidal chapels which it throws out around it. The architect recog- nises the organs which need strengthening, but as yet he dares not attempt what the architects of the thirteenth century were to do : 18 kk;. 34. — roHCH ok sainte-ckoix, at uokueaux. MONASTIC OR ROMANESQUE ART it II i ii KIG. 35. — FAVAUIi OF SAINT-I'IEKKK, AT AN<;i)L'M*;.Mi:. i.e., detach the buttresses from the mass ; on the contrary, he dis- simulates them as much as he can, transforms them into decorations, hnks them together by arcades, or rounds them, givmg them the ap- pearance of engaged columns ; the Romanesque builder loved curvmg lines, full and convex contours. This marvellous mason, the inventor of a new system of construction, was careful to conceal his innovations under traditional forms. Neverthe- less, a few towers begin to rise to the sky from his fac^ades or the crossings of his transepts. They become lighter as they mount ; the upper storeys are pierced with win- dows and throw out a bold spire. The Romanesque belfrey soars thus proudly because it is independent of the compact structure, and detached from the system of equilibrium. Sometimes it suffices to change the character of the church, reveal- ing a heavenward impulse in the stolid creation. Romanesque architecture, extending over the entire surface of ancient Gaul, accommodated itself to the material resources of each region, and the local habits of its builders. Art reveals regional individualities at the very moment when the great feudal divisions begin to play an important part in history. It was in Auvergne, on that plateau at first re- calcitrant to Latin civilisa- tion, but afterwards one of Its most faithful guar- dians, that Romanesque architecture produced its most masterly buildings. Notre Dame du Port, at Clermont-Ferrand, or the Church of St. Nectairc, are examples of robust buildings, finely proportioned, carved from a granite that 19 c 2 FIG. 36. — N.'WK OK SAINT-KKONT, AT I'lvRIGb'EllX. iPhoto. Nciirtiein. ) ART IN FRANCE HG. 37.— SAI.N 1-WAKllN, AT BOSCHEKVILLE. makes admirable walls and coarse sculptures. The Auvergnate Church IS the most complete of Romanesque organisms ; its side-aisles with their ribbed vaults support tribunes with half-barrelled vaults, and from the ambulatory that surrounds the choir, apsidal chapels radiate in graceful symmetry. At the crossing of the transept rises an octagonal tower, which elevates and lightens the massive body. These vigorous build- ings multiplied on the slopes of the central plateau. They are to be found in the valley which was tra- versed by the main road of Cler- mont and Brioude, in Limousin, in Quercy, and in Languedoc. Tou- louse, inaugurating her architectonic activity at this early period, transposed the stone masonry of the day into brick. Piles of bricks give a very individual character to the belfries of Languedoc. This influence was felt very far afield. Saint-Sernin at Toulouse inspired the plan of the original church of St. lago at Compostella. The pil- grim, lost and strange in remote regions, hailed the Romanesque sanctuary of his native land at successive stages of his road, and recognised his religion in unknown provinces. (Figs. 19 to 26.) The close affinity between the churches of Burgundy and those of Provence recalls the relation be- tween North and South in the basin of the Rhone ; the kingdom of Aries at one time united Burgundy and Provence. The great Burgun- dian sanctuaries contained Provencal relics ; the Magdalen and Lazarus, who had landed of old at Camargue, had left relics at Vezelay and at Autun. The grandiose abbey of Cluny has perished almost 20 KIG. 38. — FAfADE OF LA TRINITIi (AIIBAYE AUX DAMES), AT CAEN. MONASTIC OR ROMANESQUE ART KK;. 39. — Al'SE 1>I' THK. CHURCH Ol- ALLNAY, IN SAINTONGE. entirely ; the churches which have survived attest that their architects were audacious enough at times to sacrifice soHdity. They reared their vauhs boldly, throwing out their walls and buttressing them only by means of low side-aisles without galleries. They thus reserved a space for light- ing the nave directly with lofty windows. The Proven^aux built in the Burgundian manner, but they gave greater height to their side- aisles, and the dazzling southern sun- light entered through windows much reduced in size. The builders of these churches, which often replaced Roman temples, utilised the ruins of the latter. Carved friezes and columns, imbedded in the Romanesque decoration, still remind us that antique art reigned upon this soil before Christian civilisation. (Figs. 28 and 32.) In the south-west, from the Loire to the Pyrenees, the Poitevins and the Sain- tongeais reared innumerable churches, in which the lofty lateral aisles cling closely to the sides of the nave. The light struggles dimly into the constricted central space. But on the fac^ade and sometimes on the lateral porches, the sculptors lavished exquisite decoration. The close and tender gram of limestone lent itself to the carving of delicate images and supple arabesques, and thus the somewhat loaded construction is worked as richly as an ivory casket. in this region many churches, both very vast and very hum- ble, are crowned with cupolas, for the '- most part concealed by gable roofs ; but at the Church of St. Front at Perigueux, the spherical domes are visible, and cover the four equal arms of a Greek cross ; the Oriental aspect of this architecture inevitably evokes memories 21 rl<;. 40. — KACAI>K OK SAI.NT- KTIKNMC (AliBAVK AV\ HO.MMES), AT CAEN. ART IN FRANCE H./^i^M-%/i^7< fTfwm M FIG. 41.— WII.I.IAIM THE CONQH-'EKOR S ARMY IN CAMl'. BAYEUX TAPESTRY. of Byzantium, and the plan of the church is identical with that of St. Mark's at Venice. (Figs. 31 to 36.) These Romanesque constructions appear more robust and flourish- ing in the provinces, where the ancient culture had left the strongest impress on the soil. The northern provinces never raised such perfect buildings as the churches of Auvergne and Languedoc. It was not for lack of courage. On the contrary, the Nor- mans undertook construc- tions of such audacity that It was not possible to cover them with stone vaults ; the over-lofty walls could not have sus- tained their weight. Car- penters completed the work of the masons. The proud churches of the Abbaye aux Flommes and the Abbaye aux Dames at Caen were begun in the Romanesque manner, but they had to await the Gothic vault for their com- pletion. (Figs. 37 to 40.) During this same Romanesque period, Chris- KIG. 42. — SCENE FROM THE Al'OCALYPSE ; PORCH OF SAINT-SAVIN, NEAR POITIERS. (Bibliotheque Nationale, Print Room.) FIG. 48. — GOD CREATING THE SUN AND THE MOON, NAVE OF SAINT-SAVIN, NEAR POITIERS. (Bibliotheiiue Nationale, Print Room.) 22 MONASTIC OR ROMANESQUE ART f^C^fe^J^A FIG. 44. — El'ISODE 0|- THE BATTLE OK HASTINIIS. BAVICUX TAPESTKV. tianity further gave rise to a vigorous development of imagery. It had first evolved a very copious iconography, which for centuries was perpetuated by miniatures, mural painting, sculpture, enamel, and stained glass. After practically suppressing sculpture as an art too deeply impregnated with paganism, it had countenanced a prodigious pictorial florescence, and had in- vented a dogma of imagery to illustrate the written dogma. Re- ligious subjects were stereotyped, so to speak, in Eastern art in a large range of clearly defined compositions, which spread from monastery to monastery, thanks above all to the illuminated manuscript. It was on this common ground that Christian art was henceforth to exercise itself i-U;. 45. — Ki:l.ll,)L AKV HEAD OK SAINT liAUDIMK. (Clnircli of Snim-Ncrtaiic.) it is found al the source of ^^ m-M ^^ ^m ^ FIG. 46. — FK.AC.MENTS OF STAINED GLASS OF NOIKE-IiAMK-UE-CIl AKTKES. THE ANNUNCIATION. — THE ANNUNCIATION TO THE SHEIMIERUS. — THE NATIVITY. (Uibliothcque Nationale.) 23 ART IN FRANCE FIG. 47. — SATAN AMONGST THE DAllNED. APOCALVPSE OF SAINT sf;ver. (Latin Manuscript in the BibliothtKiue Nationale.) [Flwto. Bert/iaud.) the pictorial arts of all Europe, like an original language the roots of which bear fruit in different dialects. Pictorial themes were transmitted even more readily than architectural forms ; Christian iconography, like the Christian religion itself, was almost entirely borrowed from the East. The earliest motives treated by the painters of the catacombs and the sculptors of sarcophagi among the Christians of the West — certain Old Testament episodes, such as the Israelites crossing the Red Sea, Daniel, Jonah, etc. — seem to have disappeared m the copious repertory introduced by the Benedictine minia- turists. In the Merovingian period and afterwards in the time of Charle- magne, certain painters no doubt showed some originality of invention, for they depicted the Life of St. Martin in the famous basilica of Tours, and in the palace of Charlemagne at Aix-la-Chapelle, they glorified the race and the reign of the Emperor. But all that survives of these manifestations is the record of them in the pages of historians or poets. This pictorial tradition was annihilated with the Carolingian civilisation, and when art began to live again at the close of the eleventh century, French artists seem to have adopted Byzantine forms almost exclusively. These painters were quite untouched by any sort of realistic inspiration. They borrowed fixed images and made no attempt to transform them into representations of the world in which they lived. And yet even in the twelfth 24 FIG. 48. — THE MYSTIC MARRIAGE OF ST. CATHERINE. (Ciiurch of INIontniorillon.) MONASTIC OR ROMANESQUE ART K:G. 4g.--ADAM, EVE, AND THE ANfiEL. CAPITAL OF NOTRE-DA.ME- DU-l'OKT, AT CI.EK.MONT-FERKAND. century, this iconography lost something of its uniformity when it estabhshed itself on French soil. The sculptors who transposed Byzantine motives into their carvings had not the same habits in every region ; they did not work the same stone, nor use the same instruments. The Pro- vencals bored their marble with the auger, like the antique sculptors ; the Burgundian monks hewed out long, flat silhouettes, the Languedocians robust figures ; the Auvergnats carved their hard granite with infinite labour, whereas the men of Poitou and of Saintonge treated their docile limestone freely and fancifully. Hence we distinguish pro- vincial styles in the borrowed forms of this art, as, no doubt, we should recog- nise them in the painting of the day, if more specimens of this had survived. Moreover, if they showed little invention, every monastery and every church selected from the common repertory the themes most in harmony with local devotion. Innumerable pilgrims flocked to Provence to pay homage to the relics of the three Marys, which had been landed at the mouth of the Rhone together with Lazarus. The great sanc- tuaries of Provence show their effigies on every hand. They are to be seen on the door of St. Gilles, and in St. Trophime at Aries, going to the tomb which Jesus has just abandoned, straight and rigid, draped in long Syrian robes, all holding their vases of spices in their hands with the same gesture. The Resurrection of Lazarus was also a favourite theme with the painters of Aix and Avignon in the fifteenth century. In the regions of the West, on the great highway which leads towards St. lago of Compostella through Poitou and Saintonge by Blaye, Bordeaux and Ron- cevaux, the churches also show a very characteristic motive : a knight bearing down a vanquished foe. The Gestes of Roland 25 Kl<;. 50. — BAS-KELIEK IN IS.WEUX C.\l HEDKAL. ART IN FRANCE and of Turpin represent this region as wrested foot by foot from the Saracen by Charlemagne and his companions. Every church and monastery invited the pilgrim to halt before some relic of warriors slam fight- ing against the Infidel ; archaeologists now recog- nise a Byzantine Constan- tine, where the men of FIG. 51.— CAPITAL FEOM THE CHURCH OF SAINT- SERNIN OF TOULOUSE, PRESERVED IN THE MUSEE DES AUCUSTINS. FIG. 52. — THE SIGN OF THE I.ION AND THE RAM, FROM SAINT-SERNIN OF TOULOUSE, PRESERVED IN THE MUSEE DES AUGUSTINS. old no doubt saw the Emperor, "slayer of the Moors," whose exploits were recounted and whose advance was traced in contem- porary song. The tradition lingered long ; an incontestable Charlemagne was carved at Saintes, in the fifteenth century, on the door of the cathedral. The venerable relics of St. Martin of Tours attracted many pilgrims. The churches in western France dedicated to him are innumerable. In the sanctuaries which stud the highway, on painted window or capital, we often find the figure of the horseman dividing his cloak. But these examples, in spite of many others that might be cited, are exceptions. As a whole, a religious iconography uniform with the dog- ma it accom- panied, was propagated. In spite of its Oriental origin, it flourished well in France. It did not take the place of an earlier art ; it responded to the crav- ings of religious sensibility ; it gave to Christians the concrete images which enabled them to picture to themselves Jesus, the Virgin, the Apostles, the FIG. 26 53- -CAPITAL OF THE CLOISTER, MOISSAC. MONASTIC OR ROMANESQUE ART FK;. 54. — I'ROl'HET. CIIUNCFI OK SOUII.LAC marvellous or artless stories of the Gospel, and the fantastic visions of the Apocalypse ; they saw more clearly that source of light the beams of which irradiated their whole life. For a time, the Chris- tians of the Romanesque period were content to repro- duce the Byzantine images, just as they repeated the sacred legends, without any sort of modification. But in these congealed forms there were latent forces which were later to wake to life ; the Romanesque sculptors were to animate these figures, and this hieratic iconography was to end in realism. Imagery came from the East in the form of painting, and in the Romanesque period, painting was the natural complement of architecture ; vaults and solid walls afforded it vast surfaces. The monks of the eleventh and twelfth centuries illuminated their churches like their manuscripts. The rude masonry disappeared under enlarged miniatures which recalled the distant legends of dawning Christianity, and the expected terrors of the end of the world. These have disappeared for the most part, but an attentive eye will sometimes discover on the vault of some dark crypt, bistre lines which indicate long silhouettes of Byzantine figures and the familiar attitudes of the Annunciation or the Flight into Egypt. The pilgrims who came of old to venerate the relics of the Saint were able to admire clearly defined forms and bril- liant colours, by the light of the tapers. The half-effaced frescoes to be found in certain churches, '■"■• 55- — IMl.LAK \V1 in CIllMKKAS. Cni^K'CH OK SOUIl.I.AC. 50.— CAiri AI. OK THli CmibTliR OF MOISSAC. 27 ART IN FRANCE Fic. 57.- -THE LAST JUDGMENT. I'OKCH OF THE CHURCH OF 13EAULIEU. especially in the region of Poitou, give us some idea of the nature of Romanesque painting. The decorators used fresco as the ancients had done, and as the Byzantines were still do- ing. A monk, Theophilus, has described the process in a treatise : Dioersarum artium schedula, a manual of the arts of this period. The colours are laid on flat and surrounded by hard outlines ; modelling is re- duced to a few white hatchings in the lights and a few dark blotches in the shadows. This drawing, impoverished and re- stricted for centuries by the monks, was adopted by the Roman- esque painters and applied sometimes with a brutal hand. If the lines were tortured, the attitudes violent, the bodies distorted, it was because a violent energy had laid hold rudely of these drowsy effigies, and had shaken their torpid limbs. The most important relic of Romanesque painting is pre- served at St. Savin, near Poitiers. Episodes from the Book of Genesis are painted on a barrel vault. These vast compositions are carried out m pale tints, among which greens, and red and yellow ochres predominate. The vivacity of the execution forbids us to look upon the design as mere trace-work. Other remains of frescoes near St. Savin, at Montmonllon, at Poitiers, at Montoire (Loir et Cher), at Le Liget (Indre et Loire), seem to prove that this region of richly sculptured churches was also the most fertile in paintings. But this mural decoration was soon to be transposed into glass-painting ; the glass-painters were to adopt all those picturesque compositions which the Romanesque walls were 28 FIG. 58.- -PORCH OF THE CHURCH OF MOISSAC. MONASTIC OR ROMANESQUE ART unable to preserve. Some of them do not belong to the ordinary cycle of Christian painting, in St. Julien at Brioude, there are remnants of a fading vision of Hell, conceived and painted by men who followed no Byzantine tradition. A mon- strous Devil gambols in the flames surrounded by little terrified figures, a barbarous and chaotic nightmare which has nothing in common with the hieratic and theatrical compositions of Oriental art. It was no doubt familiar to the Romanesque imagination, and recalls the terrors of those monks of Satan (Figs. 42, 43, 59-- -IlEKOUS FliAST. CAl'lTAL KKO.M .SAI.NI I^rrrENNK, TOIII.OUSE MUSEUM. the claws who felt themselves in 47, 48.) The sculpture of the twelfth century, like the architecture of the same period, is marked by a charac- teristic peculiarity, in that it was an art at once very ancient and very novel, an art of primitives struggling with material as yet unsubdued, yet a decadent art, in which antiquated forms and superannuated customs still survived. It combines a strange rudeness with subtle refinements. It IS awkward and contorted, because for the most part the twelfth century sculptors simply transposed into relief what Byzantine artists had designed for painting. Antique statuary, a pagan art. had disappeared completely together with the worship of which it had been an accessory. Statuary intro- duces concrete beings ; it is the art of idolatry ; painting is but an illusion, and lends itself less to a confusion of the divinity and his image. Nevertheless, in certain districts where the antique civilisation had 29 lie. 6o. — JESUS GIVING .\UTHoKlTY TO IHE AroSTI.ES. TV.MrANU.\T OK THE CHURCH OK vfiZEI.AV. ART IN FRANCE FIG. 6l. — GOD APPEARING AT THE END OF THE WORLD. TY.MPANUM OF THE PORCH OF ST.-PIERUE, AT MOISSAC. penetrated most deeply, statues still survived. At the beginning of the eleventh century, Bernard, a scholar of Chartres, on making a third pilgrimage to Con- ques, found in Auvergne certain reliquary statues which were venerated by the natives. He was scan- dalised by this survival of pagan custom ; he derides the men who pray to a dumb and senseless thing; rem mutam insen- satamque. The miracles wrought by the little statue of St. Foy were necessary to efface his first impressions and calm his scruples ; in common with the men of his day and of his creed, he considered statues of gypsum, wood, or brass, absurd and sacrilegious, save as applied to the crucifix. But if the worship of relics tended occasionally to revive this statuary which the detestation of idols had destroyed, it was, no doubt, only in order to give a human form to certain costly reliquaries of gold or silver. These works in precious metals were merely the luxuries of rich monasteries, and an art, if it is to live, requires deeper roots and a more extensive develop- ment. (Figs. 45, 75.) The beginnings of sculp- ture at the dawn of the twelfth century were un- certain and uneasy mani- festations in unfavourable surroundings. It did not develop normally, like Greek sculpture, which disengaged a human body from a tree-trunk or a block of stone, afterwards attached limbs to it, and gradually gave the suppleness of life to the whole. The motives of Romanesque art had long been established by painters when sculptors began to treat them. The 30 FIG. 62. — THE LAST JUDGMENT. TYMPANUM OF THE I'OKCII OF THE CHURCH OF CONQUES. MONASTIC OR ROMANESQUE ART KIG. 63. — THE LAST JUDGMENT. TYMTANUM Ol-' I'OKCH OF THE CATHKUUAI. OK AUTUN. {Photo. Neiirdiiii.) first Romanesque sculptures are merely transpositions mto low relief of the images of Byzantine miniature, and the vivid colours which formerly covered the tym- pana of Vezelay or Mois- sac must originally have emphasised the fidelity of these transpositions. Their authors, too, ventured upon strange audacities. They attempted the most com- plex compositions of By- zantine painting with the rudimentary resources at their disposal ; and their childish awkwardness gives a kind of youthful air to the figures of a senile art. The architects of Gaul did not command materials as rich as those of the East or of Italy. They never faced their buildings with slabs of marble, and their decoration was not applied to the building, but evolved from it, hewn in the masonry. The sculptors gave the final touches to the sturdy edifice, which offered vast surfaces to their chisels. They carved the soffits and tympana of the porches and the capitals of the pillars. They transcribed in bas- reliefs the few forms that had survived from the antique shipwreck, per- haps some heraldic ani- mals of barbaric jewellery, but above all, the images of Byzantine Christianilj', which was then pene- trating into the Western world in a thousand forms, in the provinces where Gallo- Roman re- mains were plentiful, they did not fail to adapt these to the new decoration ; the churches of Provence, St. Gilles, and St. Trophime at Aries, are loaded with the spoils of ancient art ; architecture even burdened itself with 31 fk;. 64. — thf; two docks of the chlkch ok saint- LA2AKE, AT AVALI.ON. {I'/loto. Ncurih'in.) ART IN FRANCE superfluous accessories in order to utilise as much as possible of the hoard ; here the Roman affiliation was so close that Roman- esque art desired to lose no fragment of its heritage. Augustodunum had also left many antique buildings. Throughout this region, rinceaux and rosettes give the porches of the churches the richness of certain triumphal arches. An old Roman- esque door at Bourges shows that the Christian Church had not disdained to deck herself with the gauds of Avancum. At Moissac, at Chartres, and elsewhere, the lintel over a door reproduces some antique frieze, or the side of a sarcophagus. F,G. 65.-v,Ko,N AND CHILD. Coufrontcd with an antique form, Roman- FA^ADE OF THE CHURCH OF csquc art recoguiscd and adopted it. The SAINTF.-CROIX, ATl.A CHARITE. •. l l • i i . • •11 {Photo. Mieuscmcnt.-) Capital, which was almost mvaHably rect- angular, has thick sausage-like scrolls at the angles, which are merely degenerate Ionic volutes ; the classic acanthus is preserved in a clumsy, dry, and flattened form ; in St. Remi, at Reims, there are composite capitals. Even in the poorest essays of this ^ sculpture (at Oulchy, at Morienval and at Foues- nant), the weak and tenta- tive chisel which has been laboriously applied to the hard granite, has striven to produce a volute ; this rude sculpture, like the crudest patois, is a deriva- tion from the Latin. The men of the twelfth century sought to achieve decorative richness by the accumulation of details ; they were craftsmen who never spared their pains. Their bas-relief resembles a coarse embroidery somewhat closely interwoven, which entirely fills the surface to be decorated, tympanum, archivolt, or capital. Even in dramatic compositions, with figures 32 FIG. 66. — FORCH OF IHE CHURCH OF SAINT-TUOrHIME, AT AKI.ES. {Plioto. Ni'lirift'hl.) MONASTIC OR ROMANESQUE ART in violent action, the forms are curved and in- terlaced in such a manner as to leave no empty spaces. In the porches and fa(;ades of the churches of Saintonge and Poitou, the decorative instinct has triumphed over sono- graphic scruples. In this region of fine lime-stone, the fa<;ades are elaborate- ly chiselled, and time, rein- forcing the work of the sculptor, continues to eat into the soft stone. The most dramatic motives are sometimes treated simply as arabesques. Hence the sculptors showed a preference for those which could be repeated inde- finitely, such as the Virtues and the Vices, the Wise and the Foolish Virgins, the signs of the Zodiac, the labours of the months ; in the south porch of Aulnay, in Saintonge, the twenty-four elders of the Apocalypse are multiplied at will, according to the number of voussoirs ; at Sainte-Marie- des-Dames, at Saintes, the beheading of John the Baptist with the martyr between the executioner and Salome, is repeated as often as it is required to cover the archivolts of the doorway ; everywhere I-R;. 67. — DECOKATIVF. MOTIVES, AT SAINl -GILLES FIG. 08. — UECOUAllVE MOTIVES, AT SAINT-GILLES. FIG. 6g. — i-Kii;zF;s, sain 1-011. l.ES. the strangest monsters are juxtaposed, with no other object than to bring them to the two extremities of the arch (Figs. 70 to 73). 33 D ART IN FRANCE FIG. 70.— SOUTH PORCH OF THE CHURCH OF AULNAV, SAINTONGE. St. Bernard was exasperated by " these monkeys, these lions, these monstrous centaurs, these archers, these huntsmen blowing horns. . . these quadrupeds with serpents' tails, these horned beasts with equine hindquarters." Romanesque art was running riot outside the rule of the Benedictines who had created it. Yet this fantastic fauna was never- theless far from moribund : it origin- ated in remote antiquity, and its progeny survived even at the height of the Renaissance. But was it no more than a mere play of the imagination in the twelfth century ? It would seem at times to have been the pathetic expression of terror- stricken souls. When the sculptors of Souillac and of Moissac interlaced horrible beasts with fierce talons and gaping jaws, biting and devouring one another, were they not fixing in stone the visions which so often terrified the Romanesque monk in his cell ? In these decorative extravagances, we should perhaps recognise petrified nightmares. When sculpture arose from the void to collaborate in Christian iconography, decorative motives had long been determined by painting. Doubtless, the Romanesque sculptors were not solely dependent on illuminated manuscripts for guidance ; they saw and copied the ivories and goldsmith's wares which monks and pilgrims brought back from the East. But these miniature sculptures were themselves allied to the art of the painter, with their slight relief and clearly marked lines ; Romanesque art modified the round, soft style of the antique by imitating the dry elegance of the Byzantine form. But this youthful art handles the ankylose Byzantine types very roughly. It is curious to see how these great figures stamp and 34 Fl ,. 71. — ANCHIVOLTS OF THE TORCH OF SAINTE- MARIE-UES-PAMES, AT SAINTES. MONASTIC OR ROMANESQUE ART FK;. 72. — CHURCH OF CHADFNAC (CHARENTE- IXFERIKUKE). writhe and gesticulate in the process of throwing off their drowsy stiffness. Hence the furious and inexphcable gestures, the inter- twined legs, the tremulous hands, the tempestuous draperies, the twisted robes with sharp, upturned edges. Even the rude fig- ures laboriously carved in the granite on the capitals of Auvergne, are vigorous and lively human beings. By dint of application, the artist has succeeded in de- picting a clearly defined action, and rendering in- telligible gestures with his interlacement of limbs. This pathetic violence breaks out on a tympanum at Vezelay ; Christ, with His outstretched hand casts rays of stone on the heads of the Apostles who press around Him in a frenzied dance, an interminable series of little figures, which expand or crowd together, according to the exigencies of the surface they have to cover, and seem to find It very difficult to keep their angular gestures and intricate draperies within the field of the tympanum. At Autun, a Christ of the same kind presides over a Last Judgment, in which the barbarous forms give a fantastic terror to the scene. These look as if they had been flattened for ever by having lain for centuries be- tween the pages of great folios. At Conques, the pilgrims of St. Foy were also edified by a Last Judgment, a swarm of figures, mingling in hell with acrobatic demons, or squeezed between the arcades of the New Jerusalem, At Moissac, the Christ, the most comely Romanesque Christ before that of Chartres, makes a grandiose appearance in the midst of the four and twenty elders, who gaze at Him with upturned 35 D 2 Fit;. 73. TOUCH OF THE CIIIUCII OF COGNAC. ART IN FRANCE l-IG. 74.— rukCII OF THE DESERTED CHURCH NEAR MATHA (CHARENTE-INFERIEURE). heads, twisting their necks to get a better view. At Beauheu we have the same scene, the same figures boldly treated with high relief and angular contours, marked by a robust- ness wholly lacking in the thread- like larvae of Vezelay and Autun (Figs. 60 to 63). These complex and grandiose works have a strange charm ; they express that epoch in which a semi- barbarism was breathing its ardent vitality into an exhausted civilisation. Already, however, in the middle of the twelfth century, an absolutely novel statuary began to evolve from these combinations, in which the awkwardness of an infant sculpture mingles with the conventions of a senile painting. This statuary detaches itself completely from paint- ing, and sets in space living bodies, and full forms. After the monastic sculpture of Romanesque art we have an art which is no mere repetition of religious motives, but an imitation of life. There is little affinity between the fresh plants which throw out their young and vigorous shoots in the region of Chartres, and those dried herbs which Romanesque monks found between the leaves of ancient books. The more famous sanctuaries have for the most part lost their treasures, and collectors compete one against the other for the fragments. Some of the more modest country churches have preserved reliquaries, shrines, and vases, those precious works of rare material and difficult fashion to which the Romanesque craftsman applied his skill. They remind us that in the eleventh century the plastic arts received more than they created ; the most various 75. — STATUE OF SAINT-FOY, AT CON'QUES. 36 MONASTIC OR ROMANESQUE ART IK,. 70. - l-KA<,MK.\T Ol-- THli FACADE Ol- IHli CHUKCH OK ECHEIiKfNE (CHARKNl E-INFKKIKUK'E). elements are combined m these exam- ples : the East and the West, the Barbarian and the Latm, the Pagan, the Christian, and even the Arab. The treasury of St. Denis possessed antique vases which Romanesque goldsmiths set in mountings of silver- gilt, adorning after their manner the relics of antiquity they had reverently collected. There are Roman cameos among the precious stones which en- rich the robe of St. Foy of Conques, a strange and barbarous little figure with large enamelled eyes, still pre- served m the wild district where it worked so many miracles and attracted so many pilgrims (Fig. 75). In the twelfth century, the enamels of Limoges began to penetrate into the treasuries of the churches of Limousin and Auvergne before they found their way throughout Christen- dom. The enamellers continued this Byzantine industry, replacing the technique of cloisonne by the simpler process of champlcoe.^ Even when they represent native saints, these figures are Oriental in design. Like the leaden net-work of the painted win- dows, the cloisons of the enamel tended to fix and stiffen the lines of Romanesque design. Here, however, flexibility and truth of design were of less moment than perfection of technique, and beauty and solidity of material. Neither goldsmiths nor glass painters were inventors of living forms, and even when sculptors had discovered the art of carving life-like figures, enamel and stained glass long remained faithful to the Romano- Byzantine style. This is what makes Romanesque goldsmiths work I'K;. 77. — VIKIilN ANDCIIII.l). (Wood.) (F.oiiviv. I>;uis.) ' In clohonne the design was applied lo the surface, the divisions being marked by little barriers (cloisons) of metal ; in champleue the metal field was hollowed out to receive the enamel. 37 ART IN FRANCE ___ ^lfeJS4«l^ m r^MilrTF^r^ip^i^*^*^^ : 'Wi'Wi mm j wk ' Hk-' !' W] 1 1 KLjj' > BP] r^ Ji,. J ^^< ^ ^ 0i FIC. 70. — SHRINE OF SAINT-YVED. (Ivory.) (Cluny Museum, Paris.) is the first definite form of French art. Fragments are all that remam to us of an earlier period, and even so, the Roman ruins in France are monuments of an alien civilisation. The Latin basilicas have survived only as memories. The Romanesque churches have en- dured ; they are still in use, and con- tinue to serve the purpose for which they were created. It was in the s outh- ern pro- vinc e 8 above so valuable ; it was origin- ally the most precious of all the arts, and was second to none plastically. The Romanesque style, with its honest solidity, and its applied ornament, FIG. 79. — CHKIST IN GLORY. (Limoges enamel of ihe Xllth Century.) (Cluny Museum, Paris.) FIG. 80.— CASE OF AN KVANGELIARY FROM THE TREASURY OF SAINT-DENIS. (Louvre, Paris.) all that they multiplied. They are very much less numerous in the north of France, either because this style made way for its successor, Gothic, or because it flourished more luxuriantly in the regions where the antique culture had pene- trated most deeply. In this architecture of the langue doc, as in the southern literature, we are conscious of a very ancient spirit, and a kind of rustic charm. The Romanesque buildings were 38 MONASTIC OR ROMANESQUE ART -FOOT OF THE (JKEAT CANDKl.AliKU.M CF SAINT-KfCMI, AT REIMS. (Pliolo. Rotliiir, Kfiiiis.) closely associated with pro- vincial and rural life ; many of them are at a consider- able distance from the main arteries of general life. Never was art so freely scattered on the surface of the soil as it was in the twelfth century. Nearly all the provinces had their individual style of architec- ture and sculpture ; more than one lost it in the sequel for ever ! How many districts and villages have known no other fine work of art but a Romanesque church porch ! After this period art became less rural, and concen- trated itself in the towns. Great sanctuaries, built for the reception of innumerable pilgrims, now rear their rich fac^ades in solitary spaces, and the footsteps of the faithful are no longer numerous enough to trace a pathway in the grass. But how venerable time has made these country churches. The pavements are worn, the angles are blunted, the vault has subsided ; the masonry of the fa CAimajKAl.. WKvl I KLIN I'. CHAPTER III COMMUNAL OR GOTHIC ART The Cii'ilisalion oj the Ile-de-lrance : the Communes and their Cathedrals in the time of Philip Augustus and Saint Louis. The Gothic Building; Saint-Denis, Paris. Laon, Charlres, Bourges, Le Mans. Reims, Amiens, Beauvais ; the Cathedrals of .\ormandy ; the Gothic Style in the West and in the South. Stained Glass IVindou's. The Renaissance of Statuary. Statues at Chartres. The Transformation of Iconography by Statuary ; the Prophets. Christ, the Last Judgment. Idealistic Statuary ; the Style of .Amiens, and of Reims. -Ornamental Sculpture. Towards the middle of the twelfth century, when Romanesque art was at its zenith, a new style, destined to shed its radiance upon all Christendom, was germinating in the Royal Domain. The Romanesque epoch was a period of disseminated art ; each province had its special architecture and its individual decoration ; no single one dominated the rest. In the vast regions of the languc doc, from the South to the Loire, from Aries to Poitiers, from Anjou to Burgundy, the great feoffs enframed individual existences, united by the diffusion of a common religion. The antique culture which had come by the great Roman road that extends from Frejus to Bordeaux had spread northward through Burgundy, Auvergne and Poitou. The highwiiys of communication between the languc doc and the languc d oil met together in the l:)asin of the Seine. I he unity which was impossible in the South was inevitable in the North. Life was more concentrated in these regions, and their wide plains 41 ART IN FRANCE 84. — CRYPT OF THE CHUKCH OK SAINT-DENIS, had none of those geographical frontiers by which the particularist spirit is fostered. A personahty rose above the feudal federation ; a France was evolved to which the other provinces gradually attached themselves ; Gothic art, born of this society, naturally followed the course of its destiny. Since the days when the Greeks invented the Doric and Ionic tem- ples, no society had ever developed a style of architecture more per- sonally expressive ; the immense cathedrals of the Ile-de- France and the adjacent provinces rose at about the same time ; there is something of the marvellous in this phenome- non ; an impulse so general and so sudden must have had some definite cause. It is to be found m the fact that the population of the communes had lately conquered a place in the world, side by side with the feudal and ecclesiastical castes. Romanesque art had been primarily the work of monks ; the feudal class gave birth to the architecture of the castle ; but it was the population of the communes who reared the Gothic cathedrals. Numerous towns sprang up whose inhabitants formed a vigorous and prolific citizen class, friendly to the king, and administered by a bishop. An urban civilisation comprising bur- gesses and workmen began to flourish in the shelter of their ramparts. Corpora- tions were formed, work- shops were opened, masters trained apprentices in difficult crafts ; industrial activity was organised, and preserved its organisation to the end of the Middle Ages. Lay workmen laboured, but religion still guided and directed them. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the cities applied their wealth and their muscles 42 l-TG. 85. — CKVri ciK .SAIM-GILI.ES. COMMUNAL OR GOTHIC ART -.NA\ !•: HI- NOTKl-;-UA.ME UE TAKIS. to the construction of the House of God ; the entire town devoted itself to the common task. Cathedrals had to be vast, immense, for whole populations were to circu- late beneath their vaults ; they were to rise to a giddy height, because this seemed to give an added fervour to these Hosannas m stone ; and very soon also a kind of rivalry between town and town caused vaults and spires to soar higher and ever higher. Every cathedral was the outcome of a vast charitable impulse ; the bishop directed and organised the work, carried the relics about and col- lected contributions ; the king encouraged the quest, and opened his own purse in aid of the task ; the mass of the faithful accepted their share in the enterprise by offering the labour of their hands. " Whenever the great blocks of stone were hauled up by cables from the quarry, the people of the district, and even those of the neighbouring regions, nobles and commons alike, harnessed them- selves to the ropes by arms, breasts, and shoulders, and drew the load like beasts of burden " (Suger). It was like a crusade in which all took part, either with their purses or their arms ; the faithful pressed in from the surrounding country, drag- ging carts loaded with stones and beams ; they encamped by the founda- tions of the cathedral that was to be ; the work was intermingled with religious ceremonies ; the building rose swiftly, for enthusiasm gives without reckoning the cost ; after the sublime ceremony, when these crusaders dispersed, a prodigious building stood upon the plain. 43 " U»*,«ffii|;-' , ^ -CIKUK o|- niK ClIUKCII 111' SAIN r-UENIS. ART IN FRANCE •FAfADE OF NOTRE-DAME, PARIS. This miraculous efflorescence is only to be explained by universal impulse. It was a brief moment, little more than a half century ; the growth of the cathedrals which were not begun under Philip Augus- tus or not finished under Samt Louis was intermittent. As early as the end of the thirteenth century, the zeal of the overstrained community began to slacken ; cathedrals were then built by forced labour ; fewer were reared, and finally they ceased to be built at all. But in the thir- teenth century the energies of a young and devout society raised these mountains of stone ; the architects had not to fear a lack of funds ; their sole preoccupation was with technical problems. Gothic architecture is the result of the mechanical researches undertaken by builders after they had substituted a stone vault for the timber roof of the ancient basilicas. To prevent the deviation of the walls, the Romanesque architects had reinforced them, and narrowed their aisles. Intent upon the solidity as well as upon the beauty of their building, they preserved the Roman style, masking the buttresses as far as possible, and thickening the members of their compact masonry. Romanesque architecture remained faithful to an- tique forms after admitting a new principle. On the other hand, during the second half of the twelfth century, in the Ile-de- France, to the north of Paris, and in Normandy, the art of building was transformed in a few years, because architects boldly accepted all the consequences of vaulted architecture ; a kind of division of labour was established in Romanesque masonry ; 44 □. — CHURCH OF SAINT-I'UsIn-KE, CHARI KKS COMMUNAL OR GOTHIC ART ^^li.. 90. — NOTRE-DAMK, PAKIS (solTII SIDk). organs began to detach themselves from the compact mass ; a new type of church was evolved : the Gothic church. The genesis of this new architecture is marked by a constructive invention : that of intersecting diagonal ribs, the supreme achievement, after which no further progress was made. Under a vaulted bay enframed by two arcs doubleaux (trans- verse arches) and two formerets (lateral arches) two diagonal arches in- tersect,^ and assume the weight of the vault. The four portions in which it is thus divided counterbalance each other, and the weights are concentrated partly upon the central keystone, where they neutralise each other, and partly (directed by the ribs) upon the four points of support. The architect has made himself the master of the Romanesque vault ; he has hung the inert mass on a resisting ossature, and guides a diffused force at his will. This system of inter- secting arches is an element of extreme flexibility, docile to the exigencies of the plan. The architect can expand or contract these two diagonal ribs at will, extendmg them for the bays of the nave, and curtailing them for the side aisles ; he can press them back on the one side, and open them out on the other to fo'low the ambulatory in its course round the choir ; he imposes liG. 91. — ia(;aije ih' the catmi-.di. I.AOV. th( (Photo. A'i!i7;ici)i.) form he requires and ' This is the French croisrc d'ogivcs. The word ogive, though odtn loosjly applied to any pointed arch, is derived from the Latin austere, to augment, in reference to this re-inforcement. 45 ART IN FRANCE FIG. 92. — FACADE OF THE CATHEDRAL OK CHARTRF.';. conducts the thrusts to the points he chooses. The problems he had to solve were these : to fix the points of support ; to suppress useless solids ; to divide and direct the thrusts ; to obtain equilibrium by opposing various forces ; the same principles which had transformed the vault were now to be applied to the wall which sustains it. As this wall under the new system only supported the intersecting arches, the intervening solids became useless ; it was obvious that wide voids might safely be pierced in them, and very soon there was little of the wall left but the framework of the windows. So much for the vertical pressure ; the architect had further to deal with the lateral thrusts. All that the Romanesque architect had opposed to these was the thickness of his walls and the buttresses embedded in their masonry. The Gothic builder, bolder and more logical, frankly applied projecting buttresses ; then he detached them from the wall, and from the summit of these abutments he threw arches which re-inforced the intersecting arches of the vault at their points of support ; these " flying buttresses " passed over the side aisles. Here again the constructor, understanding the principles of vaulted architecture better, or accepting its consequences more frankly than his Romanesque predecessors, obtained a greater effect with infinitely less labour. A slender oblique strut easily neutralises a lateral thrust which the thickest wall could hardly resist. The flying buttress is an element as flexible as the intersecting arch ; its strength is readily multiplied ; it was the flying buttress alone which made it possible to rear very lofty vaults ; a wall becomes weaker in propor- 46 FIG. 93. — NORTH I'OKCH OF THE CAIHEDHAI. OF CHARTRES. (Photo. Ncurdehi.') COMMUNAL OR GOTHIC ART I'IG. 94. — THE SAINTE-CHArKI LE. tion to Its elevation, but to rectify this it IS only necessary to give the flying buttress its point of support on a more distant abutment. The Gothic organ- ism was now complete ; here again the architect had disengaged vigorous and elastic members from the wall which had hitherto achieved solidity merely by mass ; he had liberated the active forces from all the dead weight which made Romanesque construction heavy. This logical evolution resulted in a sum of decorative forms, the Gothic style. Originally these forms indicated forces, the equilibrium of which ensured the stability of the building. In the interior, they were : the lofty pillars, which rose occasionally to a height of thirty, forty or fifty metres, and covered the nave with their expanding ribs ; on the exterior, the oblique descent of the flying buttresses upon the abutments, a lithic cascade which transmitted the thrust of the vault to the ground. Like the Greek temple, this style was the out- come of an ingenious adaptation of stone to the exigencies of mechanics. But whereas the ancients had estab- lished a constant relation between the height and the width of their buildings, Gothic architecture was too complex to be reduced to " orders." Its dimensions are varia- ble. In a Greek temple, we can deduce the dimensions of the whole structure from the base of a column ; the Gothic pillar rises to heights we cannot predict, for so many other elements contribute to the solidit}' of the building. Thus the Gothic architects, though they worked on common principles, yet gave an individual physiognomy to each cathedral. 47 05. -NON! 11 DOOR (IF NO 1 KK-UA.Ml I'AKIS, IIV JEAN DE CHELI-liS. ART IN FRANCE -FAfADE OF THE CATHEDRAL OF REIMb. {PJioto. Troinpctte. ) It was apparently in the Ile-de- France to the north of Paris that the first vaults on intersecting arches were built. As early as the first half of the twelfth century, in the valley of the Oise, and perhaps in Normandy, architects understood the advantages of the new process ; making its way far afield, it retained its original name of opus francigenum. This name it still bore when it was about to disappear, at the time when Philibert Delorme was working at its overthrow. The first Gothic essays, then, date from the period of the Romanesque in its fullest efflores- cence. While the people of the South were constructing massive walls to support their vaults, in the darker north it was necessary to provide large window spaces to light the nave ; and as this reduced the resisting power of the walls, architects contented themselves with timber roofs while awaiting the invention of some more in- genious contrivance. It is not easy to discover the first essays of the new style ; when architects had mastered their methods, they re- placed the works in which their first tentative efforts might have been traced, by more finished achievements. But very often a Gothic roof covers a building of Romanesque aspect ; it is fixed awkwardly upon the wall itself, instead of falling distinctively upon a formeret. The windows retain the round-headed form, and the buttresses are not yet disengaged from the wall to offer a more distant point of support, and to receive the thrust by the intermediary of flying buttresses. The new vault had certainly been known for many years, and 48 97. — NAVE OF THE CATHEDlwM. (IF CHARTRES. COMMUNAL OR GOTHIC ART |y| lm : -^ 4 98. -KAl; AUK Ol- Till-. CXTHEDKAL OK AMIKNS. architects had adopted it, at least tentatively, when a memorable structure arose to demonstrate its advantages. The famous abbey of St. Denis guarded the relics of three martyrs, Denis, Eleutherius, and Rusticus. King Dagobert, after amassing treasure in the building, desired to make it his last resting-place. Its Merovingian basilica was successively Roman- esque and Gothic, before the royal tombs began to make it a chroni- cle of French sculpture. In the twelfth century, the concourse of pilgrims to the shrine was so great that they could not all obtain access to the relics. Suger, when he was a monk, saw worshippers crushed to death by the crowds that were pressing in behind them ; a denser population, a more fervid faith, required a vaster sanctuary. When he became Abbot, Suger enlarged the crypt ; it is surrounded by an ambulatory with radiating chapels, and still covered by a groined vault resting on enor- mous pillars (Fig. 84). Above this solid Romanesque crypt he built a Gothic choir ; here slender columns support the intersecting arches of the vault. In this case, the architect is no longer tentative ; he knows that he may venture ; the inert masses of the masonry become slighter and more nervous ; a less massive support sustains a higher and wider wall (Fig. 87). This choir was solemnly conse- crated on June II, 1144, in the presence of the king and queen, the assembled nobles, ecclesiastics, strangers, and commons ^vho had flocked in from the neighbourhood. I he new style was not, of course, invented at St. Denis. But this much frequented abLey 49 E FIG. 99. — NAVE OK THF. CATHEDHAL OF AMIENS. ART IN FRANCE FIG. loO. — '1HI-; 'HcjUSE 111- IHli MUSICIANS," AT REIMS. {Phofo. V. Co7irk«x.) certainly accelerated the transformation of architecture. In a few years, builders set to work eagerly in most of the large towns north of the Loire ; the Romanesque monuments were dis- mantled, and their stones were set into Gothic pillars and buttresses ; some few porches and towers specially dear to the faithful alone survived, in- corporated in the new cathedral. Notre Dame in Paris, begun in 1 1 63, and almost completed during the reign of Philip Augustus, did not receive the porches of its transepts until 1260, a century after its founda- tion. The disposition of this church is marked throughout by extreme clarity. Two side aisles give width to the build- ing, and extend round the choir in a double ambulatory. After the year 1 290 the body of the church was further enlarged by chapels which correspond in depth to the buttresses and occupy the spaces between them. The lower pillars are as sturdy as towers ; the tri- forium occupies the entire space between the supporting arches and the upper windows ; each com- partment of the ribbed vaulting is sexpartite, and covers two bays ; the points of support for the ribs of the vault are rather low. This primitive Gothic style still retains the robust aspect of Romanesque architecture ; the ascending lines are intersected by horizontal courses on which they rest ; each pier, to reach the summit, requires three storeys, three pauses, and three departures (Fig. 86). There is no cathedral in the world the pro- portions of which are more admirable, none which presents a finer appearance from various points of view. The apse, which rests 50 #i#l FIG. lOI. — Al'SE OF THE CATHEDRAL OF AMIENS. COMMUNAL OR GOTHIC ART l-r''.. I02.— Al'SE OK THE CATHEDKAI, (JI-' BEAUVAIS. upon very oblique flying buttresses, springing boldly from distant points of support, has often been com- pared to a galley propelled by long oars ; the lateral outline is the regular development of a noble building with a prolonged vertebra, proudly rearing aloft the mighty towers of its faqade (Fig. 90). it IS this faqade more especially which gives its distinctive character to Notre Dame. It repeats in greater perfection the H form of the Romanesque church of the Trinite at Caen. Its two wide towers, closely attached to the central body, exactly cover the side aisles and the flying buttresses ; the two masses, rising to an equal height, end frankly, evoking no regret for the spires which were never added ; the Gallery of the Kings and the open gallery of the third storey cut through the sturdy buttresses, dividing the square front into equal quadri- laterals ; they enframe the porches, the side windows and the central rose window, deeply embrasured in the thick wall (Fig. 88). This fa(;ade was conceived as a whole by a constructor skilful in designing with broad masses and frank angles, and the ornamental accessories of the later style were applied to Its robust nudity. Com- pared with this vigorous and well- pro portioned architecture, the north and south porches by Jean de Chelles are a charming decora- tion, but somewhat flat and fragile. Notre Dame has profited by the historical importance of Pans. It remains the finished type of that Gothic style, the varieties of which were so numerous. Outside the He de France other 51 E 2 103. — CHUIK OK THE C.VTHEDKAL OF IlEAUVAIS. ART IN FRANCE i'k;. 104. -ArSE OF THE CAIHKUKAL OF liOUKC.F.S. {Photo. Neiirdcin.) cathedrals may boast a richer facade, a more graceful nave, bolder towers, and more luxuriant sculpture ; but not one shows a more limpid coherence of struc- ture. Notre Dame has become as it were a classic work. Amidst the ex- uberance of Gothic fancy, the wise and exemplary model IS the monument which Maurice de Sully reared in the Cite, m the heart of Paris and of the kingdom of France. The Cathedral of Laon is the sister of Notre Dame, and almost of the same age. The two facades show a family likeness ; but Laon is even more grave of aspect. Its deeply recessed windows and rose-window, placed with a certain irregularity in the midst of sym- metry, give it a violent and uneasy physiognomy ; from the upper part of the towers, which arise like alert sentinels, project the heads of oxen (Fig. 91). On the abrupt eminence of Laon, this church affects the haughty robustness of a stronghold, whereas the Parisian cathedral is peacefully extended on its island. The naves are also similar in style ; but that of Laon, instead of ter- minating with a semi- circular apse, IS now bounded by a straight wall. This square plan, replacing the traditional rounded apse adopted in the first Christian basilicas, suggests a secular hall. The Gothic church of Soissons, on the other hand, retains the circular form in the north transept as a heritage from the Romanesque epoch. Notre Dame at Chartres, with its great north and south porches, was completed in 1 260, and consecrated in the presence of St. Louis 52 -THE FIVE I'OKCHES OF THE CATHEDKAL OF BOURGES. (Photo. Neurdein.) COMMUNAL OR GOTHIC ART lOO. — CIIUUCH OK NOl'KrC-DAMK, DIJDN. (Photo. Nctirdcin.) and the royal family. The central body of the building dates from a time when the architect remained prudent in spite of his boldness ; the courses are solid, the height is prodigious, but the effort by which it is supported is formidable. The lofty vault makes the nave, which re- tains Romanesque proportions in its plan, seem short. The huge interior IS dark m spite of the immense win- dows, for the light filters through the jewelled mosaic of stained glass (Fig. 97). The wide nave is crowned by a very open vault ; to support It it has been necessary to thicken the buttresses, multiply the flying buttresses and link them to- gether by arcades. On the exterior these stone struts descend in over- whelming cataracts ; no effort has been made to mask their heaviness ; this conflict of forces, which ensures the solidity of Gothic buildings, shows a sort of violence here. The west front was not a homogeneous conception ; it began as a Romanesque design, with its three doors pressed together be- tween Its two towers ; but an immense rose window was inserted to decorate this faqade which soars upward with the nave it closes (Fig. 92). The circular forms of Romanesque decoration are found everywhere ; its round-headed arcading ap- pears in the rose window of the west front and in the flying buttresses. One of the towers is the boldest essay of the Romanesque style ; it rises massive and solid, flanked by sturdy buttresses, and terminates in a belfry ; the superposed storeys thus reach the level of the roof, and from thence, suddenly, an octagonal pyramid springs 53 107. — APSK ()|- Till-; CAIIIEDUAI. or I.Ii MANS. ART IN FRANCE loS. — ,MONT-SAINT-.MICHEL (sillTH SIUE). {Photo. Nciirckiii.) heavenward to a height of 100 metres. The second spire, built in the sixteenth century, rises higher only by means of starting from a higher level. These piles of stones dominate La Beauce, and on the vast plain which so many pilgrims once traversed, carting materials towards the famous sanctuary, they seem to proclaim the pro- tecting presence of Our Lady. The cathedral of Bourges shows a more massive silhouette upon the plains of Berry, for the towers seem to have lacked power to rise to any height. The body of the church is not interrupted by a transept ; on the fagade the architects juxtaposed five doors corresponding to the aisles, and offering an immense field to the sculptor ; the decoration is on so vast a scale that it was not possible to continue it above (Fig. 105). In the lateral porches the architects have embedded some precious Roman- esque fragments ; like Chartres and Le Mans, Bourges shelters some admirable archaic sculptures. At Le Mans, the choir is an un- usually important feature (Fig. 107). It IS surrounded by double aisles, and thirteen chapels, which are almost as large as churches, radiate from these. The abutments are adapted to the complexity of the aisles ; each of the flying buttresses bifurcates and finds points of support on two buttresses, between which is a window giving a direct light to the ambulatory. Thus in the interior the forest of pillars and ribs, and on the exterior that of the buttresses and flying buttresses, becomes more and more dense and daring. 54 FIG. log. — C.V1HEDR.\L OF ROUEN. COMMUNAL OR GOTHIC ART FIG. no. — SALLE DES IIUTES IN' THE .M(.).\ASTEKY OF MONT-S.MNT-MICHEL. Notre Dame at Reims, which was fimshed at the end of the thir- teenth century, was prolonged by the addition of three bays in the following century. The nave was made wide enough to contain the crowd on coronation days. The general outline of the faqade re- calls that of Notre Dame ; it has the same unity of plan, the same arrangement of windows and gal- leries. But the work, reconstructed at the end of the thirteenth century, dates from a time when the style had become much more florid ; the horizontal lines disappear under a network of ornament. A soar- ing tendency common to the whole facade urges the lines upwards, and resolves every projection into spires, gables, and pinnacles. The wall itself is reduced to the small columns of the windows ; the towers are mere skeletons without bodies, through which the eye passes, and the tympana of the west porches, instead of a full bas- relief, enframe stained glass. This chiselled, hollowed, and much- decorated fa<;ade shelters an in- numerable population of figures (Fig. 96). Its animation, its festival aspect, is earned on to the sides of the building ; the pinnacled buttresses are recessed to shelter statues. The roof is surrounded by a graceful gallery, a diadem for the church in which kings were crowned. Throughout, Reims conceals the ele- ments of strength beneath a wealth of decoration. Stone foliage quivers on the capitals ; the scene seems duly set for the pageants of monarchy. Notre Dame at Amiens, built by Robert de Luzarches, was not finished till 1 269. No nave in existence reveals an architect surer 55 FIG. III. — FACADE OF THE CA llIliDKAI. OF ROUEN, BETWEEN' A ROM.\NESQUE TOWER AND Tinc " nUTTEK TOWER." (End of tlie XVth centui-y.) ART IN FRANCE i-A(,:AI)E OF THE CATHEDRAL 01<" COUTANCES. of his means, or more skilful in the calculation of his audacities. Here there is nothing to suggest the weight of the building ; the walls are cut away and the pillars which support the vault are elongated to rise ; they are sub- divided into clustered shafts, and the shaft which corresponds to the arc-doubleau (transverse arch) of the vault springs without interruption, with a single bound, as it were, to the keystone. The very lofty side- aisles seem to enlarge the nave immeasurably ; between them, over the central aisle, the enormous mass of the vault seems etherealised by distance, like some airy covering, or like a sail stretched over the ribs of the vault, and upheld by a continu- ous wind from below. In this luminous nave with its dilated walls, the soul is exalted and amplified. To sustain the immense mass it was necessary to reinforce it with huge buttresses which rise boldly from the ground. But in the faqade, the soaring impulse seems to have failed. The decoration of the three porches gives a certain air of heaviness ; the towers barely rise to the level of the roof ; materials for a further ascent were lack- ing ; the monster had not strength enough to raise his head. The people of Beauvais determined to raise a church to even dizzier heights ; in 1272, they had finished their choir ; it fell in, and the church was never finished. The restored choir still awaits its nave. It is so lofty that It was found necessary to double the supporting pillars in order to sustain it. And yet the architect had accumulated exterior 56 VIC,. 113. — SAI.I.E DES CHEVALIERS IN Till-: .MONASTERY OF MONT-SAINT- .MICHEL. COMMUNAL OR GOTHIC ART l-IG. I 14. -Al'SE OF TUB CATHEDRAL CI- IIAYKUX. {I'hoto. Ni'unftin.) abutments ; on the outside, the apse looks a frail creation, lost among the multitude of long arms which the gigantic buttresses throw around it (Figs. 102, 103). These daring architects recognised that a stone building IS not an abstract structure ; in proportion as the organism be- comes more complex, its equi- librium depends on a greater number of elements ; the most exact calculations are liable to be upset by defects in the material. An adventurous spirit was in- herent in Gothic architecture ; many towns followed the exam- ple set by Beauvais ; amazing successes occasionally gave rise to the belief that the architect had made a compact with the devil, and had bartered his soul in order to rear a vault or raise a spire. Normandy owns various cathedrals in which a lantern-tower rises boldly at the crossing of the transepts ; it is to this feature that the Norman churches owe their originality of silhouette ; this tower dominates the building with its mass and its crowning spire. In the interior, the vault seems to have opened to admit the daylight. These beautiful Norman churches are very numerous ; at Rouen there are the cathedral and Saint Ouen : the cathedral has a fae^ade ill- attached to two towers set over-far apart, an old Romanesque tower, and the so-called Tour du Beurrc (Butter Tower), a structure somewhat soft and languid in form, overlaid with the accessory ornament of flam- boyant Gothic ; on the stone of the porch, elaborately cut by the 57 KIG. 115. — CDIKT (II' THE CI.OISIKK' OV MONl- SAINT-MICHEI.. {Photo. N.inifchi.) ART IN FRANCE FIG. Il6. — CATHEDRAI, OF QUIMHER. (Photo. Neurdein.) architect and minutely chiselled by the sculptor, time is now working in his turn (Fig. 111). The great nave of Saint Ouen appears even vaster than it is as a result of Its majestic unity, and the somewhat frigid elegance approved among the architects of the four- teenth century. At Coutances (Fig. 1 1 2) the facade has the soaring pride of outline that characterises St. Etienne at Caen ; the two spires, and the lantern-tower which recurs at Bayeux and at St. Lo, are models of plain, nervous, and slender masonry. In its naves, as In its towers and spires, Norman architecture reveals the characteristic haughtiness it had found so hard to reconcile with the exigencies of Romanesque masonry. On the narrow summit of Mont Saint Michel, the architect built and burrowed ; buttresses resting on the flanks of the rock support a paradoxical building which continues the pyramidal form of the mount, a sanctuary famous for its pilgrims, a solid fortress for the kings of France ; an abbey rich in architectonic refinements crowns this peak, encircled by ramparts against which the sea dashes (Fig. 108). Pointed architecture had penetrated to the extreme point of Brittany ; it per- sisted for a long time afterwards in this region ; everywhere else Gothic art was already making way for a new style, while the people of the peninsula were still busy carving the ornament of their graceful pierced belfries (Fig. 116). The Gothic style also spread southwards ; it crossed the Loire, but it had to compound with local custom ; it was only in the 58 117. — CHAKNEL HOUSE, CHATEAULIN. COMMUNAL OR GOTHIC ART -CATHEDRAL OF ALBI. north of France that it expanded, free of all pressure from the past. While adopting the new principles, each province safeguarded its own tradition as far as possible. The Normans, when they passed from Romanesque to Gothic, retained their lantern- towers ; in Poitou and in Anjou, the architects pre- served their customary- high side-aisles, a pecu- liarity which gives the body of these churches in the interior the appearance of a large hypostyle hall. The intersecting diagonal ribs are combined with the cupolas dear to the architects of the South West ; hence these domical vaults which characterise the Plan- tagenet style. The Cathedral of Poitiers, although it is a Gothic building, is manifestly akin to Notre- Dame-la-Grande, the old Romanesque sanctuary ; the architect has contrived to dispense with flying but- tresses ; he has retained a predilection for the semi-circular arch in the design of his windows, and he makes frequent use of small columns in his decoration. Throughout this region we find that the Gothic did not always supersede the Romanesque style ; it merely induced greater slenderness and loftiness. Limoges, Cler- mont-Ferrand, Rodez and Narbonne possess great churches of the thirteenth century, imitated more or less from those of the North. In proportion as we advance to the South, we shall find the French style undergoing modifications more and more considerable. There are no flying buttresses on the exterior, no side aisles in the interior ; the Gothic building has 59 I-IG. 119. -CHLKCH OF SAINI-.NAZAIKE AT CAKC.^SSONNE. {Photo. Neitrdein.) ART IN FRANCE retained all the massive majes- ty of Languedocian Roman- esque. MoissacToulouse, and Albi are wide single-aisled buildings ; strong buttresses were necessary to support the very open vault ; mstead of detaching them from the ex- terior walls, the architect has made them project strongly on the inside, so strongly that they serve as partitions for the lateral chapels. The principle of Gothic construction was not accepted with all its conse- quences. Sainte Cecile at Albi, compact and sturdy, rests upon its promontory, more like a defiant fortress than a tutelary cathedral ; be- tween the two towers of the facade there was place for a guard-room ; an embattled parapet runs round the roof ; the towers are those of a stronghold, the windows like loopholes (Fig. 118). In the fourteenth century, Carcassonne, finally reunited to the Crown, also wished to have a cathedral " in the French manner ; " but here again the customs of the South transformed the style of the North ; the buttresses are not detached from the wall to support flying but- tresses, and the lofty roof is replaced by a flat cover- ing(Fig. 119). The Gothic cathedral is a true product of the Ile-de-France. It har- monises perfectly with the skies under which it was born, whether its lofty FIG. I20. — KING AND QUEEN, CENTRAL PORCH OF WEST FRONT OF THE CATHE- DRAL OF CHARTRES. FIG. 121. — FK;URE of A QUEEN, IN THE CHURCH OF S.\INT-DENIS. (From Corbeil.) FIG. 122. — CHRIST IN GLORV. TYMTAXUM OF 'i HE WEST PORCH OF THE CATHEDRAL OF CHARTRES. 60 COMMUNAL OR GOTHIC ART FI<;. 123. — VIRGIN l)F THE AXXUNCIATION. RH.HT TVMl'ANUM, WEST FRONT OK Tlir, CATHKHKAI. OI" CMARTKKS. {J'hofo. Mieuseiiicii/.) mass IS veiled in mists, or the sun brings out the florescence of the grey stone on the fac^ade washed by winter rains which it turns to the West. It is also an urban product, the communal monument par excellence ; it enshrined the soul of the city ; it was planted in the midst of houses which crouched beneath its flying buttresses ; men did not isolate it upon a summit or an empty space ; they loved to circulate round it, in the little streets that wound about its feet ; above the gables of the wooden houses they saw its fasces of shafts soaring skywards, and its whole silhouette terminating in innumerable points. It is the towers and spires, dominating the forest of roofs, which give each city its special character when one sees it from afar, encircled by its ramparts. Even to the present day, these cathedrals have remained the typical buildings of the French towns ; the people of the communes left in them not only evidences of a heroic faith, but features which have fixed the physiognomy of cities for all time ; these old stones attract and retain pilgrims more fervent than ever. But we must go deeper to under- stand the profound significance of this architecture. That of the Greeks was governed by the external decora- tion. The populace never entered the temple. It challenged admiration from the summit of its Acropolis, clearly detached from its base, its pure outline relieved against the deep sky. All Christians enter the cathedral, and it was in order to receive the whole city that naves were enlarged and vaults heightened ; it was to il- luminate Its congregations with celestial visions that voids \\ere made in the 1 ]<;. 124. line \ isi lA rici.N. RH;HT TVMI'ANIM, WKST KKONT OK IIIK CATllKDKAI. OF CIIARTKICS. (/'//(>/(). t^liillsCIIICIlt. ) 61 ART IN FRANCE riG. 125. — I,EFT PORCH OF THE WEST FRONT OF NOTRE-DA.ME, PARIS. walls, and filled in with immense windows of stamed glass. It is also in the interior that we feel the pres- ence of the exalted soul which raised and organised this mass of stones ; the prodigious height of the vault is not meaningless ; all these aspiring lines invite the eye to look up and seek God. On festivals, the voices of children and the thunder of the organ fill the empty space, carrying up the orisons of a whole population in a common sursum corda. When the chants are hushed, and the church is deserted, it preserves its sentimental power ; the slightest sound, the closing of a gate, a key turning in the lock, the footfall of a passer-by, echoes through the im- mense space ; in the solemn silence the solitary soul also takes on an unaccustomed sonority, and vibrates in unison with this atmos- phere in which the mystery of the divine seems to brood. After the building of this cathe- dral, where the whole city could find place on festivals, the problem of decoration presented itself. It is not like the Greek temple, a simple building, almost invariable in its configuration. Its very com- plete organism admits of innumer- able complements ; architects could always add towers, spires, and even chapels ; in succeeding cen- turies they could apply a wealth of ornament to the somewhat bare fa|.- 1 m-. CA1HE1}RAI, OF CHARIRES. ART IN FRANCE fk;. 129. — ruoi'HETS, kings, resur- rection OF THE VIRGIN AND HER CORONATION. WEST FRONT OF NtlTRE-DAME, I'ARIS. was supple enough to follow the design in its contours. The motives form little medallions superposed in such a manner as to decorate the window. An iron framework ensured the solidity of the whole. At first this consisted of rigid metal bars which cut across the mosaic ; but at Saint Denis and at Chartres we already find the brutality of this re-inforcement yielding to the exigencies of decoration ; the frame-work is made to surround and isolate the medallions, and the general arrangement of the glass gains greatly in clarity. The figures of stained glass windows typify a phase of mediaeval design, that of the Romano- Byzantine paintings and of the Bene- dictine miniatures ; this drawing is harsh and stringy in character, defining the figures with a hard outline, and swathing them in close draperies with twisted folds. The lead frame- work emphasises the hardness of the features. But this hardness is not gratuitous ; it prevents the forms from dissolving in the radiance of this luminous painting. The little humble figures, with their conventional attitudes, preserve their well defined personality among the blues, reds, and golds, which gleam like sky, and fire, and sun. 64 beginning of the thirteenth century, glass-painting and sculpture, like architecture, were primarily French arts. The monk Theophilus, in his treatise on the arts, attributes a peculiar skill to the French glass- painters. The earliest basilicas were no doubt lighted through coloured glass. But it was not until the Romanesque period that this painting began to represent living figures. A coloured window was then a transparent mosaic, in which pieces of glass, stained and cut, were held together by a tracery of lead ; the leading FIG. 130. — FIGURE IN THE NORTH TORCH OF THE CATHEDRAL OF CHARTiSES. COMMUNAL OR GOTHIC ART FIG. 131. — THE RESLRRECTION OK THE VIRGIN. LEFT TORCH OF THE WEST FRONT OF .\OTRE-D.\.ME, I'ARIS. In the course of the fourteenth century painted glass became less decorative and more and more realistic in character. The forms show greater richness and variety, and the figures, less harshly drawn, are clothed in more supple draperies. The frank colours of the early glass are replaced by broken tints ; colours more neutral, and even monochrome, make their appearance. As early as the thirteenth century the glass painters had modified, to some extent, the rich effects of the first stained glass windows. At the close of the Middle Ages glass-painting sacrificed splendour to an impossible correct- ness ; in the effort to imitate the effects of realistic painting, it lost not only its original beauty, but its raison d'etre ; after this, it was belter to fill the windows with colourless glass, and so to illuminate real pictures. It was at the beginning of the thirteenth century that the art of glass-painting had reached its highest perfection in the workshops of St. Denis, where Suger had the glass for the abbey church made, in those of Chartres, where the glass for the innumerable windows of the cathedral and of other churches in the \vest was produced ; and finally, in those of Pans, the town in which all the industries of Gothic art tended to centralise. The stained glass of this period produced an effect dazzling yet soft, which the illuminators attempted to transpose into their miniatures ; a few seconds spent in contemplating the great figures of the high windows, or the little pictures of the 'ow 65 F FIG. 132. — SAINT THEODORE. SOUTH TORCH OF I HE CATHEDRAI. OF CHARTRES. ART IN FRANCE FIG. 133. — NATIVITY. FRAG:MENT OF THE DESTROYED ROOD-SCREEN OF THE CATHEDRAL OF CHARTRES. chapels, sufficed to suggest to them celestial beatitude. The Sainte- Chapelle of St. Louis is like a crystallisation of precious stones ; Gothic windows enabled the pale light of the north to realise marvellous visions. Gothic architecture was born when builders freed themselves from traditional forms and frankly ac- cepted those indicated by mechanics; a similar emancipation took place in sculpture. The monks of the twelfth century had produced only an incom- plete statuary ; all they did was to give a certain degree of relief to the forms of the Benedictine paintings. Even when stirred by violent emotion, these figures remained rigid ; they suffer from an over-long subservience to the Byzantine convention, and are awkwardly crushed down on a flat surface. A different art, a real sculpture, healthy, and normal, so to say, began to develop in the middle of the twelfth century. While the composite sculpture of Burgundy and Languedoc was producing agitated and uneasy forms, this youth- ful art was setting up simple figures in stiff atti- tudes ; before achieving life and ease, sculpture, like antique statuary, had to go through the hieratic phase, the phase of fron- tality. But these quies- cent figures enjoy complete organisms ; they have solid bodies, detached from the mass. It is not possible to follow from work to work 1 ic j j the process which gradually endowed the stone with life ; dates and provinces cannot be determined with precision ; this resurrection of 66 I UJ. 134. -APOSTLES. CENTRAL I'ORCH OF THE CATHEDRAL OF AMIKNS. COMMUNAL OR GOTHIC ART 111.. 135. - AlilM LHS. J •; MI'AM M OK Till! Sliurn I'OKCH OK 'lllli CA rin:r)K-.\i. of ami1':n-;. born Christians and sculpture must be assigned to about the middle of the twelfth cen- tury, and to an indeterminate region embracing Bourges, Chartres, and Saint Denis. When the carvers of images felt the charm of living forms, the ancient prejudice against statuary had to give way ; Christianity tolerated a kind of modified idolatry, and thus it was given to this religion to find again what Greek paganism had first dis- covered eighteen hundred centuries earlier. The Gothic artists were right not to fear these novel forms, for whereas those of the Romanesque monasteries were related to antique art, of which they were often mere dis- figurements, the statues of Chartres have no remote heredity ; they were autochthonous. This initial period produced more than one remarkable work. At Bourges and at Le Mans, certain long, rigid figures are sheltered in the back of the Gothic building. There were some at Saint Denis ; two statues at Corbeil (Fig. 121) also survive from those years in which the figures began to detach themselves from the inert mass, while in Provence, at Saint Trophime at Aries, and also at Saint Gilles. the Apos- tles were still imbedded in the Romanesque fac^ade. But we must go to Chartres to behold the first florescence of living statuary. A wondrous stone population emerges from its walls and pillars ; they are, certainly, decora- tive statues, but they have an independent existence, and are no longer mere architectural ornaments. Here we may study the sculpture of a whole cen- tury and more ; some very early statues seem to be hardly more than slightly convex tombstones. Others, dating from the middle 67 F 2 Kn;. 136.- -Al'OSIl.lCS. CKM'UAI. I'OKCH OK TIIK. CAfllKDNAI. OK AMIIiNS. ART IN FRANCE FIG. 137. — MARCH AND APRIL, WEST FRONT OF THE CATHEDRAL OF AMIENS. of the thirteenth century, have supple bodies and learnedly treated forms. The statues of the west front date from the middle of the twelfth century. They are set agamst strongly projectmg Roman- esque pillars, and do not adhere to the building (Fig. 120). Thenceforward, in other porches, architecture had to reckon with large sculptured figures ; pillars disappear, to make place for statues ; they look as if they were drawing themselves in to take shelter between the pedestal on which they stand and the canopy which overhangs them, and seem to move more freely than the earlier figures against pillars (Figs. 134 to 136). In the west front of Chartres, the porches, with the projecting pillars of their embrasures, were constructed in the Romanesque style of the west, by an architect who had provided for sculpture only on the tympanum and archivolts. These first figures of Gothic statuary are the precocious masterpieces of an art as yet far from mature. The youthful freshness of this sculpture is shown in the calm and rigid dignity, akin to Greek archaism, to which it returns after the agitated style of the Romanesque period. Here, again, we have the hieratic immobility of the body, the impassible irony of expression found in the /Egmetan marbles and those of the Parthenon. The artist is no longer inspired, as was the Romanesque sculptor, by a flat, painted image, antiquated and clumsy, falsified by centuries of conven- tionalisation ; like the earliest Greek idols, the first Gothic statues emerged from a stone post. They seemed to be still imprisoned in it, but half disengaged, like flowers bursting from the bud, their petals still folded. In this new conquest of the aspects of life, sculpture once more went through a period of sharp and angular forms ; like the slender Korai of the first Parthenon, the long figures at Chartres 68 FIG. 138. — FRENCH IVORY KNOWN AS THE " VIRGIN OF THE SAINTE- CHAPELLE," BEGINNING OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. COMMUNAL OR GOTHIC ART FIG. 139. — JESUS Ari'EARING TO THE HOLY WOME.V. JESUS AND THE MAGDAI.F.N. HIGH RELIEFS ON THIC CHOIK SCREEN AI' NOTRE-DAME, I'ARIS. were carved by an indus- trious chisel which atones for the inexactitude of the planes by the care with which it defines the acces- sories of the costumes and the details of the faces. The elaborately rendered draperies are not cast about very robust bodies ; shoulders are imperceptible, the arms are attached to the trunk ; on the long slim bodies are perched delicate heads of bearded men, or women with long braided hair. The faces, with their prominent eyes and lips compressed in an austere smile, do not belong to our world ; these holy beings are rapt in contemplation of radiant visions ; a juvenile art has given them but an incomplete life ; yet the workmanship is subtle and incisive ; these figures have a tense and nervous quality which gives them an indefinable charm. If we now walk round the cathedral, and study the innumerable figures of Prophets, Apostles, and Martyrs in the lateral porches at Chartres, we shall feel, even if we make no attempt at an imposssible chronological classi- fication, as if we were looking on at the slow labour which awoke this world of stone, and moulded the inert matter into the attitudes of life. The Apostles preside over the central south porch, the Prophets, still vigorous and agitated, over that of the north. This elaborate art, which can also be brutal upon occasion, is admirable in its evocation of a strange and antiquated world. In the neighbouring door- ways the miracle is completed, and we see the stone bend and soften and curve to imitate moving bodies and floating draperies. The faces are modelled in larger planes, and forms are more frankly defined ; the beard no longer adheres to the breast, the neck is longer, enabling the head to turn upon it, the shoulders are broader, the arms begin to move. The 69 FIG. 140. — CHRIST m.ESSIN<;, KNOWN .•\S the " iieau dieu d'amiens." west front ok the cathedral OF .\MIENS. ART IN FRANCE >,. FIG. 141. — THE MEETING OF AHKAHAM AND MELCHIZEDECH. INNER WALL OF THE FA^ADF, OF THE CATHEDRAL OF REIMS. figure is no longer fixed rigidly against a pillar, the feet cramped upon an inclined plane ; it is detached and independent, and plants its feet firmly upon the ground to support its weight. Then one leg only is rigid, and the other is bent carelessly ; the axis of the body is inflected, one hip is raised ; the lines of neck and shoulders become mobile ; the whole figure, with its supple limbs, produces a harmonious equilibrmm. And now these figures begin to combme, and to enact some quiet drama together, the Annunciation or the Visitation : the Virgin, St. Anne, the angel Gabriel, make up tranquil groups animated by a com- m o n sentiment. A century after the pillar- statues, the swaddled terms of the west front, sculptors were setting up graceful and vigorous figures, vital organisms which, even in repose, suggest their latent energies. They had become capable of carrying their imitation of human types still further, of executing portraits, reproducing costumes, and even attempting the play of physiognomy ; the art of statuary had recovered all its powers. Christian iconography, when it adopted this form of art, was com- pletely transformed by it. All the remote figures of the Gospel and of the Old Testament presented them- selves to the eyes of the faithful, not with that strangeness of aspect which kept the Romanesque figures in a fantastic, supernatural world, but with faces and bodies like those of living beings. The series of the Old Testament Prophets had to be retained; they appear in the north porch of Chartres, and are still beings outside the bounds of nature ; an art hampered by larchaic stiffness had fixed 70 fk;. 142. — THE "gilded virgin. SOUTH DOOR OF THE CATHEDRAL OF AMIENS. COMMUNAL OR GOTHIC ART their violent personalities ; they are the turbulent and furious vision- aries of the Bible, who, prior to the dawn of the serene radiance of the Gospel, sometimes illuminated their tempest of invective by lightning flashes of truth. Throughout the Middle Ages they re- tained their formidable aspect ; we shall find these wild beasts later, at the end of the fourteenth century, round the well of Moses at Dijon, bowed down by the terror of their terrible predictions. The principal figures of the Gospel change their appearance. Christ detaches Himself from the tympanum on which the Romanesque _^^ ^^ artists had carved His 1 ^ W^jBm^^ ^ BS^S^ BiM^ figure in relief, seated ' -S^tSR^Ki*ilP^^^Jwi ' II ^ amidst the Elders of the Apocalypse or the sym- bols of the Evangelists (Fig. 122). This attitude He now retains only in the Last Judgment, over which He presides on the west fronts of our cathe- drals. But later He is to be found standing alone, upon the central pier of certain doorways, instinct with an in- dividuality, a personal significance which owes nothing to figures surrounding Him, or a scene in which He is taking part. His attitude has become calmer. His face nobler ; in one hand He holds the Word of Truth, and with the other He makes the sign of benediction. To this tranquil figure the sculptors of the thir- teenth century gave in- comparable majesty. The " Beau Dieu" of Amiens, draped in an ample, flow- ing toga, lifts a face so gentle that a soft light seems to shine from it ; revelation could not be l-IG. 143.- -I'LANT OUNAMENT OK THE CATHEURAI. OF KEIMS. ^^^^^^H|W^^:^Kw^ :'■ >- -j^"' _, '■ 1 ... --P^^/i ^'M lUn^U^B ' 1 IK;. 144. — SAINT-RI%MI CONDL'CTEU UV ANGELS, WEST FKONT (IE THE CATHEDRAL OF KELMS. {Photo. Ncnrdein.) 71 ART IN FRANCE more impressively announced (Fig. 140). In the thirteenth century a serene splendour enfolds the teaching Christ ; at the end of the Middle Ages He was replaced by the suffer- ing Saviour. But the Virgin was more especially dear to the artists of the thirteenth century ; her figure dominates the whole of Gothic art. The majority of the great cathedrals were dedi- cated to her, and already an im- posing chapel in the choir was set apart for her. The part she plays in the Gospels is modest enough ; but popular imagination supplemented it ; legend blossomed around her, and provided her with a copious biography. In the twelfth century the Virgin was represented seated, and supporting the Infant God upon her knee " throne of Solomon. I-IG. 145. — FIGUKE ON THE CENTRAL PORCH OF THE WEST KKONT OF THE CATHEDRAL OF REIMS. (^Photo. Micusciiicnt.) FIG. 146. — THE QUEEN OF SHEIIA. WEST PORCH OF THE CATHEDRAL OF REIMS. {Phoio. I\IicnSC)»C l'.t.) she was the Jesus does not look at her ; He is already preaching or blessing. It is thus she was represented on the tympana of the Romanesque churches, thus she was carved in stone, in ivory, in metal and in wood. In the Gothic cathedrals one entrance was always dedicated to her. She stands carry- ing the Infant Jesus on her left arm, her hip slightly projecting, her right leg carelessly bent, m such a manner as to throw her robe into large oblique folds. Her head is still covered with a corner of her mantle, in the traditional Eastern fashion ; but a large royal crown discounts the severity of this nun-like Byzantine head-dress. Her features show no trace of the impassible stolidity of the Romanesque Virgins ; her head is inclined towards the Child, with half- 72 COMMUNAL OR GOTHIC ART FIG. 147. — SAINT-JOSF.FH, CENTRAI PORCH OF THE WEST FRONT OF THE CATHEDRAL OF REIMS. closed eyes and smiling lips. The supple figure, the somewhat sinuous robe, the playful hands, the tender look the Virgin bends upon the little Jesus, all these amenities have evolved a new figure, dearer than all others to Gothic art. It was the French thirteenth century which invented this gracious queen, delicate, gay, and smiling, of which the "gilded Virgin" at Amiens is the finished monumental type, a type that was repeated for centuries in ivory and in wood (Figs. 138,142). The little Virgins carved in ivory accentuate this dainty grace ; the features of the plump faces are small and fine, the cheeks rounded, the forehead prominent, the neck well covered ; but the nose is pointed, the lips and eyes compressed m a keen little smile. The sculptors of the thirteenth century were always happily inspired by the legend of the Virgin. At Amiens and at Reims, the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Presentation in the Temple, lend them- selves to many calm, tender, and discreet scenes. Attitudes and emotion are un- necessary, the episode is always rendered with a gentle charm. The Death and the Resurrection of the Virgin have furnished subjects for the greatest master- piece of Gothic statuary, in the north doorway of the west front of Notre Dame m Paris (Figs. 129, 131). This tympanum, in three stages, is in a style perfectly different from the Romanesque manner, with figures in high relief, com- pletely detached from the background ; but these figures, which are like so many independent statues, compose closely re- lated groups, interwoven with a harmony of lines rare in the Middle Ages. Here again the sculptor was inspired by the 73 Fu;. 148. — fk;ure oi' one of IHE SAVEIJ in the LAST JL'DCi- MENT OF THE CATHEUKAL OF r.OURl'.ES. {Photo. Micusciitcnt.) ART IN FRANCE 1-I(J. 149. — VIKGIX Ol- THE VISITATION. CENTRAL DOOR OF THE WEST FRONT OF THE CATHEDRAL OF REIMS. Apocryphal Gospels. The Virgin has just died ; Jesus has come down from Heaven, and the AposUes, scattered throughout the world after His death, have gathered together for the last time round her bed. Their heads, to which a gentle calm common to all gives a certain family likeness, form a circle round the expected miracle. Jesus gives the signal of Resurrection, and two angels rever- ently uplift the Virgin's corpse. Above, in the top of the tympanum, the glorification of Our Lady is completed. She is seated to the right of her Son ; humble and radiant, she bends towards him with folded hands, while an angel places the crown of glory on her head. Form and sentiment were never more happily harmonised. French statuary of the thirteenth century is greatly in advance of the other plastic arts. Not till two centuries later shall we find such noble grace and atti- tudes so elegant and virginal rendered by paint- ing ; Fra Angelico was the first to evoke visions so purely beautiful. The sculptors were able to give life to the twelve Apostles who accompany Jesus or the Virgin ; but it was difficult to bestow a definite character on each of the twelve. The most animated series of Apostles bequeathed to us by mediaeval art is to be found in the south porch of Amiens Cathedral. Above the " gilded Virgin " twelve vivacious little figures, well proportioned, their mild heads enframed in curling hair and beards, converse in couples, bending forward, leaning back, emphasising their speech with an amusing variety of gesture (Fig. 1 35). The alert grace of the attitudes and the diversity of the draperies com- pensate for the somewhat monoton- ous vagueness of the types. These Apostles at Amiens and those in the FIG. 150. — SOUTH I'ORCH OF THE CATHF.DRAL OF ROUEN, KNOWN AS THE " roRTAlL DE LA CALENDE. 74 COMMUNAL OR GOTHIC ART FH,. 151. — Al'OMLI-; BEARIXG THE CROSS OF DEDICATION, SAINTE- CHAPELLli. tympanum of the Virgin at Notre Dame in Pans show that French sculpture of the thir- teenth century might, hke Greek sculpture of the fifth century before our era, have created a canon m certam similar types and identical proportions. But mediaeval sculpture was practised on too vast a territory, and in work- shops too remote from each other ; it had also too complex a programme to have enabled it to perfect a single type of beauty. Christianity had gained its profound hold on the minds of men by permitting the popular imagination to collaborate in sacred narrative ; the tenderness that vivifies religious art is not born of theology. Out of the universal icono- graphy the men of the thirteenth century chose, and gave prominence to, the figures more particularly interesting to their local ex- pressions of worship. In the general tradition, each diocese had its particular interest in one of the innumerable figures that belong to all Christendom. The Parisians kept a place of honour for the Evangelists, for the patrons of their city ; when they enter Notre Dame they are received by St. Denis, carrying his head, and accompanied by angels ; elsewhere they see St. Marcel piercing the Dragon with his crozier. The cathedral, which absorbed an ancient church dedicated to St. Stephen, was not unmindful of the proto-martyr ; the southern tympanum is dedicated to his history. The people of Amiens easily recog- nise their special patrons among the apostles of the universe ; in the left porch of the west front, St. Firmin raises his hand in benediction towards that Picardy he converted ; one of the most famous bishops of Amiens, St. Honore, is elaborately commemorated on the tympanum of the south porch. At Chartres, amidst the multitude 1 J$. m J I ^Ifl ■*.'» KIG. 152. — NORTH I'OKCH OK THU; CATIIEDKAI. OK ROUEN, KNOWN AS THE "I'ORT.ML UES I.lIiRAIRES. ' 75 ART IN FRANCE FIG. 153. — FIGUKE OF ONE OF THE SAVED IN THE LAST JUDGMENT OV THE CATHEDRAL OF BOURGES. {Photo. Mktiscinent. ) of figures which embraces the whole Christian iconography of the day, the faithful could identify their St. Potentien and their St. Modeste, a graceful Virgin ; and the admirable St. Theodore (Fig. 132) who guards the south porch recalled the fact that the Cathedral preserved his head among its relics. At Reims we find the evangelist St. Sixtus, and St. Remi, to whom a dove brings the holy phial ' (Fig. 144) ; the cathedral in which the kings of France were crowned shows on its faqade David anointed by Samuel, and Solomon anointed by Nathan. Local traditions came from every region and took their place in the universal revelation ; the roots of Christianity struck deeper, and art received its vital sap from the soil on which it flourished. It was for this reason that it be- came more and more realistic and concrete. After the evolution of an urban civilisation, the various guilds discovered patrons and pro- tectors ; the faithful organised the celestial world after the fashion of their own, and the vague personalities of saints and martyrs entered the communal corporations and assumed their attributes. St. Bar- tholomew became a tanner, St. Thomas a stonemason, St. Crispin a shoemaker, St. Christopher a porter ; the perfumers placed them- selves under the protection of the Magdalen ; the goldsmiths, under that of St. Eloi (Eligius) ; St. George was a knight, St. Luke a painter, St. Martha a servant. These relations between mankind and the saints became closer and more numerous in the ^ This phial, preserved in the Cathedral, contained the oil for the coronation ceremony. It was smashed with a hammer by the revolutionaries in 1 793. 76 '54-- THE CORONATION OF THE VIRGIN. I\I)RV. (The I.ouvie, Paris.) COMMUNAL OR GOTHIC ART course of the Middle Ages ; artists imagined less and less, and copied more and more, m representing this Christian mythology. Jesus, the Virgin, and a few other figures whose features were clearly fixed by tradition, were brought more into harmony with daily life, without ever becoming portraits or losing the general aspect determined centuries ago ; but all around them a host of secondary actors assume a more realistic appearance ; in sculpture as in painting, Gothic art, illustrating the Gospels, or the narrative of Jacobus de Voragine, showed the image of the mediaeval world to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The subject of the Last Judgment, which IS found m nearly all the great cathedrals, demonstrates the formation and transformation of a motive during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries ; it manifests the successive characteristics of French sculpture, in the confused and disjointed violence of Autun, the serene majesty of Pans, the dramatic and emo- tional art of Bourges. At Autun, the scene is already complete : Christ, the dead who are awakening, the angels and demons who contend for the elect and the damned ; but the elements are not yet harmonised ; Christ occupies too large a space ; around Him, the tumultu- ous figures create such a confusion that it is not easy to grasp the great mystery which is enacted. In the south porch of Chartres, the composition is calm and well balanced ; below the figure of Christ, the little bodies of the elect and of the damned are ranged in orderly groups, but the scene lacks grandeur. At Paris, the Last Judgment is represented in three stages with marvellous clarity ; above, Jesus presides over the last day of the world ; in the lowest stage, the dead come forth from their graves ; in the intermediate space, the Archangel and the Devil divide the souls. But though it is clearly defined, the composition is perhaps lacking in movement ; there is a certain monotony in the awakening of the dead (the execution, it must be remembered, is modern) : the groups of the elect and the damned are arranged in compact and well distributed bands ; the sinister calvacade of the Apocalypse is confined to the archivolts. At Amiens the same grandiose com- 77 I K;. 155. — THE IlLACK VIKGIN OK COUl.O.Mli. (The Louvre, Paris.) ART IN FRANCE position takes on a less peaceful, a more agitated character. But at Bourges the drama becomes animated and affectmg (Figs. 1 56, 162). Here the sculptor has endeavoured to ana- lyse sentiment, mstead of contenting himself with a somewhat monotonous mass of similar figures ; the risen dead, after rais- ing their sepulchral stones, gesticulate and entreat ; above, on either side of the great angel who is weighing souls, the final separation between the two worlds is completed. The damned are driven away and cast mto the jaws of hell by horrible and grotesque demons ; one of these has the grinning mask of a satyr. But the elect are touching to behold, their little curly heads irradiated by the childish smile of an intimate faith (Figs. 148, 153). Until we come to the Netherlandish painters of the fifteenth century, we shall find no more expressive vision of the Last Judg- ment than this legacy from FIG. 156.— THE LAST JUDGMENT. CENTRAL POKCH OF THE WEST FRONT OF THE CATHEDRAL OK BOURGES. {Photo. Ncnrdein.') iitt llilil the Middle Ages. The Gothic painters had little further to invent ; the Netherlanders added grimaces and contortions to the spectacle of hell, and the painters of Cologne devoutly coloured the little figures of the saved, putting blue above their heads, green beneath their feet, and red upon their cheeks. By this imitation of the flexibility and disorder of actual life, sculpture freed itself from architecture, to which it was at first merely supplementary, and 78 I57-- -TOMIi OF SAINT STEPHEN AUBAZINE (cORRfeZE). C11U1;CH OK \ COMMUNAL OR GOTHIC ART from the rigidity of line it imposed. The sculptors who executed the tympanum of Notre- Dame in Paris belonged to this brief and happy age of precarious FIG. 158. — HINGE OF HAMMERED IRON IN THE WEST PORCH OF NOTRE-DAME, PARIS. equihbnum, during which technical skill allowed artists to handle forms with ease, but not to give more than an idealised image of realities ; the faces are uniformly serene and beautiful, the draperies carved in planes of great geometrical regularity. The Apostles at Amiens are of the same simple and non-emphatic type ; their gestures are natural and peaceful ; their robes fall in strongly marked folds, slightly broken, without much flexibility ; the faces are lively and intelligent, but have none of the individuality of portraiture. This elegance is not the outcome of a very search- ing art ; the figures, in which, however, there is no trace of the ancient heraldic stiffness, are somewhat monotonous in their attitudes ; under the great Gothic porches, they are admirably decorative. At Reims, on the other hand, the somewhat abstract sobriety of Paris and Amiens is replaced by a varied and even incoherent vitality. Here the sculp- tors have been little concerned with unity of style ; they have given free rein to their own exuberance of spirit ; the faces are more expressive as well as the attitudes. and the draperies are more flexible. Many of the figures are even individual types ; certain spare, bony, energetic heads, the faces tense with moral expres- sion, are set upon alert bodies in animated attitudes. Some of the faces are eager and spiritual as if the more subtle stone could imprison, without extinguishing, the flame of life. Here are great angels of a feminine 79 I ic. 159. i.Kii.i.i-: (>\- iMiK-(,i:i) IRON FROM OLRSCAMP, IN IHr! MUSliE DES ARTS Dl^CORATIFS, PARIS. ART IN FRANCE 1 k » ^ i::::rins?r?i 1^^ 1 i^-<> ■1 1 •^^-^^^ P KIG. l6o. — THIRTEENTH CENTURY SHRINE, LIMOGES ENAMEL. (The Louvre, Paris.) type who bend forward daintily, with an expression of gentle malice. Here, too, among the angular figures of mediaeval sculpture, is that amazing group of the Visitation, which revives the luxuriant contours of antique statues, and the quivering folds of their clinging draperies ; robust and supple female forms are draped in flowing robes of delicate texture and minute folds. These women are not of Gothic race ; they are akin to those idols which antique art carved in the marble to satisfy its worship of physical beauty and moral health. The peaceful dia- logue between these two majestic figures suggests a colloquy between vestal virgins. Such a variety of types and style shows how litde Gothic sculpture was fettered by formulae such as those which had for centuries hampered painting. The Gothic sculptors were not all skilful, but they were all inspired by a vigour unknown before their time. It took possession of French artists, when, at the beginning tury, the plastic arts came for the first life. The evolution of orna- mental forms IS more sig- nificant of the intimate pre- dilections of French taste than that of architecture or the representation of figures. Nothing charac- terises the style of a period so strongly as its grammar of ornament, those forms which are born spon- taneously under the artist's hand when it is uncon- trolled by any law of utility or imitation. At the same period when architects set their vaults upon intersecting arches, sculptors transformed the appearance of the capitals which 80 of the thirteenth cen- time into contact with FIG. l6l. — SHKINE OF SAINT CAl.MINE. LIMOGES ENAMEL IN THE MUSEE D0Br6e (nANTES). (^Photo. Gibouin.) COMMUNAL OR GOTHIC ART l-'IC. 162. — THE LAST JIDG.MKNT I-'RAGMEXt). I'OKCH OK THE CATHEDRAL l)F liOURGES. (Pkoio. Neunfeiu.) received the ribs. Romanesque ornament was a very complex mixture of ancient or exotic motives ; its sculptors sought rather to combine than to invent. Towards the close of the twelfth century, decorators showed a tendency to eliminate the barbaric interlacements and arabesques, and all the remnants of antique art, volutes or acanthus leaves. While the sculptors were returning to the living forms of the human body, the decorators borrowed from vegetable life swelling and bursting buds, spreading leaves, closing or opening petals, in contrast to the Romanesque capitals with their trenchant designs and dry angles, the products of a minute and difficult technique — that proper to the worker in ivory or precious metals — the first Gothic capitals, swelling with a robust sap, clothe themselves with the broad leaves of arum or water-lily, and petals the fleshy contours of which preserved the solid character of the basket. By degrees, as the Gothic style became more supple, the sculp- tors adopted more elaborate plant forms ; they reproduced the leaves of oak or parsley, and while pre- serving regularity of arrangement, they imitated the dense disorder of foliage. Reims Cathedral contains not only the most life-like figures of Gothic statuary ; on its robust archi- tecture, on the capitals of its pillars, ivy and vine leaves climb and inter- twine, so delicate and nervous that they seem to quiver as we gaze. How and Romanesque decoration seems for all its 81 G 1 Hi. 163. — CIIAI.ICE HI- SAINI-KEMI. TKr.ASUKY OK THE CATHEDRAL OF REIMS. (Photo. Ncurcfi-in.) ART IN FRANCE luxuriance, when we compare it with this freshness ! Later, at the end of the fourteenth century, the last Gothic artists carved the sharp and curling forms of cabbage, chicory, and thistle ; on the stone angles, as on the pages of manuscripts, the Indented and serrated leaves of plants flourish in profusion. Like Gothic archi- tecture itself, the Gothic flora became fragile and com- plicated. BIBLIOGRAPHY. The same general works as for Chapter II.— Villard de Honnecourt, Album manu- icrit published by Lassus and Darcel, Paris, 1858. Anth. Saint-Paul, 5(mp/e memoire sur I'origine du style ogival (B. M., 1875). Louis Gonse, L'Art goihiquc, Paris, 1890. Ch. H. Moore, Development and Character of Gothic Architecture, London, 1890. G. von Bezold, Die Enlstehung und Ausbildung der Gothischen Baukunsl in Franl(reich, Berlin, 1891. — G. Dehio, Die Anfdnge des Gothischen Baustils Stein, Les Architecles gothiques, Paris, FIG. 164. — CATHEDRA!, OF REIMS. CAPITAL OF A riLLAR IN THE LADY CHAPEL. (Photo. Neurdein.) (Repertorium fUr Kunstwissenschafl. 1896).- H. 1909. D. Mich. Felibien, Histoire de I'Ahbaye de Saint-Denis en France, Paris, 1706 Vitry and Briere, L'Eglise abbatiale de Saint-Denis et scs tombeaux, Paris, 1908. — L. Vitet, Notre-Dame de Noyon, Paris, 1845.- F. de Guilhermy and Viollet-le-Duc, Description de Notre-Dame de Paris, Paris, 1856.- F. de Guilhermy, Description de la Sainte-Chapelle, Paris, 1887.- M. Aubert, La Cathedralc Notre-Dame-de-Paris, Paris, 1909.- Abbe A. Bouillet, Les Eglises paroissialcs de Paris, Monographics iltuslrees, Paris, 1897-1903. - Lassus, Mono- graphie de la Cathedrale de Charlres, Paris, 1867.— Abbe Bulteau. Monographic de la Calhedrale deChartres, Chartres. 1888-1902, 3 vols. E. Lefevre Pontalis. Les Fouilles de la Cathedrale de Chartres (B. M .. 190U. R. Merlet. La Cathedrale de Chartres, Paris, 1909.— Abbe Bouxin, La Calhedrale de Laon, Laon, 1890. G. Durand, La Cathedrale d' Amiens, Amiens 1901-1903. Abbe Cerf. Histoire el Description de Notre-Dame-de-Reims, Reims, 1861, 2 vols. L. Demaison, Les Architecles de la Calhedrale de Reims (B. A., 1894) Goisel, Histoire et Mono raphie de la Calhedrale de Reims. Park, 1894. Begu\e. Monographic de la Calhedrale de Lyon, Lyons, 1880. Corroyer, Description de I'Ahbaye de Saint-Michel, Paris, 1877. Denais, Monographic de la Calhedrale d' Angers,, 1899. Abbe Bosseboeuf, L Architecture Plantagenet, Angers, 1897. Ch. de Grandmaison, Tours archeologique, Paris, 1879.— Abbe Arbeliot, Cathedrale de Limoges, Paris, 1883.— H. Crozes, Monographic de la Calhedrale Sainte-Cecile d'Albi. Toulouse, 1873. G. Dehio, L'Inftuence de I' Art franfais sur I'Arl allemand au XI 11" siecle ( R. .4., 1900). _C. EnUrl, Origines franfaises de I'Archi- leclure golhique en Italic, Paris, 1894. C. Enlart, L'Art gothique el la Renaissance en Chypre, Paris, 1899, 2 vols. C. Enlart, Origincs franfaiscs de I' Architecture golhique en Espagne (B. A., 1894).- De Baudot. La Sculpture franfaise au Moyen Age et a la Renaissance, Paris, 1881 (Album of 400 motives in statuary or ornament). P. Vitry and G. Briere, Documents de Sculpture frangaise du Moyen .Age, Paris, 1904. E. Male. L'Art religieux en France au XIII' siecle, 2nd ed., Paris, 1902. M. Voege, D/e Anfiinge des monumenlalen Stiles im Millelaltcr, Strasburg, 1894.--!^. de Lasteyrie, Eludes sur la Sculpture franfaise au Moyen Age (Mon. Plot, vol. viii., 1902) — R. de Lasteyrie, La Porle Sainte-Anne a Notre- Dame-de-Paris (Mem. de la Soc.de I' Histoire de Paris, I902).--Margaret and Ernest Mar- riage, The Sculptures of Charlres Cathedral, Cambridge, I909.— R. Koechlin, La Sculpture beige et les Influences franfaises aux XI 11" el XI V" siecles (G. B. A., 1903, II).— A. Marignan, Wis/oiVe (/e /a 5cu/pfure en Languedoc aux X 1 1" el X 1 1 1'^ siecles. Pans, 1902.— 82 COMMUNAL OR GOTHIC ART R. Kcechlin, Quelques Ateliers d'icoiriers franfais aux \III'\ XIV' siecles (G. B. A., 1905). Louise Pillion, Les Portaih latiraux je la Cathcdralc de Rouen, Paris, 1907. — A. Schmarsow, Das Eindrin!>en der franzo'ischen Plaslik in die deulsche Sculptur (Reperlo- riuni fiir Kunstwissenschafl, 1898). For Painting: the works quoted on Romanesque Art. - F. de Lasteyrie, Histoire de la Peinture sur verre. 2 vols., 1857. Magne, L'CEuvre des Peintres verriers franfais. Paris, 1885. L.-O. Merson, Les Vilraux. Paris, 1895. H. Oidttnann, Die Glasmalerei, 2 vols., Cologne, 1898. FIG. 165. — C.\THEDR.\L OF REIMS. CAI'lTAL OF A I'lLLAK, SOUTH .SIDE OF 'IHE N.WE. {Flwto. Xeufdi-in). 83 G 2 l-IG. l66. — liAMTAHrS OV AKU.'ES-MORTES. {Photo. Nciirdcin.') CHAPTER IV FEUDAL ART AND CIVIC ART AT THE CLOSE OF THE MIDDLE AGES The Centres of Artistic Activity: the King, the Great Nohles, the Pope at Avignon.- The Middle Classes in the Fifteenth Centurij. Feudal Architecture. Communal Architecture, Ramparts, Houses. Mansions of Rich Burghers or Princes, Town-Halls. Cathedrals in the Fourteenth Century; the Radiating Type. The hlamhoyant Style at the End of the Fifteenth Century.- Sculpture, Tombs. Painting, Stained Glass, Illumination. Realistic Evolution of Miniature-Painting. Thelirst Distemper Pictures. Painting in Burgundy, at Avignon and Aix, in Touraine and Bourhonnais.— Popular Inspiration in the Arts of Imagery. In the thirteenth century, an intense artistic activity took possession of all the great communes which desired to build a cathedral, and then to people it with statues and adorn it with coloured glass windows. Art had already become the work of laymen, but, as yet, it only existed for religion, and like religion, it had spread abroad in the world. As the century advanced, artists worked less exclusively for the requirements of worship ; there is a charm in the plastic arts which kings and great nobles soon desired to enjoy and to reckon among the accessories of their wealth. Now the art of luxury cannot be so widely disseminated as religious art. It requires wealth, and a certain intellectual culture ; there must be prosperous towns to form skilful workmen, and rich citizens or the court of a prince to pay them. Under these conditions, the artistic energies of a country tend to concentrate in certain places. It was in the 84 FEUDAL ART AND CIVIC ART 107. — CHATEAL-i.All.I.AIil). fourteenth century that the destinies of French art began to inter- mingle with those of the great men of the kingdom, of kings and those who aspired to rival them. To survey the activities of the most distinguished among these patrons of the arts is to pass in re- view the principal works of art of the second half of the fourteenth, as well as those of the succeeding century. First in order are the kings : the first Valois, frivolous and mag- nificent ; John the Good, who took musicians with him to his captivity in England ; a painter has left us his portrait, the earliest of French pictures (Fig. 243), a brutal head painted in languid colours. Then Charles V., the wise king who built Vincennes, the Bastile, and the Louvre, a quadrangular fortress which combined many architectonic amenities with a huge donjon, dating from the time of Philip Augustus ; the learned king who loved beautiful manuscripts, and wrote on them "This book belongs to me, Charles" ; the collector of miniatures, whom the illuminators have shown us with his big nose and his ill-shaved chin, receiving some precious book as a homage ; the builder of the chapel of the Celestins, whose image a sculptor set up m the porch, side by side with his queen, holding a model of the building in his hand. The statue has survived ; it is a tranquil work, without brilliance or fire, but probably abso- lutely faithful ; the man still lives, with his weary body, his narrow chest, his good-natured face, half meditative, half smiling (Figs. 209, 210). We find him again on his tomb at Saint Denis, carved by his " imagier," Beauneveu ; this statue is more commonplace ; but we recognise the 85 KI<".. 168. — CIIATKAU lir AKCIL'ES. ART IN FRANCE FIG. 169. — COURT OF THE CHATF:AU OF COUCY. great nose in the flabby face, and the subtle expression. Then come the brothers of Charles V., Louis d'Orleans, the builder of Pierrefonds (Fig. 1 76) and of La Ferte-Milon ; the Due de Berry, who was rapacious only that he might procure himself refined delights ; his plump, snub-nosed, reddish face IS familiar to us ; in his old age, he is shown wrapped in furs, turning over his book of hours, to admire the wonderful chateaux his architects had built and his miniaturists had painted for him. Finally, there are the Dukes of Burgundy : Philippe le Hardi and Jean sans Peur, whose successors gave them such ad- mirable tombs ; Philippe le Bon more especially, and Charles le Temeraire, who were rich and powerful, and had the good fortune to rule Flanders, and employ those great artists Claus Sluter, Jan van Eyck, and Rogier van der Weyden. In the South, the Popes had made Avignon a city of luxury and pleasure. They built themselves a fortified palace (Fig. 1 74) on the hill, encircling it with ramparts, and summoned fresco painters to decorate it in the Sienese manner. It was at their behest that Italian painting crossed the Alps ; it has left a few decorations in the monasteries of Savoy ; it penetrated far into the country, as far as Tou- louse, where Italian artists painted the Church of the Jacobins. Avig- non preserved her artistic vitality for a long period ; situated upon the main road to Italy, the town seems a precursor of the Italian cities ; rich in churches and in works of art, she is to the Northerner the thres- hold of that land where the relics of the past appeal so strongly to the sense of beauty. But if the fourteenth century in Provence was in the main Italian, the preceding century had rather been Netherlandish ; it was a period of intense ex- 86 170. — KEEP OF THE CHATEAU OF COUCY. FEUDAL ART AND CIVIC ART FIG. 171. — KAMl'ARTS OF DINAX. pansion for the art of the great Flemish towns. Aix was the city of the good King Rene, who loved painting so much that tradition has made him a painter ; in any case, he certainly summoned to his court many skilful artists, whose acquaintance he had perhaps made during a forced sojourn in the Low Countries. He sat for them frequently ; on the shutters of triptychs, his painters have shown us his coarsely modelled head with the pendulous goitre, and the thin face of his wife. Many Northerners came to Aix in those days, bringing their angular and richly attired figures to bask in the sun of Provence. Towards the close of the fifteenth century, the modest court of the Duke of Burgundy at Moulins had also attracted painters, who portrayed the family of the Duke, and the undulating verdure of the Bourbonnais landscape. In the course of the fifteenth century, however, the rich patrons necessary for the artists of the day began to fail. Charles VII. and Louis XI. were too much occupied ; they had to introduce order into France ; the task of embellishing her was left to their successors. The great feudatory princes were Louis d'Orleans had built the Chateau of Pierre- fonds, his son Charles, vanquished at Agincourt, vegetated at Blois ; the Due d'Anjou lost his states one by one ; the court of Burgundy dis- appeared with Charles le Temeraire. On the other hand, an enriched middle class was replacing the feudal aris- tocracy. Jouvenel des Ursins, a prelate who was the friend of Charles VII. and Etienne Chevalier, sat to Fouquet. Jacques 87 gradually declining ; whereas FIG. 172. — CHATEAU OF AI.F.N^O.N. ART IN FRANCE FIG. 173. — RAMPARTS OF VILLENEUVE-I.ES-AVIGM IN. Cceur, Charles VII. s silversmith, built a house for himself at Bourges which is one of the most charming examples of fifteenth century architecture (Fig. 1 92). At about the same period, the hospital of Beaune (Fig. 186) was built by order of Nicolas Rolin, Chancellor of the Duke of Burgundy, for whom Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden painted pictures. The middle classes gradually came to play the part formerly assumed by the nobles, who were ruined by the luxury of the towns. The artistic efflorescence of feudal civilisation was practically confined to the fourteenth century ; its architecture dates from this period. Before this, the castle was but a fortress ; solid walls con- tinued the sharp acclivity, defying escalade by their height, and the shock of projectiles by their thickness. At the time when the Communes, directed by their bishops, were raising their learnedly constructed churches, strongholds such as the Chateau Gaillard (Fig. 167), which Richard Coeur-de-Lion built to close the Seine to the King of France, were nothing but brutal obstructions of masonry. Upon an eminence, the crest of the plateau was encircled by walls, at the angles of which rose towers and keep. This keep, which dominated the surround- ing country in a symbolic fashion, was the only in- habited portion within the narrow limits. In the Romanesque period, it was generally quadrangu- lar ; in the thirteenth century it was circular. At Coucy, in the first half of the thirteenth century, the keep rose to a height of fifty-five metres, and the walls on the ground floor were ten metres thick. Viollet-le-Duc points out 88 IK,. 174. — I'.M.ACE OF THE POPES AT AVIGNON. FEUDAL ART AND CIVIC ART 1- iG. 175. Ki:i;i' i)i- Tnii CHATEAU OK I.ANtiEAIS. (Photo. Xciirdcin.) that everything in this castle was on a colossal scale ; the panels of the battlements, the steps of the staircases, the benches and supports seem to have been constructed for giants ; the whole is an object lesson on feudal power ; in his donjon, the lord of Coucy could bid defiance to the world. This fortress was impregnable ; but the huge mass suffocated those whom it protected. In the fourteenth century, the donjon was considered a very un- comfortable dwelling ; within the ram- parts, houses were erected against the walls, and the height of the curtains was raised for their protection. The building gradually improved ; on the exterior, it still presented a hostile face, with solid \valls, pierced only by narrow loopholes ; but this sturdy outer shell now enclosed a mansion. The graceful fa(;ades that gave on the inner court had large windows and spacious bal- conies, crowned by high roofs which are seen from a distance rising above the curtains ; here the architect was able to indulge his Gothic fancy in decorat- ing dormer windows and chimneys. For the noble, im- prisoned in his castle, the principal amusement was no doubt a walk along the barbican or covered way, at the top of the curtains and towers ; through the loopholes he could con- template from afar the plain, the forest, the village ; he enjoyed in anticipation the pleasure of a gallop in the open country. The castle of Pierrefonds, built at the beginning of the fifteenth century and restored by Viollet-le-Duc, shows how skilfully 89 I'Ki. 176.— CHA iKAu (IK •i'ii;kki;koni)s. (Photo. Xcurdchi.) ART IN FRANCE IG. 177. — RAMl'ARTS OF CARCASSONNE architects installed a palace m a fortress. It would be impossible to tell in a few words how the offensive and defensive perfection of the ancient castle was evolved. All we can do is to note the principal inventions, those which were retained, with slight modifications, in castles built after the feudal regime. The wall was no longer merely obstruc- tive ; it protected its defenders on the summit behind battlements ; first wooden hourds (or timber scaffolds), and later stone machicolations sup- ported by corbels, enabled them to cast down projectiles upon assailants, themselves unseen. These walls and towers were the precursors of the Renaissance Chateau. Here, as in religious archi- tecture, utility directed invention, and an organism was constituted, an organism both harmonious and logical, the forms of which were destined to persist even after the feudal fortress had ceased to have any raison d'etre ; a decorative style was evolved from the fortress, from its towers, its battlements and its machicolations, just as Gothic ornament developed on the initial theme of diagonal ribs supported by arches and pillars. Of the earlier structures, little now remains but gutted towers and crumbling walls overgrown with vegeta- tion ; all this ingenious architecture is gradually assuming the aspect of the rock from which it was de- rived. How many hill tops of Brittany , Limousin , Perigord, Provence, and Auvergne are crowned and completed by the still haughty silhouette of dis- mantled fortresses ! Looking at them, we see how feudalism and its castles were the natural products of the soil. In the Chateau of 90 KIC. 17b 'KA.Ml'AKTS Ol' CAKCASSONNE. FEUDAL ART AND CIVIC ART I-Q. — KAMTAlvl s 111 A\'ir,Ni Bonagull, in Lot-et-Gar- onne, built in the middle of the fifteenth century, the architect's chief con- cern was to resist and to utilise artillery. He ex- tended the exterior de- fences widely, and in the lower parts of the towers, he made apertures for the muzzles of cannon. And yet these proud towers, and this donjon upon the rocky scarp, offer an insurmountable resistance only to escalade. Powder would very soon blow this dry masonry to fragments. All these castles suffered from their too intimate re- lation to a form of society which was not destined to endure ; they were sub- jected to long cannonades from the royal artillery, and were methodically destroyed in the time of Richelieu and Mazarin, after the definitive victory of the monarchy. Feudal architecture had to trans- lorm itself in order to subsist ; the castle abandoned its obsolete organs of defence ; the smiling Renaissance palace emerged from its shell when at last the will of the king was powerful enough to decree that henceforth no one should live m a fortress. The Communes, after conquering their place in feudal organisation, had to defend it ; the burgesses encircled their towns with ramparts ; but these ram- parts were to prove no ,„^ .Sl-chateau ..,. ang,.ks. more enduring than the (Photo. Ncuydcm.) I'IG. iSo. — VAI.KN TKl-; r.mix.F, AT CAIICil;: (^Photo. Ncurdcin. ) ART IN FRANCE 182. — (ILI) HOUSES AT BAYEUX. {Photo. Neurih-in.) fortresses ; the stone girdle had to be removed or it would have strangled the growing com- munity. Only some few towns, such as Dinan (Fig. 171) and Saint Malo in Brittany, and Provins in the He de France, have preserved large portions of their ancient ramparts. But there are three southern cities where these are almost intact : Car- cassonne (Figs. 1 77, 1 78), Aigues-Mortes (Fig. 166) and Avignon (Fig. 1 79). Aigues-Mortes was the crea- tion of Saint Louis and of Philip the Bold. The kings of France coveted an outlook upon the Mediterranean. Hence this fortified town, rising from the flat shore, is quite unlike the usual Acropolis. The nature of the ground did not necessitate an elaborate plan ; the masonry is the only eminence in the plain. Upon this desert of sand and of pools rises a quadrilateral struc- ture of uniform walls flanked by towers of equal height. The whole has a stunted look in a landscape the infinite lines of which enhance the drowsy horizontality. On all four sides the ramparts present a solid front of masonry, unbroken save by narrow loopholes for the watchful archer. The ramparts of Aigues-Mortes constitute a mediaeval fortification in all its simplicity ; a very thick wall to check the enemy, an obstruc- tion offering no weak points for attack, and, behind it, ingenious hiding-places for the defenders. Here, again, a refuge was con- trived ; the Tour Constance rises, round and solid. This massive 92 183. — OLD HOUSES AT ROUK.N. {Photo. Ni-urdcht.) FEUDAL ART AND CIVIC ART lt)4. — AllKE SAlNT-MACLOf, Al' UdUKN. shell of masonry encloses rooms with graceful vaults ; the wall is honeycombed with galleries and staircases, which constitute so many traps for the feet of the assailant. Saint Louis and his successors hastened to make Carcassonne equally impregnable when it be- came a royal town. On a vast, wind-swept plain the citadel rears its mighty bulk, dominating the historic passage of the Garonne into the Mediter- ranean ; the double en- ceinte flanked by fifty towers encircles an abrupt hill ; the huge flat, bare walls, unrelieved by any accidents save the natural asperities of the stone, are pierced with long loop holes and crowned by battlements, the sharp outlines of which have been restored by Viollet-le-Duc. Everything is calculated to the end of keeping a constant watch upon the aggressor. The defenders could follow his movements from a hundred hiding-places when he advanced towards the gloomy wall that betrayed no sign of life. A walk upon these ramparts is a crushing experience ; such a piling up of masonry fatigues the spectator ; the steel-grey stone adds its dull monotony to this rude armour in which a little town is dying, after hav- ing suffocated in safety for centuries. The Popes at Avignon also sur- ^ (Bt^iK^B^^^^H : rounded their pleasant town \s'ith m B'iSHBHHRi^ military defences. But here the ramparts do not constitute a prison. Above the low walls, surmounted by strongly projecting battlements, the town can contemplate the Rhone and the sun-bathed rock of Ville- The palace of the Popes bears no resemblance to the of the French nobles, it has neither round towers nor 93 85. — IKITKI. Dli Vll.l.i;, AT SAINT-OUENTIN. neuve. castles ART IN FRANCE k ^^^1 ^ ^^^^H 1 s^ mm -COURT OK JHE HOTEL-DIEU AT BEAUNE. keeps. Lofty blocks of i buildings enclose two' quadrangular courts. But their towering walls are also defences ;: the huge buttresses which reinforce them are united at the top by pointed arches, which form machicolations. Fortresses were numerous in the domain of King Rene ; they can bear the proxi- mity of the magnificent Roman rums. The same radiant light gilds the rude relics of feudal days, and the splendid buildings of antiquity, triumphal arch and battlemented donjon, the successive structures which civilisation extracted from the same Provencal limestone. Meanwhile civil architecture was evolved in the towns ; in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the burgesses began to instal themselves in comfortable dwellings behind the pro- tecting ramparts. They varied greatly according to the character of the locality ; the general style of the habitation indicated the differ- ence between the France d'oil and the France doc, just as did the language of the two regions. In the south the predominant type was the flat-roofed building, of well cut stone ; in the north the house was built of light materrals and crowned with a high, pointed roof ; it was to some extent the difference of style between Romanesque and Gothic. A few Romanesque houses still subsist, the round-arched windows of which recall the Gallo- Roman type ; in certain centres of Romanesque art, such as Cluny, Montferrand, and Saint Gilles, we may still see houses of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. At Cordes (Tarn) very nearly an entire street of this period is intact ; in this civilisation, 94 FIG. 187. — HOTEL DE VILLE AT CUiMPlfecNE. FEUDAL ART AND CIVIC ART which had retained the municipal traditions of decorum derived from the Roman occupation, solid blocks of freestone were still the customary materials for buildmg. A Romanesque house at Saint-Antonin, with a square belfry, recalls the communal palaces of the old Tuscan towns ; delicate little columns with carved capitals form a graceful gallery in the first storey ; the Roman- esque builders always loved to insert an elaborate piece f 1 . • . r KK.. iSS. — CHATEAU oV Jt'.sSELl.N. or sculpture into a mass or somewhat rude masonry. The open ground-floor served as a market for traders, and a shady refuge in which to breathe the open air. The northern towns have preserved no civil buildings so ancient ; erected at a later date of municipal civilisation, the more active life of colder latitudes wore them out and renewed them several times ; northern urban dwellings date back no farther than the fifteenth century. At this period houses were built with a wooden framework, the ground-floor alone being of masonry ; the upper storeys were of light materials, upheld by a skeleton of beams arranged in the form of the letter X or N. Sometimes the houses widened at every storey ; large windows opened on to the street, which gradually contracted as the building rose from storey to storey ; the whole was covered by an over- hanging roof ; a gable gave the fa<;ade that pointed silhouette dear to the Gothic architect. The man of the fifteenth century could provide a cheap decoration for his house by carving grotesques on the projecting beams of the 95 -HOTRI. I)E CI.LNY, I'ARIS. ART IN FRANCE FIG. 190. — PALAIS DE JUSTICE, ROUEN. facade ; within, also, the wood was carved and painted. The whole house was like the work of a cabinet-maker. The town mansions {hotels) were ar- ranged like the interiors of feudal dwellings ; Jacques Coeur's house at Bourges (Fig. 192), the Hdtel de Sens, and the house of the Abbots of Cluny in Paris (Fig. 1 89), are the unforti- fied dwellings of great nobles in a town. Like the castle, the facade of the house giving on the court has become gay and hospitable. It is generally separated from the street by a block of buildings, and sometimes merely by a battlemented wall, which masks the whole. The visitor who wishes to admire the graceful structure must pass through a low doorway in the wall. In the course of the fourteenth century, civil architecture adopted more and more generally the square, casement window, to which an arched hood moulding was sometimes applied. Pointed windows were reserved for religious buildings. A turret sometimes detaches itself from the body of the building, crowned with a belfry ; it contains a spiral staircase, and its oblique openings reveal the steps ; these little projecting towers were long a favourite motive of French architects ; the one which Raymond du Temple built in Charles V.'s Louvre was famous until the Re- naissance. In the Royal Domain, town-halls made their appearance very late ; the towns did not attain to the municipal power of the cities of Flanders, and the cathedrals were often used for political gatherings. Notre-Dame-de-Paris had not been built very long before its vaults resounded with the furious invectives hurled against the Pope by an agent of Philip 96 I'ALAIS UE JUSTICE, BEAUVAIS. FEUDAL ART AND CIVIC ART IC)'_'. — JACCIUES Cllvlk S i;oui«;es. {Pilot 0. Ni-iirdt-iii.) the Fair, before the States General. However, urban administra- tion soon required a house for the despatch of business. It is more especially in the towns of the north, rich cities which were brought into contact with Flemish life and manners, that the town-halls have a really original character, with the elaborate decoration proper to the luxury of commercial civilisation, and the enormous communal bell-towers, haughtier than feudal donjons. On the ground-floor, as at Saint-Quentin (Fig. 185), and Arras, was an open gallery ; on the upper storeys, windows described a graceful curve, in the latest style of Gothic, and sometimes, as at Samt-Quentin, a row of gables crowned the faqade ; they formed a circle together with the gables of private houses, round the great Place. The Town-Hall of Compiegne (Fig. 187), on the other hand, is very different in aspect ; it is built in the style which was evolved in the heart of France after the Hundred Years War, a style more akin to the massive architecture of feudal times. Like the Hotel de Cluny, and Jacques Coeur's house, it is a graceful and soberly- decorated building, not, like the town-halls of Flanders, open to the passer-by, and permitting the seething life of the town to penetrate under Its vaults, but more akin to a CIVIC hall under a powerful monarchy, where public functions conferred a kind of nobility, and where an equestrian statue of the king was proudly enshrined. The Rouen Palace of Justice shows the wealth of graceful ornament Gothic architecture could lavish on a fa(;;ade. ig3. — FiKRi'i.Acr; in ihk ck-eat hai.l of iiik I'Ai.Ais DK lusTicK, i'orni:i;s. 97 H ART IN FRANCE FIG. 194.- -CLOISTIiK Ol'- THE MUS^E DES AUGUSTINS, AT TOULOUSE. Superb mouldings enframe the wide windows. Between these, buttresses, recessed for statues, mount to the dormer-windows, over which they throw flying buttresses, and on the lofty roof the stone turns and curls in an exuberant florescence of pinnacles and pierced gables (Fig. 190). At the close of the Middle Ages, the types of civil architecture, man- sion and town-hall in particular, as they were to continue after the Re- naissance, were definitely fixed. The renovation of architecture went no further than decoration ; the recessed buttresses were replaced by pilasters, and the gables by pediments. The mouldings which overrun a Gothic facade capriciously, like the branches of an old vine-creeper, were disciplined and transformed into delicate bas-reliefs ; but the building was not disturbed in the logic of its organism. The men of the fourteenth century had practically ceased to build cathedrals ; the great effort of technical invention was draw- ing to an end, and the mystic impulse was arrested ; but the Gothic style continued to live, without renewing itself. The general forms of the building took on a more precise elegance, and ornament continued to grow richer. The Gothic style of the fourteenth century was more methodical than that of the reign of Philip Augustus. In the transi- tion from the west porches of Notre-Dame-de-Paris, to the north and south porches built by Jean de Chelles, we see the architect more and more intent on precision of design ; he developes I, 98 FIG. 195. -CLOISTEK OF LA CHALSi;-UIEU. (Photo Neurdein.') FEUDAL ART AND CIVIC ART -XA\E (II'- SAINT-UURN, KOUEN. the decorative theme of a door or a rose-window with easy mastery ; facades acquire a precise and regu- lar elegance, not without coldness. The admirable nave of Saint Ouen, at Rouen (Fig. 196), due to a single uninterrupted effort on a well-defined plan, is impeccable in style and somewhat chilly in effect. The masses of the architecture, walls and pillars, the wide windows with three mullions and roses, have the purity of a fine architectural drawing. The term Rayonnant (radiating) IS applied in France to that chast- ened and correct style which came into vogue when architects substituted decorative research for mechanical problems. The resulting modifications affected every part of the building. The inert elements which remained in the masonry were eliminated ; windows were enlarged, pillars were transformed into a sheaf of slender columns ; the profiles of mouldings became sharper ; the tnfonum was diminished or disappeared alto- gether, to give more impetus to the soaring vertical lines. Y\\e ]{ayon- nant style carried elegance to the extreme point compatible \\'ith the solidity of the building. To decor- ate this somewhat puny ossature and drape this nudity, architects added a quantity of ornamental amenities : the mullions of the en- larged windows were elaborated, and formed roses ; the pierced and pointed gables of doorways made a rigid lacework against the sky ; buttresses were crowned with pinnacles ; spears of stone or metal bristled on every summit ; towers arose, with sharp spires flanked by belfries ; the stone was hollowed and reduced, carried towards 99 n 2 FIG. 197.— N.WK IlK THE CATIIEDKAI. (IF AI.EN^ON. ART IN FRANCE FIG. 198. — CATHEDRAL OF SEXS. {Fhofo. Nnn-iia'n.) the zenith by an Impulse common to the whole buildmg. Thus Gothic architecture con- tinued to enrich itself, even after its creative force was spent ; the cathe- dral IS an organism which could go on indefinitely receiving new mem- bers and ornaments ; the porch could always be crowned by a gable ; the facade could always be flanked by towers ; each tower could always have its spire. Even the plan of the building allows of additions. At Rouen, the body of the cathedral disappears among the limbs that have been attached to it, between the two towers added to its facade, the Portail des Libraires and the Portail de la Calende, which give monumental decorations to the two extremities of the transept, the Lady Chapel which in- creases the depth of the apse, and finally the enormous spire which surmounts the lantern. The cathedrals left unfinished at the close of the thirteenth century were not, however, abandoned. But the master-builder who resumed the work, concerned himself little with the inten- tions of the original architect. He never identified himself with the initial design ; his interest was confined to the part on which he was working, faqade, tower, spire, porch, or chapel. Thus the construction of churches was not carried on throughout the cen- turies after the fashion of a theorem taken up again at the point where it was interrupted. Each epoch brought its particular style ; certain cathedrals record the whole history of French architecture. The facade of Tours enables us to follow the various styles of France in their rapid succession. As it rises from the ground, its Gothic decoration 100 u;. 199. -I'OKCH OF SAINT-MACLOU, AT KOUEN. FEUDAL ART AND CIVIC ART gradually turns into Renaissance ornament ; two towers, which set out to end in spires, terminate in round lanterns, in the Italian manner. The facade of Angers begins a similar evolution with Romanesque elements. The cathedral of Rodez (Figs. 207, 208) continues the avatars of French architecture even after the Renaissance. The building rises from the ground severe and massive, but as it ascends it blossoms into ornamental detail ; at the second storey of the tower the solid wall begins to be pierced and carved, and the ribs to ramify with an exuberance which the solid forms of a rigorous geometry sup- port. The actual faqade superposes styles that bring us to the middle of the seventeenth century. Neo-classical architects added a facade in the so-called Jesuits' Style at the top : two antique " orders crowned by a pediment ; to complete the cathedral, a reduc- tion of the Val-de-Grace or the Sorbonne was perched on the summit. The interior decoration of cathedrals is no less receptive l-'IG. 200. — Sl'lUAL STAIKCASE AT SAINT-MACI OU, KdUT-X. It still goes on towards completion to the present day. The fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries enriched the naves with curiously wrought rood screens, which were destroyed in the eighteenth century, i- - ifJfc<|B[| P^i They gave the choir carved wooden i »i^HHi^^B stalls of incredible richness; they surrounded it with a sculptured gallery. In the seventeenth cen- tury, marble altars were set up at the bases of pillars, with columns and pediment enframing a large picture in the Bolognese manner. The eighteenth century added its graceful screens of hammered iron, which reveal a certain affinity between the caprices of the Flamboyant and the Rococo Styles. The architects of the fifteenth century had long lost the habit of 101 !'l<;. 20I. — SOUTH I'OKCH OF SAINT-RliMI, KEl.MS. (/Vtofo. CoillliK.r.) ART IN FRANCE I'K;. 202. — SOUTH PORCH OF THK CHURCH OF I.OUVIF.RS. 203. -CHURCH OF LA TRINITE, VENDOME. vast enterprises. They loved to elaborate a portion of a building ; they displayed their skill in the treatment of stone, which they carved like wood and twisted like iron. When, after the agitations of the Hundred Years War building was resumed, pointed architecture blossomed for half a century into the Flamboyant style.^ It may have been an importation from England. It is even less monumental, even more exclusively decorative than the Rayonnant style of the fourteenth century, for it turned every organ of the Gothic building into ornament. Nevertheless, it did not violate the principles of this archi- tecture ; it merely carried them a little beyond their logical consequences, piercing the solids, dividing the vital forces of the masonry. Tympana became concave, and were covered with a perfect network of tracery ; towers sprang skyward, with no solid supporting walls, by means of little superposed pinnacles and flying buttresses ; stone fillets became more numerous, more FIG. 204. — RIGHT UOOK, FACADE OF NOTRE-DAME, MANTES. (_Fhoto. Nan-dcin.) ^ The English form of this evolution is known as Perpendicular. 102 FEUDAL ART AND CIVIC ART I-'IG. 205. — SOUTH I'OKlll 111' rilli CATHEDRAL OF AI.l'.l. and and delicate, and more involved. in the enlarged windows the mullions multiplied, and were united by curves analogous to the aspirmg flicker of flames. The rose-wmdows at Sens leave an impression of fatigue and bedazzlement on the retina ; the restless, quivering forms carry away the eye on their capri- cious undulations, and offer it no single quiet line on which to rest. In the same manner the simplicity of the great arches in the ogival vault is elaborated into complexity ; these arches bifurcate and ramify into Hemes (summit ribs) and tierce- rons (intermediate ribs) ; purely decorative ribs accompany them with their fanciful curves, as in the Cathedral of Moulins, Saint Nizier at Lyons ; the stone branches become more more tangled. Occasionally, architects allow the key or boss of the vault to hang down like a stalactite, and this projecting stone seems to have no- thing to sustain it ; it is a capital without a pillar, a point of support for the ascending ribs, as in the Portail des Marmousets at Rouen, the rood-screen of Albi, and that of the Madeleine at Troyes. These refinements reveal an archi- tecture more subtle than vigorous. The Flamboyant style produced many marvels, chapels, towers, porches, the lantern-tower of Avioth in the Meuse, the porch of St. Maclou at Rouen (Fig. 199), Jean Texier's belfry at Chartres, and at Beauvais, the transept porches built by Martin Chambiges. At Albi, the last of the Gothic architects have laid a porch, light and delicate as a piece of lace or goldsmith's work, against the side 103 IIG. .206. — CIIOIK-SCUICKN OI' TllK CATIIEDKAl. OI' AI.l'.l. ART IN FRANCE FIG. 207. -TOWER OF THE CATHEUKAl. OF KODEZ. of the brick fortress (Fig. 205). But Flamboyant Gothic raised no superb cathedral. The vigour of the structure was no longer concentrated in a few robust and sturdy trunks, as in the days of the great cathe- drals ; it was dispersed in tortuous branches ; the lofty groves of early Gothic were transformed into dense thickets. The great Gothic period had exhausted invention in sculpture as in architecture. But sculpture can live by imitation ; once de- tached from the architecture which had hitherto dominated it, it followed, in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a peculiar evo- lution, independent of all decorative considerations, and intent on the creation of forms more realistic or more mannered. The favourite motive was the figure of the Virgin. The image of the Mother, standing, and hold- ing in her arms the Child Jesus, naturally multiplied. We find it not only on the altars of her in- numerable chapels and in private oratories, but at street-corners, shehered in litde niches, and en- shrined in the walls of houses under her protection. The attitude and general aspect had been fixed in the thirteenth century : the Virgin of Paris, of Amiens, and of Reims, is a gracious queen smiling at her child. But when she descended from her pedestal and became a statuette, the Virgin partook more of the nature of common humanity. The men of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries loved her best in her character of mother ; when she was shown smiling at the gambols of her infant, prayer might without impropriety become 104 FIG. 208. — WEST FRONT OF THE CATHEDRAL OF RODEZ, FEUDAL ART AND CIVIC ART familiar, and poor folks spoke heart to heart to this Virgin who inspired no awe. These images of stone, wood, or ivory were not all fashioned by expert hands ; the goodwill of the craftsman was not always crowned by success ; the humble artisan was careful to preserve the type created by the great " imagiers," but he often omitted the finer gradations, and exaggerated particular features. The date of a mediaeval Virgin may always be approximately fixed by the drapery ; it was only very exception- ally that the Gothic sculptors treated the nude ; the design of the folds characterises each phase of their statues in trailing robes. In the thir- teenth century the drapery was sti IIG. 20g. — FKAGMENT OF THE STATLli OF CHARLES V. (The Louvre, Paris.) somewhat summary ; later sculptors treated the folds of gowns as they treated the lines of the architecture ; they made them smaller and more graceful, and took pleasure in elaborating them. In the time of Charles V. it was customary to pile up on the Virgin's hip a mass of fluted pleats forming rounded volutes. By the end of the century, these draperies, though they had not been •— -— simplified, had lost their somewhat conventional 11* '^ll stiffness. They then fell to the ground, and piled their deep and multitudinous convolutions round the feet. This was an outcome of pre- vailing fashions. It was the period of very long dresses, of ample slashed cloaks, such as we see in illuminated manuscripts, wrapping nobles and citizens at the courts of the Dukes of Berry or Burgundy. The small Virgins, sometimes very coarsely carved, are lost, as it were, in a tangle of draperies, among which it is difficult to discern their attitudes. The sculptors of the thirteenth century had slightly inflected their figures to modify their hieratic stiffness : the weight of the body was 105 FIG. 2IO. — CHAKLFS V. FROM THE CHAl'EL OF THE CI5lESTINS. (The Louvre, Paris.) ART IN FRANCE HG 211. — ISAlJIiAU Uli BAVIKKli TOMU AT SAINT-DENIS. thrown on one hip, and this easy attitude cast the drapery into grace- ful oblique folds. But, although in nude figures like those of Praxi- teles, or figures very slightly veiled, this movement of the hip is per- fectly sufficient, it becomes barely perceptible when the body is swathed m heavy draperies. The popular "imagiers" accordingly em- phasised this gesture till it became caricature. At the middle of the fifteenth century, their Virgins con- tort themselves amidst involved draperies. It was not until the close of the century that they re- covered their grace and simplicity. The work of the Gothic " imagiers " was reproduced in small by the ivory-workers. Their statuettes are exact reproductions of the great stone figures. If all the stone figures had perished, we might have followed the traditional treatment of the Virgin from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century in the ivories. Our Lady was, in fact, the favourite motive of the workers in ivory. Her image multiplied and was dis- seminated, in like manner as her worship. At first she was represented as at Pans, Amiens, and Reims, a gracious figure with half-closed eyes and a slight smile on her thin lips. In the course of the fourteenth century, ivory figures follow the evolution of stone statues, and we can only date them by the chronology of parallel works of great sculpture. We note that mannerism is on the increase ; the folds of the robes become complicated, and the general aspect is one of a somewhat affected grace ; later on, the figure became heavy, and the delicate material was unable to translate the robust realism of the fifteenth century. The ivory-workers did not confine them- selves to the imitation of stone statues ; they also transposed the effects of the miniaturists, 106 l-Ui. 212. — JEANNE DE liDURBON, KHOM THE CHAPEL OF THE CIti.ESTINS. (The Louvre, Paris.) FEUDAL ART AND CIVIC ART graving delicate reliefs upon ivory plaques which form diptychs and tnptychs. In the centre is the Virgin, the little Gothic queen smiling at her child, attended by chubby angels in flowing robes. The shutters are decorated with numbers of little pictures in which the ivory-worker, following the taste of the century, has compressed the history of Jesus into the space of a few centimetres. The scenes are enframed in miniature columns and pointed arches sur- mounted by gables, an elaborate architectural setting, which invites comparison with the miniatures m the Psalter of Saint Louis. The TK;. 213. — SAINT MAUKICE. (Orleans Museum.) French ivory-workers, like the French illumina- tors, excelled in adapting " histories, ingenious attitudes, expressive faces, and sinuous draperies to the limits of their little Gothic compart- ments. FIc;. 214. — FIGUKF. OF A KING. (The Louvre, Paris.) During the four- teenth century, statu- ary gradually achieved portraiture ; this was the natural evolution of an art that had be- come both more inde- pendent and richer in technique. It was also a result of the new conditions ; the artists were in the service of great nobles, who raised their own monuments during their life-time. From the reign cf Saint Louis, the kings of France had their own images and those of their ancestors carved upon their tombs in Saint Denis ; the Dukes of Burgundy at Dijon, the Duke of Berry at Bourges, the Dukes of Bour- bon at Souvigny, the Popes at Avignon 107 FIG. 215. — SAINT MICHAEL < >V EKO >.M I NG S.\ r.\ N. (Musce des .Vugustiiis, Toulouse.) ART IN FRANCE FIG. 217. — SAINT FORTUNADE ; CHUKCH OF SAINTE-FORTUNADF. (CORIifeZE). did the same. Their sepulchral effigies show them recumbent, their hands folded in prayer, their feet resting on heraldic beasts such as dogs or lions. In the time of Saint Louis, busts were not, as yet, portraits ; the costumes only seem to have been accurately rendered ; the round, inexpressive faces, modelled with very little character, are lifeless, in spite of a vague indication of a smile. For a long time the sculptors of gisants (recumbent figures) had been content to lay the same figures they had been in the habit of erecting against pillars in ca- thedral porches flat upon a marble slab. They made no change in the design of the draperies ; the fluted parallel folds were still retained, as if the weight, continuing to be exercised in the length of the body, had be- come horizontal with the latter. At Saint Denis, Philip VI and Charles V sleep thus, wrapped in a sheaf of rigid folds like the flut- KIG. 216 — SILVER-GII.T VIRGIN FROM THE TREASURY OF SAINT- DENIS. n he Louvre, Paris.) 21S. — IIIE VIRGIN AND CHILD. (Mu.see cles Augustins, Toulouse. ) ings of an overthrown column, and the cushion under the head is the sole indication that the sculptor in- tended to represent a recumbent figure. At the end of the fourteenth century, however, good sense corrected a fashion that lacked any justification ; the folds fell on the slab, clinging to the rigid corpse and suggesting its outlines. Among the artistic centres created by the luxury of kings and great 108 FEUDAL ART AND CIVIC ART IC. 219. — FIGURE OF THIC MAGDALEN. (Clu.iy ^[useiim, Paris.) feudatories, Dijon was the one which showed most activity and splendour, and the ancient capital of the Dukes of Burgundy still preserves the sculptured masterpieces of this second Gothic period. This Bur- gundian art appeared and disap- peared with the power of the Dukes ; it was the result of a bril- liant political phase rather than of ethnical characteristics. It is to be explained by the position of a feudal family and its suzerainty over the Netherlands. The wealthy cities of Flanders, reservoirs of skilled craftsmen, had furnished painters and sculptors for the Pans of Charles V and Charles VI, before providing them for the Dijon of Philip the Good. During the first half of the fifteenth century Paris was in a state of anarchy, and in the hands of the English, and Burgundy alone was able to profit by the labours of Flemish craftsmen. At the Carthusian monastery of Champmol, near Dijon, where masses were continually to be said for the repose of their souls, the Dukes of Burgundy caused the most powerful works of the Middle Ages in their de- cline to be executed by the Dutchman, Claus Sluter (d. 1 406) and his succes- sors. These sculptures have been pre- served. In the porch of the church (now destroyed) a Virgin upon the central pillar of the doorway reveals the hand of a master on the threshold. The bold chisel that carved it has given it robust vitality, and has decked it with abundant and complicated draperies ; but in the midst of the welter of folds the vigorous body indicates certain simple movements (Fig. 224). On either side she is flanked by Philip the 109 Fir,. 220. — FKILKE OF A QUEEN AT THE PALAIS 1)E JUSTICE, rOITIEUS. {rho/o. Ulicusciinni.) ART IN FRANCE FIG. 221. — Al'OSTLE, FROM THE ABBEY OF RIEUX. (Museum of Toulouse.) Bold, his wife, Margaret of Flanders, and their patrons ; the faces are strongly characterised, the attitudes natural, the draperies flowing and supple. All this vigour makes the art, which a few years earlier erected the puny Charles V of the Celestins, appear timid and poverty- stricken. For this same Philip the Bold, Claus Slater decorated the well of the monastery with sculptures, grouping six prophets round it : Moses, David, Jeremiah, Zachariah, Daniel, and Isaiah ; each holds the phylactery on which is inscribed his pre- diction of the sufferings of Christ. The monu- ment was dominated by a Calvary : Jesus on the Cross, the Virgin, the Magdalen and St. John ; all that remains of this is the head of Christ, a marvellous head of suffering majesty. In this work, mutilated as it is, an energy very rare in history finds expression ; this art was the final outcome of a naturalistic progress ; it was anterior to that classic discipline which was soon to curb violence, and force the wildest accents to take on harmony. In the time of Claus Sluter no scruple, no desire for beauty or correctness, kept the passion of the sculptor within bounds ; enormous heads are set on squat bodies. Among the deep folds, the sinuosities and breaks of the tormented draperies, the bodies are hardly indicated ; but the boldly-carved faces, hollow, ravaged and wrinkled, reveal individualities of unforgettable vigour. The colour which once overlay these brutal forms gave an appearance of reality to the aged vociferous heads. It is not often that the inc. 222. — APOSTLE, FROM THE ABIiF.Y OF KIEUX. (Museum of Toulouse.) FIG. 223. — Al'OSTLE, FKO.M THE ABBEY OF HIEUX. (Museum of Toulouse.) 10 FEUDAL ART AND CIVIC ART 111,. 224. — ci.Ats siA i'l-:i;. Dooi;, AUBEY OK CHAMPMOL, NEAR UIJON. (Photo. Kfiinfcin.) exigencies of the subject, the ten- dencies of local art, and the genius of the artist so combine to create works harmonious even in their violence. Never again was such savage energy to be found on French soil, save in the case of genius in revolt. The Burgundian power was shattered before all the great works projected by the Dukes had been carried out. The most brilliant among them, Philip the Good, never had his tomb ; but for his predeces- sors, Philip the Bold and John the Fearless, two marvels of architecture and sculpture were executed ; they are the work of several artists. The second of these monuments was not finished till 1470, by the Avignonnais, Antoine le Moituner. On a wide base of black marble, an elaborately carved gallery of alabaster shelters a whole world of mourners (plcuranls), who clamour under the intricacies of the delicate arcades. Above, on spacious slabs, with sharp cornices, the recumbent figures (gisanh) lie wrapped in long Court mantles ; winged angels bend over their heads, supporting helmet or coat of arms. The mourners who circulate beneath the funereal slabs of the Dukes of Burgundy, and who were also to be seen round the tomb of the Duke of Berry, are the members of the family, and the Court officials in mourning dress, as they figured at the obsequies. Their bodies are lost in their voluminous robes with their heavy, broken folds. The coarse stuffs and the hidden faces suggest grief more solemnly than any facial contortions (Figs. 230, 232). 1 IC. 225. — CI.ALS Sl.L'llii;. ISAIAH AM) MOSKS. WKI.L OK THE rKOI'HEIS AliliEY OK ClIAMI'MOl., NliAR DIJON. 11 ART IN FRANCE KIG. 226. — CI.AUS SLUTER. ZACHARIAH AND DANIEL. WELL OF THE PROPHETS, DIJON. Nevertheless, the Dijon sculptors did not always exploit the full pathetic force of these tragic statuettes. La Huerta and Le Moiturier even treated them familiarly, and gave a comic touch to their vulgar gestures. Some years later, at the end of the fifteenth century, we find these small alabaster figures very vigorously developed on the tomb of Philippe Pot (Fig. 232) ; the Gothic gallery that enframed them in the earlier tombs has disappeared ; the architectural decoration is replaced by statuary. The slab on which Philippe Pot reclines in armour, rests heavily on the shoulders of eight sinister mourners swathed in heavy gowns, the hoods of which are drawn over their heads, and walking with measured steps. This expressive violence marks the close of mediaeval sculpture. Before the period of a difficult and nicely adjusted science, a good workman, well inspired, yet without any subtleties of technique, was capable of striking home rudely, and of achieving the pathetic with a vigour that was finally to disappear from art. The effect was attained in spite of — perhaps indeed to some extent by means of — the summary execution. Gothic architecture had killed the mural painting dear to the Roman- esque artists. It had virtually sup- pressed wall-space ; the figures and scenes of Christian iconography had been transported to the windows. What mural fresco could have com- peted with these pictures from which the living light streamed forth ? But glass-painting was subject to a tech- nique too special, and dominated by restrictions too severe, to become more than an exquisite decoration, and to blossom into a realistic art. VIC,. 227. — CLAUS SLUTEK. MOSES AND DAVID. WELL OK THE PROPHETS DIJON 112 FEUDAL ART AND CIVIC ART Fl<;. 228. — VAMC OI'- TIIE CHATEAU OK LUDE. The theologians of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries may have suggested new episodes and ingenious symbols to the glass-painters ; they did not insist that the workman should imitate living forms and natural colours. Thus we find that the figures on glass retain the emaciated forms, the knotted and twisted lines of Romano-Byzantine design, long after these had been discarded in sculpture. It is not here that we must look for the realistic effort which corresponds, in the chromatic arts, to that which had revived the dry bones of sculpture. In Italy, mural painting, encouraged rather than restricted by architecture, awoke to life at the beginning of the fourteenth cen- tury in the work of Giotto. In the countries of Gothic art, it was the pages of the illu- minated manuscripts which prepared the efflorescence of painting. Miniature painting had never ceased to be practised by the monks of the Middle Ages ; but in the thirteenth century a new style began to develope, inspired, apparently, by the art of the sculptors and glass-painters. There is more than one striking analogy between the little figures of the Psalter of Saint Louis and the saints which were carved by contem- porary sculptors. The harsh drawing of an earlier period had be- come suppler and more delicate, and the illu- minators of the thirteenth century, renouncing the dryness of the Benedic- tine miniatures, were roused to emulation by the splendour of the Gothic painted windows. Their pages glow with pure colours, reds and blues, with no intermix- ture to break or deaden them ; the gold-leaf against which the little figures are relieved gleams from every page, and as we turn the 113 I l-'li;. 229. — TOMUS OK I'lllLiri'lO I.K lIAKm AM) JEAN SANS I'EL'K. (Museum, Hijon.) {P/mtc. Nciirtfciii.) ART IN FRANCE FIG. 230. — A MOURNKR ON THE TOMli OK THK DUKE OF HERUY. (Museum, liourges.) ^—^^^— leaves, it sparkles like the painted window of some ^^]j]^| dim chapel. In several cases the framework of the ^^^^ vignettes recalls the design of a Gothic wmdow and its radiating mullions. It was the Parisian illummators of the thirteenth century who first attempted to fix this gem-like painting on parchment. But the illuminator could not rest content with the conventional design of the glass-painter. Even in the Psalter of Saint Louis, the figures are easy and life- like, with a dainty vivacity akin to the quality we find in the album of Villard de Honnecourt. This ar- chitect of the middle of the thirteenth century draws with a free pen, and traces sinuous figures draped in supple robes. It is true that his anatomy and his perspective are defective ; these are weaknesses which are very frequent in the plastic art of mediaeval times. But he can already make his little figures move gaily ; they have cast off the Byzantine ankylosis. In the Psalter of Saint Louis, and in the best manuscripts of the close of the thirteenth century, we even find upon the faces the keen smile of certain contem- porary sculptures. Fol- lowing in the wake of the " imagiers," the illumin- ators gradually become masters of the suggestion of life. Throughout the four- teenth century, this con- quest was rapidly pur- sued ; most of the minia- turists worked in Pans ; they were very various in origin, many of them FIG. 231. — CLAUS Sl-UTER. CHRIST FROM THE WELL OF THE I'RorHETS. (Archaeological ISIuseum, Dijou.) 232. — TOMB OF THILirrE I'OT. (The Louvre, Paris.) 14 FEUDAL ART AND CIVIC ART 1 IC. 2j!3. LANii.N ri;ANi\(,. (Figure on a Tomb, Museum of l,e Mans.) (Early x\uli century) coming from the northern provinces ; but they all adopted the same style in the royal city. Their workshops laid the foundations of the glorious painting of the fifteenth century. The evolution is obscure, because its manifestations are contained in numerous manuscripts which have been dispersed far and wide. But we can readily trace the progress made. First of all, the illuminators abandoned their decorative convention for realistic endeavour. Their miniatures are less suggestive of painted glass and more akin to life ; the lines lose their harshness, and discard the leaden outline which encircled the figures of coloured windows ; the colours sacrifice something of their splendour and purity in favour of modelling. The gold backgrounds are modified, and finally disappear altogether ; elements of landscape are introduced, the sky and the ground, blue and green. The painter is about to study nature. The contemporaries of Charles V were able to recognise certain aspects of their times when they turned over the leaves of a manu- script. The illuminators were no longer Benedictines in cells, but laymen at large ; their eyes were wide open to men and things. They lived near the Porte Saint-Denis, and led joyous lives, if we are to believe Christine de Pisan. They were able to depict Charles V receiving manuscripts ; they also added familiar scenes and figures of the streets to the usual iconography, and mingled contemporary anecdotes with traditional narrative. If the perspective of these small pictures is still conventional, it is at least intel- ligible ; the miniaturist has little sense of composition ; but his dis- connected juxtapositions abound in delightfully observed episodes, from which it is easy to deduce Parisian life in the time of Charles V. The appearance of landscape reveals a novel conception of 115 I 2 1 li;. 234.- AKISTnll.lC AND CAMI'ASli;. (Cathedral, Lyons.) ART IN FRANCE 235- -STATU K OF ANTOINETTE DE FONTETTE. (Museum, Dijon.) (xvnh century.) (P/iofo. de Beaii7-egarii.') painting. After they had re- nounced their gold backgrounds, the illuminators painted their little figures upon a ground of soft verdure, and under a sky of cloud- less blue. At the close of the fourteenth century these summary indications became richer and more precise. Books of Hours figure very frequently among the manuscripts, their opening pages consisting of an illustrated calendar of the months. These illustra- tions, which had long been tradi- tional, represent the occupations of humanity, and more especially work in the fields. The sculp- tors were content to show the attitudes of reaper, vintager and sower. When the illuminators had to set a landscape behind these little figures, they had to learn to distinguish the seasons by the colour of the sky and the appearance of plants. In the time of Charles V the landscapes of the miniaturists showed these distinctions, though they still relied upon certain conven- tions. The most famous of the manuscripts of this period, the " Very Rich Hours of the Duke of Berry," was illuminated for this prince by three artists from Limburg (1416). They enlivened their landscapes by representations of the castles of the royal house. Seated in his arm- chair, the old Duke, as he turned over his Hours, could travel in spirit from Poitiers to Mehun-sur-Yevre, from Vin- cennes to the Louvre or the Palais de la Cite. This FIC. 236. — IVORY TKU'TVCH OF Till! .\1VTH CENTURY. (Cluny Museum, Paris.) 116 FEUDAL ART AND CIVIC ART extraordinary work gives a vivid picture of the France of those days : the people at their work, the nobles hunting and riding, and on the heights, dominating the plain where the peasant sows or reaps, wonderful castles which have now disappeared, the last of the feudal dwellings, in which the gnmness of the old fortresses was relieved by Gothic fantasy. These modest little pic- tures have an engaging freshness which they owe to the lightness of the medium — thin body colour on parchment. Their fragile art gives an air of graceful minuteness to the world It represents. No doubt these castles, decorated like shrines, these great nobles, furred like cats and variegated as popinjays, are faithful reproductions. But con- temporary architecture and sculpture evoke a civilisation very much rougher. Illumination was not the sole kind of painting in use at the end of the fourteenth century. Certain artists were working in tempera on wooden panels. They hardly did more than amplify the little com- positions of the miniaturists. These illuminators on a large scale lack vigour ; certain hap- )-. — ui;iis.si-;i;, xvmi cicmlk (Cluny Museum, Paris.) pily inspired details show delicacy of observation ; but over-softness of colour and the abuse of gold im- pede the victorious pro- gress of Malouel, Belle- chose and Broederlam, all those Netherlandish artists who worked for the Dukes of Burgundy (Figs. 242, 244). It was at this period, in the first quarter of the fourteenth century, that two events combined to change the destiny of I-rench painting. The English invasion drove royalty, and most of the industries which ministered to its luxury, towards the South. 117 111.. 230. — LMKKHK (IF llll-; X\ I II CliNlLKV, (Cluny Museum, Paris.) ART IN FRANCE FIG. 239. —CALVARY. CE.NTK.\L Cl.i.M- P.\RTMENT OF THE NAKBONNE ALTARl'lECE (The Louvre, Paris.) Pans lost its radiating power for a considerable period. At the same time, some Northern artists, the Van Eycks, invented a new technique, which enlarged the possibihties of painting enor- mously, by giving it a robuster and more accurate instrument. But whereas this novel painting became the national art of the great Netherlandish cities, and the natural fruit of their urban civilisation, in France it flourished only in one or two provinces ; it was not, like sculpture, an au- tochthonous art ; for a long time it seemed a transplanted product ; and generous amateurs, great nobles, and wealthy burgesses, were necessary to attract and retain painters. The disasters of the French monarchy had not checked the Netherlandish immigration ; but the painters of the Low Countries made their way for the most part to the Court of Burgundy, and thence to- wards Provence and Italy. Philip the Good, Charles the Bold, and their ministers had very great painters for their portraitists ; Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden and others produced masterpieces for their Chancellor, Rolin. In these relations between Flanders and Burgundy, the Flemings owed nothing to their Burgundian surroundings ; the court of Dijon never acclimatised the Netherlandish plant ; it merely gathered its fruits. The same may be true of sculpture, but stone monuments are more durable than the panels of painters ; the works of the Carthusian monastery of Champmol, which are still in their original places, constitute a kind of local museum, from which the genius of a school seems to radiate. In its far-reaching 118 FIG. 240. — FIREPLACE, XVTH CENTURY, FROM LE M.\NS. (Cluny Museum, Paris.) FEUDAL ART AND CIVIC ART expansion, Netherlandish painting founded colonies even more active than that of Dijon ; it reached Italy by way of Germany and France ; Flemish or Dutch painters travelled to Genoa, traversing the East of France from north to south. The great highway which served the fairs of Champagne, Lyons, and Beaucaire, was an artistic road. On this road, Avignon, which had lately lost its Popes, and Aix, one of King Rene's capitals, were hahing-places for travelling artists. As early as the fourteenth century, Sienese and Giottesque art had entered into France by Avignon. The halls of the papal palace were decorated with Italian frescoes, and, doubtless, many a motive reached Pans, and inspired its painters and miniaturists ; in the famous Narbonne panels, in spite of the sharpness of the Gothic drawing, we recognise softness of Sienese compositions (Fig. 239). In the fifteenth century, the painters who passed through Avignon brought with them the precise style of the North. One of them is known to us, Enguerrand Charonton, of Laon, who painted a pale small- featured Virgin, crowned by the Father and the Son, and attended on either side by a multitude of heavenly figures (1453). This ap- parition dominates a vision of Pro- vence, a parched landscape with arid hills over which white houses are scattered (Fig. 248). A mys- terious anonymous masterpiece, a Virgin of Pity, formerly at Ville- neuve-d Avignon, translates into paint one of those pathetic groups 11,. 241.— 1 HE l.l.MliLKG I;Ko111K1.) were open to foreign influences, the France of the king at Bourges had contracted towards its centre, and in its isolation was long separated from those Netherlandish provinces, the artistic life of which had been so closely intermingled with its own. Painting con- tinued to flourish ; it was an art full of delicate originality, but it had all the weakness of convalescence ; it lacked a strong centre in which to take root, and profound local traditions in which to find guidance. Tours, Bourges and Moulins all took an equal part in the existence of this acephalous school ; it is known as the School of the Loire ; and like the Loire, the great artistic stream flowed, mdolent and indecisive, in an over-vast bed. The Tourangeau, Jean Fouquet (1415-1485), seems to have been the most distmguished painter of the reigns of Charles VII and Louis XI. It would be evident that he owes very little to the Netherlands, if certain critics had not insisted on crediting him with one or two very fine anonymous portraits, m which the impeccable mastery and precision of Flemish art, or of an art derived therefrom, is clearly manifested. Four paintings by him are practically authenticated ; they immortalise the most illustrious figures of the monarchy in the middle of the fifteenth century : Charles VII, "the very victorious king" (Fig. 258) ; Jouvenel des Ursms, his counsellor (Fig. 257) : Etienne Chevalier, Treasurer of France ; and finally a Virgin, which atones for its poverty of 121 l-u;. 246. — SAINT SIKEKKIN. Oluseum, Avignon.) ART IN FRANCE FIG. 247. — JACQUE.MART DE HESDIX. THE MARRIAGE OF CANA. LAT. M.S. gig. (Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.) technique by its interest as a probable portrait of Agnes Sorel. Each of these works shows the same quahties and the same defects. The painter saw his models clearly, and has cha- racterised them admirably : the king — a poor frail, shivenn gcreature; Jouve- nel, an obese and apoplectic burgess. But though his eye is clear, the paint- er's hand is not very sure ; the drawing is flaccid ; the brush of the miniaturist IS more successful with figures in which vagueness becomes grace. He illuminated a Book of Hours for Etienne Chevalier, and a History of the Jews by Josephus, on which he has lavished delicate impressions of his country and of his time. The lightness of the technique, the limpidity of the colour, are in perfect harmony with the natural aspects of Touraine, the soft curves of the blue hills which border the valley of the Loire, and make a background for the little figures in front. The river runs lazily through its meadows, the sky is a light azure, luminous and trans- parent. Sometimes a town with its ramparts, or a castle, white and new, rises above the river. It is easy also to recognise certain famous Parisian buildings, Notre Dame, the Sainte Chapelle, Vincennes, the Bastille, the gallows at Montfau- con. Scenes in sacred history are enacted by the contemporaries of Charles VII and Louis XI ; sometimes we see the heavy men-at-arms who expelled the English marching through the courtly throng, well-to-do citizens discussing their affairs, or gossips chatting round a newly delivered woman. It is- worth FIG. 248. — ENt.UEKK.-WI) CH.XRO.NTI ).\. THE CORONATION OF THE VIRGIN. FR.^G.MENT OF THE I'ICTURE AT VILLENEUVE-LES-AVIGNON. {Photo. Langlois.) 122 FEUDAL ART AND CIVIC ART l-U.. 249. VIKtilN ilF I'llV. hK(iM vii.leneuve-les-avr;non. (The Louvre, Paris.) while to linger over these landscapes and their httle figures. It IS not often that French painters show US their native land and its peasants with such sin- cerity (Figs. 252,253). Nevertheless, French art was about to accept the motives of an alien art. Fouquet went to Italy, and brought back with him drawings of arabesque and pilasters, a whole system of orna- mentation in the style of Michelozzo, which he used with more zeal than discretion. The spectacle of this Tourangeau, of the middle of the fifteenth century, sacri- ficing the fantasies of flamboyant Gothic for the more methodical and less capri- cious decoration of Italy, is a significant one. This assimilative facility is found elsewhere in Fou- q u e t ' s circle, in one of his s u c c e s- sors, the miniatur- ist Jean B o u r- dichon. The Book of Hours of Anne of Brittany (Figs. 260, 261 ; 1508), shows a sustained sweetness not with- out insipidity. The painter hardly looks at the living world around hirn ; his brush delights in vague forms and soft colours . Another agreeable artist has left some charming paintings, the most important of which is in the Cathedral at Moulins. Like Bourdichon, this lie. 250. — JEAN FOUljUEI. PORTRAIT OF THE I'AINTEK, ENAMEL, (The Louvre, Paris.) m.. 251. — MCDC.AS IKllMENT. rilE HUKNING llUSIl. CATHEDK.VL OK AIX IX I'KOVENCE. {Photo. Ncurdein. 23 ART IN FRANCE MU. 252. JKAN FdUyUEr. ADORATION OF THE MAGI. ETIENNE chevalier's BOOK: OF HOURS. (Cond^ Museum, Chantilly.) " Master of Moulins " (Figs. 256, 259, 262, 263, 264) was primarily the devout portraitist of the Blessed Virgin (between 1480 and 1500) ; he painted her pale and delicate, and sometimes placed on her head the white coif of the Berrichonnewomen. Even when he shows her in the splendour of her heavenly court, she still preserves the ingenuous air of a pretty peasant girl. The great nobles and high-born ladies of France have not yet the aristocratic appearance which the Renaissance was presently to give them. The types of the district are as recog- nisable in their faces as are in the landscapes the soft and verdant un- dulations of the Burgundian soil. But this attractive art lacks vigour ; we feel that it would be easily influenced. Its finest quality is a delicate sensibility, a natural elegance which corrects the native clumsiness of the northern figures, without, however, giving them the superb attitudes of Italian art, or its learnedly contrived mise-en-scene. At this date French art gave itself up to an ideal of elegance and beauty, and seemed, like the art of all the rest of Europe, to attune itself to that of Italy. Memling and Gerard David allowed their Flemish realism to be softened by the breath from the South, and in Jean Bourdichon's miniatures we seem every instant to recognise some figure of a Virgin or Saint Sebastian from Umbria. The harsh accent of Gothic art is mel- lowed by a new harmony. No centre could have been better adapted to reconcile the disso- nances between the Germanic north FIG. 253. — JEAN FOUyUET. SIE(;E of JERICHO. HISTORY OF THE JEWS, BY JOSEI'HUS. (Ijiljliotheque Nationale, Paris.) {Photo. Bcrthatid.) 124 FEUDAL ART AND CIVIC ART and the Latin south. The strongest antipathies could not resist the cor- dial eclecticism of the hospitality of Touraine. All that the French aristocracy needed in order to wor- ship the beauty that had been in the making for a century on the other side of the Alps was to know it. But we should be giving a very inadequate idea of this expiring Gothic art, if we should depict it as entirely feudal, executing works of sculpture and painting only to adorn tombs, to commemorate the piety of donors, or to delight the cultivated taste of wealthy patrons. In addi- 1 u;. 255. — KKA<;.MK.\C 111 AT I.A CHAISE-UlIiU. the pictures with donors, are works of official piety. The artless Vir- gins of Pity to be found in many village churches, and some few paintings coarsely frescoed on old walls, bear a closer relation to com- mon humanity. If these popular works had been THK UANCK vy DKAIII (Photo. KcKidcin.) FIG. 254. — CKILING OP THE CHAl'EL IN JACQUES CCEUK's HOUSE AT BOURGES. (Photo. Neurtfein.) tion to the statuary of the rich, their brilliant and difficult painting, there was also in the fifteenth century a popular art less easy to know, but which expresses the soul of the age with a direct and often brutal sincerity. ^The sculpture of tombs. 56. — THE MASIEU OK .M<1L1.1NS. ITIE Vila, IN IN (il.OUV, WITH THE OON(>KS, I'lEkKE DE I'.OUNl'.ON AND ANNE DE BEAUl.IEU. (Cathedral of Moulins.) (Phoio. Ncu?-ihiii.) 125 ART IN FRANCE I'll.. 257. — JEAN FOUyUET. PORTRAIT OF JOUVENEL DES VRSINS. (The Louvre, Paris.) KK;. 25a. — JEAN KOUIJUE'I'. rORTRAIT OF CHARLES \1I. (The Louvre, Paris.) better preserved, we should have a clearer insight into the soul of that period. There is one motive in particular which seems to have been dear to the humanity of the time, and to have expressed its deepest preoccupations ; this was the Dance of Death, living beings conducted to the grave by grinning skeletons. It appeared first, no doubt, in Paris, in 1424, in the charnel-house of the Church of the Holy Innocents, and thence it spread throughout France ; we find scattered traces of it now at Kermaria, in Brit- tany, where gambolling skeletons are shown tor- menting monks ; at La Chaise-Dieu, where figures outlined m black show a white silhouette against a background of red ochre (Fig. 255) ; in the cloister of the Aitre Saint - Maclou (Rouen), ^ this Dance of Death is carved in wood and is slowly crumbling away. FIG. 239. — THE MASTER OF MOULI.NS. THE NATIVITY. 1 j^^ ^^^-^^^ cemetery of Saint (Bishop s Palace, Autun.) {Photo. Langlois.) Maclou 126 FEUDAL ART AND CIVIC ART lU;. 260. — JICAN I'.OUKUICHON. NATIVITY. MINIATURE IN TIIF, liOOk' OK IIOUKS.OP ANNE OF r.kllTANV. (Ilililititliciiiie Natioiiale, I'aiis.) {/'/lolo. Ileri/iami.) From the mo- ment of its birth, engravmg laid hold of this motive ; it propagated among the people that ser- mon on death, which, no doubt, har- monised with the pre-occu- pations of the fifteenth cen- tury. Men had suffered both from civil war and foreign invasion ; in those days of pillage, famine lie. jni. — |1-:a\ uoi kiik IK in. AXNK OK Bl;H TANN' AM) UKK I'Al'UON S.MNTS. MINIAI TRIC IN THE HOOK OK HOLKS OK ANNE OK liNITT.XNV. (I'.il)liothcquc N.-itionale, Paris.) {l'/w/,>. Berthaud.) and pestilence, death was ever present, and the thought that all, from the beggar to the King, the Emperor, and the Pope were equal before it, gave a kind of vindictive satisfaction to the poor. A sort of burlesque and sinister frenzy accordingly informs all these poor little puppets ; the dance is attuned to the crash of drums and the rattle of skeletons. Painters were not singular in their expres- sion of this horrible gaiety at the exploits of death. The aspects of putrefaction, described with such crudity by Villon, were depicted with strange insistence by sculptors in their stone corpses. But the time was at hand when all these rude works were to disappear before a more cultured art. The sinister phantoms of the night were to vanish in the radiant light of the Renaissance. IK,. 2b2.--TllE MASIEK Ol' MOII.INS. IIEKRE 1)E liOUKIlON AND ST. I'ETEK. ('I'liu I ouvre, Paris.) 127 ART IN FRANCE l-u;. 263. — THE .MASTER OF MOULl.Ns. THE MAGDALEN AND AN UNKNOWN. (The Louvre, Paris.) How indeed should Gothic art have survived, when the very con- ditions of Gothic craftsmanship dis- appeared with the Middle Ages ? Even in the fifteenth century the arts were no longer designed, as formerly, to satisfy collective needs. They emanated from more strongly marked individualities, and were addressed to special personages ; amateurs and artists began to recog- nise and to seek each other. Even in architecture, the bravura additions made to the great cathedrals in the Flamboyant period have the char- acter of purely personal fantasies, decorative caprices designed by an mgemous architect to gratify a donor. They show no trace of that common thought and that mechanical necessity which were formerly com- bined for the erection of cathedrals. The sculpture of the period demanded greater dexterity and a more refined training. The " imagier " of the thirteenth century carved figures which, though beautiful, were simplified and sum- mary, proper, in fact, to an idealistic age and a monumental art. In the thirteenth century, craftsmen of the second rank were capable of produc- ing very fine statues, just as unculti- vated voices were able to take their part excellently m plain-song choirs. But at the close of the Middle Ages plastic art had become more realistic, and figures more individual ; sculptors and painters wished to produce portraits. For this difficult art, dexterous craftsmen were required, and a scientific technique. Certain skilful artists emerged from the anonymous crowd of popular " im- agiers " ; their fame spread abroad, and great nobles sent for them from FIG. 264. — THE iMA.STEK OF MOULINS. ANNE DE BEAUJEU AND ,ST. JOHN. (The Touvre, Paris.) 128 Portrait of the President de Laa^e LARGiLLiiiRE. (The Louvre, Paris.) FEUDAL ART AND CIVIC ART afar. The same thing happened in painting. Mosaic and painted glass were complex and elaborate crafts, but they were, after all, mechanical ; even fresco had been reduced to such a simplicity of process that, in the Romanesque period, artists of no particular genius could practise it successfully. And now, miniaturists and painters of altar-pieces begin to attempt a task so difficult that the goal is never reached : to copy nature and reproduce the aspects of life. The traditions of the workshop no longer suffice for art. Very soon originality will be required, and artists will be esteemed in proportion as they shall have rejected the tra- ditions which, in the thirteenth cen- tury, were held to constitute the whole of art. A new passion, the love of beautiful forms and beautiful colours, takes the place of religious sentiment as this gradually dies down. The arts slowly change their raison delre. Meanwhile, as the mediaeval soul the HI,. 205. — SCENE KKl-'.M rHE KO.MANCE, " I.ES ^CHECS AlIOUREL'X." (liiljliothciiiie Xationale, Fr. i\IS. 43.) egend, passed away, that rich store-house of tenderness and wonder of Christian art all but expired in the dully atmosphere. Artlessness is not to be preserved in mature age ; if it is prolonged, it becomes intellectual debility. The day came when art had to put away the caressing forms of childish speech, and resolutely accept the severe expression of adult reason. The im- agination of artists turned more and more to the antique mythology, on which religion had no longer any hold. Art and Christianity nevertheless came together again from time to time, 129 K lu,. 201). — (.iioiK OK I 111'; t:iu KCH oE I. A ciiAisE-niEi-. (P/iolo. Ato'iuiiicnts Ilistorigucs.) ART IN FRANCE and their divorce was never complete. But henceforth they treated each other gravely, without the familiar ease of the days when they led a common life. These stately personages no longer remem- bered that they had played together as children. KIG. 267. — TAl'ESTKY OF THE ATOCALYPSE, AT ANGERS. {Photo. IlIoHniiicnts nistoriqucs.) BIBLIOGRAPHY V. Leclerc and E. Renan, Dis- cours sur I'etal dcs Leltres el dcs Beaux Arts au XIV'' Steele. Paris, 1865, 2 vols. -Lecoy de la Marche, Exlraits des Comptes et Memoriaux du roi Rene--, Paris, 1873 ; Le roi Rene. Paris. 1875. 2_ vols. Mgr Dehaisnes. Histoire de I' Art dans la htandre, I'.Artois et le Hainaul. Lille, 1886, 3 vols. ; L Art flamand en Franee-.-(.R.S.B.A.D..\S9 2)- J.-M. Richard, Mahout, Comtesse d'Artois et de Bour ogne. Paris, 1887. C. Enlart, Les Origines anglaises du style flamboyant (Bul- letin de I' Union syndicale des Archi- tectes franfais, 1908). — L. Des- rosiers. La Cathedrale de Moulins, Moulins, 1871.- Duiay. L'Eglise de Brou et ses Architectes, Lyon, 1879. — Abbe Fossey. Monographie de la Cathedrale d'Evrtux, Evreux, 1898. W\o\\el-\^e-Duc, Essai sur I'. Architecture militaire au Moyen Age, Paris, 1854; Histoire d'une forteresse, Paris, 1874. - E. Lefevre-Pontalis, Le Chateau de Coucy. Paris, 19UV. — A. Robert Le Chateau de Pierrefonds. Paris, n. d. -E. Viollet-Le-Duc, La Cite de Car- cassonne, Paris, 1878. -Ph. Lauzun, Le Chateau de Bonaguit, 2nd ed., Paris, 1884. A. Darcel, L' Architecture civile au Moyen Age (G- B. .4- 1862, II). Gaignieres. /^ecuei'/ de tombeaux (dravj/ings in the Bibliotheque Nationale). E. Male, L'Art chretien a la fin du Moyen Age. Paris, 1908 G. Enlart, La Satire des moours dans I Icnnographie du Moyen Age (Mercure de France. Dec, 1909, and Jan., 1910). L. de Laborde, Les Dues de Bourgogne.Far'n, 1849-1851. 3 vols. Bern. Prost, Quelques documents sur l Histoire des Arts en France (G. B. .4., 1 887, I) ; Documents sur les Artistes dijonnais au XV siecle (G. B. A., 1890, II, et 1891, 1) ; Les Arts a la cour du Due de Berry (G. B- A-, 1895. II.) -A. Perrault-Dabot. L".4r( cri Bourgogne, Paris, 1894. A. Kleinclausz, Claus Sluter. Paris, 1905. A. Germain, Les Neerlandais en Bourgogne. Brussels, 1909. N. Rondot, /acqucs Morel (R. S-B- A.D., 1889).— Abbe Requin, Le Sculpteur Jacques Morel (.R. S. B. A. D-, 1890). Abbe Requin, Antoine le Moiturier. (R- S- B- A. D.. 1890). Marquet de Vasselot, Antoine le Moiturier (A/on. Piol, III, 247). P. Mantz, La Peinture franfaise du IX' au XV L si'ecle, Paris, 1898. L. Delisle, Le Cabi- net des Manuscrits de la Bibliotheque Nation- ale, Paris, 1868-1881, 3 vols.-G. Graf Vilz- thum. Die Pariser Miniaturmalerei, Leipzig, 1907. H. Martin, Les Miniaturistes franqais. Paris, 1906. J. -J Guiffrey, Inventaires de Jean, Due de Berry, Paris. 1 894- 1 896, 2 vols.- L. Delisle, Les Heures du Due de Berry (G. B. A., 1884, I). A. de Champeaux and P. Gauchery, Les Arts a la cour du Due de Berry. Paris, 1894. P. Durrleu, /-cs T^rcs Riches Heures du Due de Berry, Paris, 1904. H. Bouchot. Les Primiti/s franr^ais. Paris, 1904. M. Poele, Les Primilifs parisiens, Paris, 1904. Abbe Requin, Documents inedits sur les peinlres d Avignon (R. S. B- A. D-). 1889). Abbe Requin. Une CEuvre de Nicholas Froment {R. S- B. A. D., 1902), — G. Lafenestre, Nicholas Froment, iR A A M-, 1897, II). M. Friedlaender, Die Votiftafel des Etienne Chevalier von Fouquel IjahrbiJcherol the Berlin Museum, 1897). P. Leprieur.' Jean Fouquet (.R- A. A. M., 1897. I). .— F. Gruyer, Les Quarantc Fouquet (at Chantilly), Paris, 1900. — G. Lafenestre, Jean 130 . 268. — TAI'ESTKV OF THE APOCALYPSE, AT ANGEKS. {Photo. Monuiiieuts Histoiiqiies.) FEUDAL ART AND CIVIC ART Fouquet (Recue des Deux-Mondes, Jan. 15. 1902.) P. Durrieu, Les" Antiquities juddiques" de Josephe a la Biblioth'cque Nationale (G. B. A . 1906, II). C. Benoit. La Pcinture francaise a la fin du XV" siicle (G. B. A., 1901-2.) E. Mate, /. Bourdichon (G. B. A.. 1902 and 1904) R Maulde de la Claviere, Jean Perrial, dit Jean de Paris, peintie de Charles VIII. Pans, I 896. IIG. 269. — THE .SO-C.\M-lJ) IAII>rKV Ml- THK UMCORX. (Cluny Museum, Paris.) 131 K Z FIC;. 270. — CHATEAU DE CHANTILLY. PART II CLASSICAL ART CHAPTER I THE TRANSITION FROM THE GOTHIC STYLE TO CLASSICAL ART The Transformation of Mediacal Society, and the Dawn of Classical Art. — Its Italian and Antique Origin. The Classical Revolution in each Province. The Monarchy in Touraine, the Influence of Royalty. Architecture : the Successive Transformations of I'orlresses into Sporting Lodges and Classical Palaces. Religious Architecture. Scul iture of the Tra- ditional Style and Statuary in the Italian Afanner. The Tombs at Saint-Denis : Jean Goujon, and Germain Pilon. Painting : The Italians at bontainebleau. The Portrait- Painters: The Cloucts. How French Art, from Gothic ana Christian.',became] Classical and Pagan. After the death of Louis XI, and the recovery from the English wars, a new energy began to stir in every province, and for more than a half century there was an artistic production as prolific as it is difficult to define. Two styles and two ages intermingled, until such time as the new overcame the old and took its place. At the accession of Charles VIII, French art was still mediaeval and Gothic ; in the time of Henry II, it had become classical, and was to remain so. These two styles, the one upheld by a long tradition, the other by the charm of novelty, both benefited by the revival of national energy, and Gothic art was never more exuberant than 132 GOTHIC STYLE TO CLASSICAL ART FIG. 271. — CHATEAU D AMbOISE. {Photo. Neurdein.) at the moment when it no longer flourished alone on French soil. But the new art was exclusive ; it was permeated by the spirit and the severity of system ; it aimed logically at ne- cessary consequences, and rejected all compromise ; Gothic art resisted less stoutly, and was soon eliminated. Architects began by admitting a few pilasters, and ended by building classical temples. It will be sufficient to juxtapose the names of Louis XI and Francis I, and the civilisations they evoke, to suggest the im- portance of the moral revolution which French society, or at least the monarchical world, the heart of that society, had undergone. The France of the thirteenth century, that of the bishops and burgesses, had given to Christian Europe Gothic art, the art of the Church and the Communes. Gothic art, born in the lle-de-France, had spread more especially throughout northern Europe. It was absolutely the creation of the Christian society of the Middle Ages. Classical art was the continuation, or the resumption of an- tique art, firstly on Italian soil, whence it had never entirely disappeared, and then in the other coun- tries of Europe, where it appeared for the first time. Gothic art was so natural a consequence of mediaeval society that it had ceased to be well adapted fo the France of the sixteenth century. Architects had invented the cathedral to -receive the dense popula- tions of the great communes ; but the active and ardent faith of 133 FK;. 272. — CHATKAU DE CHAIM"\T. ART IN FRANCE FIG 273.— CHATEAU DE PLESSIS-Lfes-TOURS. {P/ioto. Lc Richc.) these populations was a necessary factor in its execution, and cathe- drals the building of which had been interrupted waited in vain for completion. Modern churches, less immense in plan, no longer demanded the mgenious and complex construction of the Gothic vault, and architects found less lofty vaults without flying buttresses more economical. In monarchical France, the feudal fortresses were irrevocably condemned. Even in the representative arts, the men of the thir- teenth century had a system of images by which they expressed their emotions ; but in the sixteenth century this iconography no longer corresponded to the collective sentiment. The secular mind had outgrown the system of scholastic symbols and the imagery of the Golden Legend ; even to believers, certain traditional motives began to seem somewhat childish ; the men of the Reformation and those of the Counter- Reformation were almost at one in their rejection or amendment of these. For some considerable time past, sculptors and painters had been no longer exclusively at the service of their religion. They were attracted by living forms, they were less absorbed in the Christ- ian drama, and more in- tent on the beauty of human expression. The artists of Italy, and more especially those of Florence, had preceded them on this path ; they were at the root of that classicism which was about to revivify French art. After the idealism of the thirteenth century, the Florentines, like other artists, 134 FIG. 274. — FORTRESS OF PEKl'UiNAN. (P/ioto. Neiiriiciii.) GOTHIC STYLE TO CLASSICAL ART {rhoto. 5. — CHATEAU I)E MEILLANT (CHER.) " Monuincjits Hisiorit/iies.") had at first practised a direct and brutal realism ; but in the course of the fifteenth century the}' had applied themselves to the study of the human form with such passion and method that they had taken up the thread of antique art. The Gothic artists, men of the north, Frenchmen, Flemings or Germans, contemplating Florentine figures, realised how uncertain, timid and incomplete their own plastic science still was. French art, like all the others, had to graduate in its humanities at the school of Florence. Like the others again, it lost something of its originality in the process. Florentine art, indeed, reached its goal m a universal ideal which it recognised in the works of antiquity ; it was therefore able to take up the Graeco- Roman tradition, and, following in its wake, French artists gradually discovered antiquity beyond Italy. The French intellect in its turn was to adapt to its own uses that classic language which had been already refined by the Greek and the Florentine intellect. The Renaissance, or in other words the penetration of Italian methods into northern art, was a European, and not merely a French phenomenon. Its manifestations are to be traced not only in the royal domain, but in every part of France, and are as clearly seen in the provinces, as yet but loosely attached to the monarchy, as in the monarchical centre. The agents of this classicism were the travelling artists so numerous at the close of the Middle Ages, the Italians in- vited to France by private patrons, by cities, and by the king, the Frenchmen and Flemings who I-IG. 276.- CHATEAU DE I'l.OlS. LOUIS .Xll's ENTRANCE, 135 ART IN FRANCE FIG. 277. — CHATEAU DE bLOIS. FRANCIS I'S STAIRCASE. returned from Italy with portfolios full of drawings. And thus it came about that classical forms made their appearance more or less everywhere during the first thirty years of the sixteenth century. Churches, tombs and mansions were transformed even m the reign of Louis XII ; mythological figures in the Italian manner took their places in all the traditional arts of France, in tapestries, in illuminated manuscripts, in the painted glass of Pinaigrier, as in the enamels of Leonard Limosin and the Peni- cauds. It was the Italian pottery which put Bernard Palissy on the track of a new technique. Classic decoration was adapted to the par- ticular art of each province. Local tradition in every district attaches a famous name to this diffuse evolu- tion : Hugues Sambin at Dijon, Philibert Delorme at Lyons, Ligier-Richier in Lorraine, Dominique Florentin in Champagne, Jacques Marchand at Orleans, Michel Colombe in Touraine, Pierre Sohier at Caen, Jean Goujon at Rouen, Nicolas Bache- lier at Toulouse, Leonard Limosin at Limoges, Ber- nard Palissy in Samtonge, Jean Cousm we know not where. Toulouse, the capital of Romanesque art and a centre where Gothic art had been but coldly re- ceived, was better dis- posed towards the Re- naissance style, in which it recognised the classical and Latin spirit. Nicholas Bachelier placed columns of stone and marble upon the Toulousain bricks ; at the Hotel d'Assezat they are superposed, and form, together with the 136 FIG. 278.- -CHATE.'VU 1> .VZAY-LE-KIDEAIJ. {Photo. Neitrdein.) GOTHIC STYLE TO CLASSICAL ART KIG. 279. — CHATEAU DE CI1AMI50KU. {I'hoto. " Montiinents Ilistoriiptes.") entablatures and openings of the facade, a very skilful arrangement by which the dismal heavmess of the brick structure is relieved (Fig. 193). On several private houses the Co- rinthian order bears a rich decoration of sculptured marble. One of the lateral doors of Saint Sernin, and the door of the Dalbade are among the most charming adapta- tions of the Italian style in France. The great Eastern region, as yet but feebly welded to the centre, that ancient Lotharingia tra- versed by the artisans of the north on the way to Italy, was also to be permeated by the classical spirit. Lyons was the city of great fairs, a metropolis of French commerce ; since the time of Louis XII, it was the centre whence the king watched the affairs of Italy. Aix, where King Rene's Flemings had worked, readily accepted the Italian forms ; on the doors of his cathedral, Gothic ornament is superposed on the Italian arabesques. Avignon still received the artists of the north, but they now worked in the Italian manner. In the middle of the century, when there was a great dearth of painters m the kingdom, a Champenois, Simon of Chalons, estab- lished in Provence, in- troduced figures copied from Michelangelo and Raphael in his religious compositions with some skill (Fig. 363). When she lost her Dukes, Burgundy also lost her artistic person- ality ; but Dijon still en- joyed its admirable situa- tion on the highway to Italy. This city also had its Renaissance, marked by a robust exuberance of style and a certain heaviness. 137 i.f- r I'lt;. 2S0. — CHATEAU DF, SAINT-CF.RMAIN". ART IN FRANCE FIG. 281. — CHATEAU DE CHENONXEAU. (P licit o. Neurdcin.) It finds expression in the facades of various mansions, and in that of the Church of Saint Michel, as also in the furniture carved by Hugues Sambin (Fig. 309). Franche-Comte, rich in black marbles and in alabaster which was used by the Dijon sculp- tors, had lived in artistic dependence upon Bur- gundy. The great nobles had caused splendid mau- soleums to be erected for themselves. In the six- teenth century these tombs lost their Gothic character, and even their religious significance ; pilasters and arabesques replaced pointed arches and pinnacles, and pagan figures were associated with Christian personages. At Brou, a church was built to shelter tombs, rich monuments in which the Renaissance style mingles with Flamboyant art. Commissioned by an Austrian princess, the grand-daughter of the Dukes of Burgundy, betrothed in the first instance to the King of France, afterwards married to the King of Spain, and soon a widow, and executed by a bevy of artists and workmen, among whom were Germans, Flemings, Picards and Italians, this exuberant work combines the style of two ages, the Gothic and the Classical, and reveals the cosmopolitanism of a pro- vince as yet imperfectly attached to its powerful neighbours (Figs. 305, 306, 307). Champenois art, on the other hand, shows a very clearly defined character, above all in sculpture. From this period date a number of Calvaries, of sepulchres, and of single figures of saints, with faces generally refined, and somewhat contorted, in the manner of the Flemish 138 Fiq. 282. — CHATEAU d'usse. {Pkoto. Netirdeht.) GOTHIC STYLE TO CLASSICAL ART FIG. 203. — lilKUS EN'E VIEW OF CHANTILLV. (From the album, " Paris vu en ballon," bv A. Schoelchcr and O. l'ecu.L;i>.) painters ; they are perfectly distinct from the Tourangeau type, those round, smooth faces characteristic of Fouquet's worthies. Troyes has preserved a touching St. Martha, with ^ a fine austere face ; the ^ careful servant exorcises the town with a gesture of dramatic simplicity (Fig. 321). A Visitation shows us two housewives in Sunday dress (Fig. 322) coming from mass ; the I folds of their gowns, the embroidery of the stuffs, the ribbons, the jewels, the long plaits, and even the bunch of keys, make up an accumulation of details that please the eye, although the colour is no longer there to complete the effect ; there is no trace here of that generalising modelling which Italian masters and antique works were soon to teach. This southern province. Champagne, witnessed the efflorescence of a picturesque statuary akin to that of the Flemings and Germans ; wood and stone were elaborately worked and afterwards illuminated with brilliant colours. This art was dear to a luxurious society, and at Troyes, as at Nuremburg, sculptors trifled with the accessories of costume. But about 1 540 Dominique Florentin brought from Italy a new manner of treating marble ; the chisel of sculptors was thence- forth applied to the modelling of supple bodies and light draperies. In Lorraine the Dukes had tombs erected for themselves in the Italian style ; Charles IV built a memorial chapel imitated from that of the Medici. A few masterpieces were evolved from the soul of the people. In the middle of the sixteenth century arose an artist, Ligier-Richier, 139 2S4. — run OVAI. C'HKT AT lONTAINTlU.nAl'. ART IN FRANCE FIG. 285. — HORSE-SHOE STAIRCASE AT FONTAINEBLEAU. who showed himself capable of adapting Italian forms to Christian sentiment. A large number of religious sculptures are ascribed to him, for the most part in marble. The tomb of Saint Mihiel is by an artist who has preserved the powerful emotion of the Middle Ages, but who knows how to balance a composition in the classical manner, and to give elegance or violence to his attitudes. The Magdalen bends to kiss the Saviour's feet with a sinuous suppleness, an in- clination of the neck which reveals a technical mastery that verges on mannerism. At Bar-le- Duc there is a skeleton due to this same art, which elevates the ancient motives by the elegance and nobility of the new style. The skeleton, on which some fragments of flesh are still hanging, is mediaeval in its inspiration ; but it was carved by a learned anato- mist, who has given this figure of a Gothic charnel-house the noble attitude of an antique orator (Figs. 331-333). Like all the provinces in which the Flamboyant Style had flourished, Normandy, with its two capitals, acclaimed the new art. Scarcely had the Palais de Justice and the Tour de Beurre been completed, when Italian ornament began to make its appear- ance on facades and tombs. The Chateau de Gaillon, built for the Cardinal d'Amboise in the time of Louis XII, combines all sorts of novel amenities with the pictur- esque arrangement of a fifteenth century chateau. Two magnificent tombs in the Lady Chapel of Rouen Cathedral seem to have fixed two moments of this artistic reformation. The 140 FIG. 286. — bird's eye view OF FONTAINEULEAU. (From the album. " Paris vu en ballon," by A. Schoelcher et O. Decugis.) GOTHIC STYLE TO CLASSICAL ART 2S7. — FRANCIS I's <;AI.LEKV AT FONTAINEBLEAl'. KI<;. 288. — HENRY Il's BALL-ROOM AT FONTAINEBLEAU. first, that of Georges d'Amboise (Fig. 341), has a rich ornament of arabesques and pilasters, a floriated decoration m the manner of Michelozzo, such as the men of the early Renaissance were in the habit of applying to Gothic buildings. The tomb of the Marquis de Breze (Fig, 346), a slightly later work, with its portico of columns surmounted by Caryatides, is a monument in the classical manner, in spite of its equestrian statue and its realistic recumbent figure. At Caen, Pierre Sohier (Fig. 304) was the author of an exquisite combination in which exuberant forms borrowed from Italian motives replace the restless lines of the Mamboyant Style. At the close of the Middle Ages, Brittany had shown a great artistic vital- ity ; parishioners crowned their churches with airy spires, nobles and citizens built solid fortresses. After the sixteenth century, at the period when France abandoned mediaeval forms of sculpture and archi- tecture, Brittany held aloof from the common move- ment. The peninsula FIG. 280.- 141 -THE LOUVRE : LESCOT S WIXG ON THE LEFT. / ART IN FRANCE 290.- -HOTEL UK VILLE OF LA KOCHEI.LE. remained isolated, lying as it did outside the great international highways, by means of which that interchange between Italy and the North was carried on, destined first to trans- form, and then to suppress Gothic architecture. Thenceforth, Breton art was behind French art as a whole ; its Calvaries continued to be rude m execution ; its ' imagiers " talked a patois, and were Ignorant of the learned language which all Europe had borrowed from Italy. Among these Breton Cal- varies, the most ancient, that of Plougastel, dates from the sixteenth century. At the height of the classic period, the Plougastel Calvary preserved the conceptions, the attitudes, the costumes of the Middle Ages, and a purely rustic style. There is nothing in this naivete, touching as it is, to cause us to regret that French art had accepted the Italian discipline and antique culture (Figs. 326, 327, 329). When we come to Touraine, we touch the very heart of national existence ; here it was that the blood of the decrepit monarchy, impoverished by war and anarchy, had once more begun to pulse vigorously ; here it was that the kings of France had fled for sanctuary, before they took to sojourning here for pleasure ; and here it was that the destinies of French art were decided, in the strongly united France of Francis I and Henry II. Among the causes which favoured classicism, we must reckon the influence of a monarchy under the omnipotent Francis I. Since art had become independent of religion, it had 142 FIG. 291. — COURT OF THE HOTEL CARNAV'ALET, PARIS. GOTHIC STYLE TO CLASSICAL ART FIG. 292. — THE LOU\"RE. DOOR KNOWN AS JEAN GOUJOn'S DOOR. often accepted service under a king. The king knew that one sure means of immortahty was to associate himself with the work of artists, and to attach his name to imperishable works. Many an Italian Maecenas had set the example. Francis I, Louis XIV and Napoleon successively engaged this force in their service, and concentrated the artistic energies of France for their own ag- grandisement. The civilisation of towns and of ancient communes was slowly effaced day by day in the general life ; it was dominated by the more brilliant centre of the court. This centralisation naturally tended to favour classicism at the expense of those provincial traditions and local arts which were so flourishing at the close of the Middle Ages ; the somewhat abstract generality of its principles made it acceptable and at home everywhere, and its very universality demonstrated the unity of the kingdom. The entry of the French into Milan, Florence, and Rome during the wars of Charles VIII, Louis XII and Francis I was merely an incidental cause in an inevitable evolution. Even had these wars never taken place, French art would have passed from the Gothic to the classic phase ; for no country in Europe, neither Spain, nor Flanders, nor Germany, was able to preserve its originality in face of the seduc- tions o( Italy. But in a monarchical and aristocratic country like France, the periodical descent of its king and Its nobles into Italy naturally hastened the adoption of ultra- montane fashions by imposing them at the very heart of French life, the court of the king. Louis XI was purely Gothic. But in 1495, his son, Charles VIII, wrote from Naples, saying hew he had been 143 l-Hi. 293. — HOTEL D ASSEZAT, TOULOUSE. ART IN FRANCE FIG. 294.— HOTEL BOURGTH^KOULDE, ROUEN. dazzled by the beauty and richness of the paintings ; he had already made up his mind to bring back Itahan artists to decorate Amboise. Some years later Louis XII declared to the Florentines that he was anxious to employ " Master Leonard, their painter." It was, however, only Francis I who succeeded in attracting the great Florentine. The kings companions, visiting the galleries of the palaces, and the gardens of the villas, marvelled at the luxury and the smiling charm which " the fair speech of Master Alain Chartier, the subtlety of Master Jean de Meung, and the hand of Fouquet would be power- less to set forth, describe or paint." For this Gothic feudality, such a civilisation was a new thing, fashioned by masters in the art of enjoyment. Fouquet, however, had been in Italy as early as the middle of the fifteenth century. He had admired Michelozzo's ornamental style, and on his return had decorated the background of his portraits with simulated pilasters and sculp- tural arabesques. His contempor- aries, Bourdichon and other minia- turists, began to replace the Gothic churches they had hitherto depicted by Italian palaces, and occasionally even produced compositions or figures imitating Florentine or Um- brian paintings. Decorative elements are, indeed, very easily borrowed, and the same pictures are under- stood and admired without difficulty in very different countries. On the other hand, architecture and religious sculpture, which are bound up with deeply rooted habits and customs, are not to be modified instantaneously ; a new system of FIG. 295. — HE.VRY IV S COURT, CAriT<1LE, TOULOUSE. 144 GOTHIC STYLE TO CLASSICAL ART Fir,. 296. — THE GRANDE I'l.ACE, ARRAS. decoration will not suffice to transform them. Italian architects and sculptors, when they took part in great artistic enterprises in France, were obliged to adapt themselves to local customs ; they threw a veil of Italian decoration over tombs and chateaux, monu- ments constituted in the image of French life by very ancient usages. Pictures, on the contrary, were a court luxury, and Italian painters such as Andrea Solario, Leonardo da Vinci, Andrea del Sarto, and later, the whole school of Fontainebleau, were able to work in the heart of France without modifying any of their FIC;. 297. — HOTEL D ECOVH.I.E, CAEX. alien hab- its. The field of action lay open to painters. The fortresses, which look so white and delicate in the Gothic miniatures, seemed very dismal dwellings in the tranquillised king- dom of the sixteenth century ; their solid walls enclosed narrow and sombre existences. During the peace which lasted from the reign of Louis XI to the outbreak of the 145 FIG. 298. — rriE UOL'RSE, I.II.I.i:. ART IN FRANCE FIG. 2Q9. — h6tEI, DE VII. l.E, AK'KAS. religious wars, architecture, too, was able to disarm, and to lay aside its heavy cuirass. The castles were thrown open to the light of day ; the dwelling emerged from the en- compassing walls ; it was erected in the midst of gardens, or in a park ; trees, fountains and flowers contri- buted to the attraction of the dwell- ing, and in the walls which formerly presented a solid surface, large windows were made to open upon the smiling surroundings. From their windows and terraces, the nobles loved to contemplate the wide plains of the Loire or the Cher. It was the art of building which expressed most fully the joyous expansion and the graceful fancy of the monarchy and aristocracy of France. A like enthu'^iasm inspired all ranks. The king, the great nobles, and high functionaries spent the greater part of their revenues on the construction of exquisite chateaux. Humbler persons ruined themselves by building, and Philibert Delorme speaks of the distrust felt by expectant heirs for architects. The least enterprising were eager to transform their old manor-houses in ac- cordance with the taste of the day ; they gutted their ancient towers to pierce them with windows ; they added a modern block of buildings to a Gothic or Roman- esque keep. The new style tended to regularity and symmetry. But the necessity of preserving majestic and im- posing fragments forced architects to display a certain ingenuity. They de- vised unexpected aspects ; they were entertained by the unforeseen combin- ations produced by the feudal architec- ture of castles intermingled with the urban style of palaces, and, a little later, with classic fagades in the Italian manner- From 146 HL,. 300. — CATHEDRAL OK TOURS. GOTHIC STYLE TO CLASSICAL ART HG. 301. — ORLEANS CATHEDKAL, .SOUTH TORCH. Louis XI to Charles IX, the num- ber of French chateaux is consider- able, and their variety is such that it IS impossible to classify them in accordance with a clearly defined type, such as that of the Florentine palace, or the Roman villa. Nevertheless, in the variety of combinations, certain elements re- appear persistently. The Renais- sance chateau in its earlier mani- festations was only the feudal castle transformed. It retained the great towers, the curtains ^vith their battlements and machicolations, and occasionally, the moat in which the basement of the building was submerged. Each of these organs was preserved for the beauty discovered in it now that it was no longer useful. The chateau, havmg descended into the plain, cast the reflection of its battlements and machicolations into the slow waters of a river, and these martial symbols became an amuse- ment for the eye. The main block of an urban mansion, with large square windows and a lofty roof loaded with dormer windows and chimneys was attached to the great feudal towers. The new towers, of a less ponderous design, were sometimes corbelled out at the angles of the building. Later, antique decoration made its ap- pearance, with Its columns, pilasters and pediments ; the Greek orders enframed doors and windows, and soon the somewhat geometrical regularity of these motives imposed on facades a symmetry unknown to the Middle Ages. The transformation in French architecture began before the pene- tration of Italian influences. The last castles built in the time of Louis XI are still defiant of aspect. At Chaumont (Fig. 272) the 147 L 2 kk;. 302 — nooKWAY ok the dlcai. I'AI.ACE, XANCV. ART IN FRANCE FIG. 303. — NOTKE DAME DE l'ei'ine, near CHALONS-SUR- MARNE. {Photo. Ncurdein.) arrangement of the building as a strictly enclosed fortress was one day to appear very dismal, and one of the four blocks of buildmgs which enclosed the quadri- lateral was pulled down to open out a prospect over the valley of the Loire. At Usse (Fig. 282) again, a large breach had to be made to give hght and air to the chateau. Its inhabitants no longer sought safety behind a screen of solid walls ; its offices, its terraces, its courts and approaches were spread out freely around it. Even structures which retained their formidable features were surrounded by gardens ; behind the great tower and the grey masonry of Langeais flowers bloomed in gay parterres. Architecture allowed itself to be disarmed at last, and associated itself with the peaceful charm of nature. The king set the example in this transformation. To judge from the fragments of it that still exist, the famous castle of Plessis-les- Tours, where Louis XI died, was no austere prison, but a mansion of red brick and white stone in a charming valley enclosed by softly swelling hills. Charles VIII died when he was superintending the transformations he had under- taken at Amboise. The Chapel of St. Hubert (Figs. 336-338), and the faqade towards the Loire built for him were still purely Gothic, richly flamboyant, and appear all the more delicately elaborate from their luxtaposition with massive feudal masonry (Fig. 27 1 ). Louis XII, the son of Charles d'Orleans, the captive poet, was born in a fortress at Blois, which Froissart described as "fair, strong and sturdy, and one of the finest in the kingdom " (Figs. 276, 277). When he became king of France, he did not desert the FKi. 304. — Al'SR OF SAINT-l'IERRE, CAEN. (_P/io/o. h'eitrdcm. 148 GOTHIC STYLE TO CLASSICAL ART FIG. 305. — TOMB OF MARGUEKITE mc HOUKBON, IN THK CIIUKCH AT BKOU. landscapes of his childhood. He began the reconstruction of the old castle, and raised a graceful block of buildings of brick and stone, crowned by a high roof with Gothic dormer windows. Francis I was, as said Ducerceau, " marvellously addicted to build- ing." This architectural king was, indeed, the creator of Cham- bord, Madrid, Saint - Germain, La Muette, Villers - Cotterets, Blois, Fontainebleau, and Pierre Lescot's Louvre. In each of these buildings, we can trace the progress of classic decoration. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, only a few motives are introduced ; but very soon one of the latent principles of classicism, regularity, is imposed upon the facades and plans of modern build- ings. Nevertheless, even when this royal architecture seems an imitation of Italian palaces, it differs from these, because it answers to different requirements. The Italian villa was a place of rest arranged primarily with a view to the delight of the eye ; it is placed on a picturesque site, which is agreeably contemplated from a belvedere. In times of peace, the chief amuse- ment of the king of France was the hunting of stag or wild boar. Thus nearly all the royal chateaux adjoin a vast forest ; many of them were originally hunting lodges ; the images of St. Hubert found in some of them, at Amboise and Pau, for instance, were not without their special significance ; such a statue would not have been out of place in any of the royal houses. In the pictures and tapestries in \\hich they are represented, the king, his court and his pack of hounds 149 IK;. 3*. — NOOIl-SCKEKN IN THE CIllKCH W V.KOV. ART IN FRANCE FIG. 307. — TOMB OF MARGUERITE OF AUSTRIA, IN THF, CHURCH AT BROU. nearly always figure in the fore- ground. The open staircase (Fig. 277) in Francis Is wing in the Castle of Blois is a Gothic structure with Italian decorations ; loggias conceal the curtain of the ancient fortress, and give the faqade an aspect of magnificence which also characterises the Chateau de Madrid. At Chambord (Fig. 279) feudal towers flank a symmetrical buildmg ; this regular quadrilateral is obviously not the work of a mediaeval architect, but the chateau has retained one very Gothic characteristic, the accumulation of all the decoration on the roof. Italian ornament has been borrowed, to be arranged in the French manner ; there is an elaborate architecture of chimneys, dormer windows and lanterns, which recalls the delightful acces- sories of the chateaux depicted by the illuminators of the Duke of Berry. At Saint-Germain (Fig. 280), a feature of southern architecture, a terrace, from which the king could contemplate his forest, and follow the windings of the horn from afar, was substituted for the customary roof. But even here, the mode of construction is French ; this terrace rests on an ogival roof, to sustain the arches of which it was necessary to encase the building with buttresses; arcades and galleries in the Italian manner are applied to this Gothic skeleton, but they do not mask it. Following in the royal footsteps, the rich men of the kingdom rebuilt their dwellings. Two of the most graceful chateaux of the sixteenth century, Azay - le - Rideaux and FIG. 308. — ROOD-SCREEN OF THE CHURCH OF THE MADELEINE, TROVES. (,P/ioia. Neurdeiti.^ 150 GOTHIC STYLE TO CLASSICAL ART fk;. 309.— church of saint-michel, "dUon. {Photo. A. Jolict.) Chenonceaux (Figs. 278-281), were begun about 1518-1520 for financiers. They are among the most charmmg of French buildmgs, and they make but the slightest decorative concessions to the Italian fashion. Their very original charm lies entirely in the elegance of their outline, their happy proportions, and the picturesque arrangement of their turrets, windows and dormers. Fontainebleau, the most famous of the royal houses, is far from being one of the happiest achieve- ments of this period of ingenious architecture. But Francis I, "who caused it to be built, took mar- vellous pleasure therein, so that he sojourned there for the most part, and enriched it with all sorts of commodities, with galleries, halls, chambers, bath-rooms, and other adjuncts, the whole embellished with all kinds of histories, both painted and in relief, done by the most renowned masters the king could collect in France, and in Italy, from whence he also obtained some fine antique pieces. And in short all that the king could find that was excellent, was for his Fontainebleau." Hence this chateau, the general conception of which is rather poor, contains a number of admirable motives, not always in very close relation to the main body of the building : these include porticoes, staircases, sculptures, and above all, a mar- vellous internal decoration, which is its great original feature (Figs. 283 288). By the middle of the sixteenth century, architects had almost abandoned all recollection of feudal buildings. They seem thenceforth to have ignored the turrets, the dormer windows the ART IN FRANCE FIG. ^11. — CHUKCH UF SAINT-ETIE.NNE DU MONT, PARIS. machicolations, the battlements, which gave such graceful adorn- ment to the first chateaux of the century. The general arrangement was no longer governed by the accidents of the site ; the structure developed its symmetrical members on an even surface ; architectonic beauty became less and less de- pendent upon the charm of details, and the picturesque unexpectedness of their disposal ; it inhered rather m the art of the proportions, and the unity of the whole. The chateau was no longer to be distinguished from the urban hotel. Four blocks of buildings, one of which, smaller than the rest, formed a gallery, gave a rectangular quadrilateral. To ornament the flat fagades, architects applied the principles of Roman construction as they were beginning to know them from Vitruvius, from antique ruins, and from Italian buildings : these consisted in arranging on the facade, in such a manner as to enframe the windows, columns or pilasters supporting entablatures or pediments ; in superposing as many orders as there were storeys in the building ; the Tuscan or Doric order for the ground-floor, the Ionic order for the first storey, and composite columns or Caryatides for the second. Between the columns, if space permitted, niches were hol- lowed for the reception of statues. This general ornamentation was repeated indefinitely all along a facade ; the monotony was relieved only by projecting pavilions, with higher roofs. Thenceforth, archi- tecture was reduced to drawing, and a knowledge of proportions. The decorative elements of French palaces admitted of little change ; 152 FIG. 312. — FAfADE OF THE CATHEDRAL OF TOUL. (,Fhoto. " Moniiwents HUtorigucs") GOTHIC STYLE TO CLASSICAL ART VIC. 313. — VIRGIN AND CIIII.U ; CHURCH OF SAINT- GALMIER, LOIRIi. the distinction between one building and another, and even between one period and another, was very shght. If we omit the internal arrangements, the history of French architecture could be followed almost com- pletely in the fashion of disposing colon- nades on a facjade. Nevertheless, limited to these methods, it created varied styles and forms that were always pure ; in proportion as it restricted decorative invention, the art of building owed more to measurement and calculation. In the middle of the sixteenth century, three men were brilliant exponents of this architecture, which had already become the classic French style. These were Pierre Lescot, Jean Bullant, and Philibert Delorme. Pierre Lescot was commissioned by Francis I to rebuild the Louvre. He gutted Charles V's palace, and built the south-west corner of the square court, two blocks of buildings which were to serve as models to many architects ; they were the nucleus of that new Louvre, the building of which went on for three centuries. All those who successively added a pavilion, a gal- lery, or a facjade were dominated more or less by Pierre Lescot's concep- tions. ' This surface of masonry is so rich in columns, friezes, archi- traves and all sorts of architecture, and of such excellent symmetry and beauty, that its equal is not to be found in all Europe " (Androuet du Cerceau). Those who continued it would occa- sionally strive to be richer or more majestic ; but that initial Louvre in which the genius of Lescot and of Goujon met, re- mains the most brilliant and one of the most graceful inspirations 153 FIG. 314.- -ROOD-SCRF.EN OF SAINT-ETIENNE DV MONT, I'AKIS. ART IN FRANCE -TdMB OF FKANXIS OK BRITTANY NANTES CATHEDRAL. of the Renaissance (Fig. 289). Jean Bullant showed even greater submissive- ness to antique forms, and was the first to make use of the " colossal order" ; at Ecouen, instead of re- ducing the colonnade to the dimensions of the storeys, he enlarged it to the scale of the facade ; and instead of superposing small columns, he erected lofty columns which rise from the soil to the summit. Philibert Delorme was also an enthusiastic admirer of antiquity ; he had studied its treatises and measured its monuments. In the Chateau d'Anet, the Tuilenes, and Fontainebleau, he not only derived certain ingenious decorative forms from antique ruins, but actually re-captured that harmony of proportion which was the soul of Greek architecture. Yet his conceptions are not merely those of a designer ; they are essentially those of a constructor ; in his book on architecture, if he is much pre-occupied with the mea- surements of columns and entablatures, he loves to ex- ercise his skill on the diffi- culties of masonry, on spiral vaults and double winding staircases ; he does not neglect comfort, and is concerned to build chimneys that will not smoke. His vigorous intelli- gence was able to master the two artistic eras, the Middle Ages and Antiquity, and to select freely and without idolatry from the traditions of the French master-masons and the works of Vitruvius. He sought to adapt, not to imitate. He is FIG. 316. — THE VIKGIN OF OLIVET. (The Louvre, Paris.) FIG. 317. — STRENGTH. MICHEL COLOMBE. NANTES CAIHEDRAL. 154 GOTHIC STYLE TO CLASSICAL ART FIG. 318. — TEMTEK- ANCE. MICHEL COLOMHE. NANTES CATHEDRAL. to be reckoned among those architects, so numerous m France, who were thenceforth to complam of bemg sacrificed to foreign fashions. He even prided himself on having created a French order by erecting ringed columns here and there to hide the joins in the drums. The cathedral also sub- mitted to the classic influence. Throughout the sixteenth cen- tury, the churches still pre- served their traditional consti- tution : groined vaults with dia- gonal ribs supported on pillars and re - inforced by flying buttresses. But this Gothic skeleton was overlaid on every side with an Italian decoration. I'k;. 319. — I'lil'DENCE. IMICHEL COLORIUE. NANTES CATHEDRAL. There is no kind of resemblance between the antique temple and the French church, and yet a gradual transition from one to the other of these diverse archi- tectures was effected. Unlike classic art, the Gothic style is very adaptable, and will ac- cept an eclectic decoration. The Greek temple was a fixed and complete organism, in which nothing could be changed. It continued immu- table throughout antiquity, and in the second manifestation it enjoyed among the moderns. The Gothic cathedral, on the other hand, was an organism in a perpetual state of transforma- tion, one which readily received all kinds of architectonic grafts. In the time of Louis XI and Louis XII, ingenious artists, constructors rather than KK;. 320. — JUSTICE MICHEL COLO.MliE. NANTES CATHEDRAL. I'U;. 321. — SAINT- MAKIIIA. ClUKCH t)K THE MADELEINE, TKOYES. 155 ART IN FRANCE FIG. 322. — THE VISITATION. CHURCH OF SAINT JEAN, TROVES. decorators, tried the fashionable ornaments of the day on its vast sides. In time, they intermingled Italian arabesques and the fantasies of the Flamboyant Style ; then the ornamental grammar of the ancients was accepted in its entirety, for nothing prevented architects from designing antique pilasters upon buttresses, or carving Corinthian capitals to support the arches of a vault. In those parts of the church of Saint Pierre at Caen which were built after 1 520 by Pierre Sohier (Fig. 304), we find this com- bination of the Flamboyant Style and Italian decoration. The pinnacles of the apse are in the form of curved vases, with convolutions and sculp- tured arabesques which destroy the soaring lightness of the Gothic lines. In the interior, crockets and consoles hang on the ribs of the vaults like some heavy vegetation. But in the over-rich decoration, there is a latent principle of regularity and symmetry which was subsequently to simplify this exuberant style. A little later, Pierre Lemercier, in building Saint Eustache in Paris (Fig. 310), remained a mediaeval architect ; but the limbs of this Gothic body, the pillars and flying but- tresses, are clothed in the classic manner. The sixteenth century built few churches ; it showed little originality in this work, and it was not until the following century that the innovations passed from the decorations to the skeleton of the build- ing itself. The literary language of France un- derwent a like transfor- mation ; to imitate Latin more closely, French writers loaded their orthography with etymological letters, and their vocabulary with 156 FIG. 323. -SAINT GEORGE KILLING THE DRAGON. MICHEL COLOMUB. (The Louvre, Paris.) GOTHIC STYLE TO CLASSICAL ART borrowed words ; but a more profound assimilation was required to win the logical regularity of classic syntax. Sculpture was too closely associated with the religious life for any abrupt mterruption of its normal evolution. In every corner of France, Italian art found sculptors who were working at tombs for great nobles, or carving the tradi- tional figures of saints for the people. In the course of the fifteenth century, there were certain motives which made a special appeal to Christian sensibilities : the groups which illus- trate the last moments of Jesus, the Crucifixion, the Virgin of Pity : the stricken Mother weeping over the corpse upon her lap, a sombre tete- a-tele which sums up all the sorrow of the Passion. The Entombment was further a tragic spectacle which gave rich opportunities to the artist : a corpse, the sumptuous costumes of Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathaea, the attitudes and the mournful faces of the Virgin and the Holy Women. These groups appear in many churches, some among them of the most modest kind ; very often they were executed by country crafts- men, who carved the stone rather heavily, without any pre- tensions to elegance or correct- ness. Rarely admirable for their skill, these works are always touching in the pity that animates them. The naive and sorrowful figures are grouped solicitously round the dead, whose body is dimly seen in the background of a low chapel, dark as a tomb. The most famous of these " Sepulchres" are that at Solesmes (Fig. 325) and that by Ligier- Richier at Saint-Mihiel (Fig. 331). The Solesmes Entombment 157 FIG. 324. — THE MAGDALEN. FIGLKE OF T.HE "SErULCHRE" AT SOLESMES. 325. — SEI'UI.CIIKE IX THE SOLESMES. Ar.r.EV OF ART IN FRANCE dates, no doubt, from the close of the fifteenth century, and shows more than one pilaster in the Italian manner. But these borrowings are applied, not assimilated ; the artist has juxtaposed them boldly with the Flamboyant ornament. The figures, on the other hand, reveal no traces of an alien art. This entombment is a tranquil scene ; a certain placidity, a kind of expressive im- potence, becomes an advantage to the artist, and gives a peaceful ijiiMWMiiMwi^^M majesty to the drama. Italian art is |'~*'''^SBHHSi^| ^ prone to emphasise gesture till it verges on paroxysm. Here, on the contrary, we have neither violence nor grimace ; the holy women are not convulsed by moral suffering, and the weight of the corpse has not evoked attitudes of painful effort in the bearers. The robust figures of Solesmes are akin to the minute personages Fouquet painted so agreeably, if a little languidly. The finest of them, that of the Magdalen, recalls one of the peasant girls transformed FIG. 326. — THE CALVARY AT PLEYBEN. by that artist into saints. She is apart from the rest, like a discreet servant. This art, lacking aspira- tions towards truth and beauty, is yet full of a sweet serenity. One name dominates the art of Touraine at the beginning of the six- teenth century : Michel Colombewas of a country and of a period which eagerly collected all the motives of Italian decoration and inserted them even in Gothic monuments. But he continued to chisel his figures in the French manner, that of an artist who was not concerned to elaborate his modelling, and did not trouble him- self about anatomical subtleties. The S. George l^illing the Dragon, which he carved with great care 158 weeping quie tly. somew hat 327. — THE CALVARY AT I'LOUGASTEL. GOTHIC STYLE TO CLASSICAL ART FIG. 328. — CLAUDE OK FKANCK. CHURCH OF SAINT-DtNIS. {l'/u>to. Mkusfiiniit. ) for the Chateau de Gaillon (Fig. 323) lacks elasticity and fire. The marble demands more nervous forms than those of this rigid knight on his heavy charger. In the tomb of Francis II of Brittany at Nantes, the general architecture re- mains that of the Middle Ages : a sarcophagus with sculptured sides sup- porting two recumbent figures with clasped hands. But at the first glance we feel that we are no longer in the Gothic age ; the panels are overlaid with the branching ornament of the Flamboyant Style ; the pilasters are decorated with delicate Italian bas- reliefs ; the ornamentation, although still rich, IS so far chastened as to permit a precision of lines and planes which is already classical. The mourners (pleurants) subsist merely in the shape of little ornamental figures ; they have made way for apostles. But above all, the four great allegorical statues at the angles. Justice, Strength, Temperance, and Prudence, proclaim their remoteness from the mediaeval iconography. The princes and kings for whom tombs were to be erected thenceforth would prefer radiant divinities, suggesting ideas of glory, to the hideous insistence on Death, characteristic of the Gothic tomb. A little later, they caused the sides of their sarcophagi to be carved with representations of their ex- ploits, and with trophies of victory. But all this was more than a change of style in architecture and sculpture. A pagan joyousness took the place of the melancholy of Christian sentiment. Michel Colombe's cardinal virtues were not as yet wholly classical in type and costume ; but they were no longer mediaeval. Their vigorous elegance, the tranquil majesty of their attitudes, heralds a world in which the figures disdain 159 329.- ficjIkks cik ai-osti.ks .\y ri.Kviii-;\. ART IN FRANCE and are content wi th FIG. 330. —CHARLOTTE OF FRANCE. CHURCH OF SAINT- DENIS. {Photo. ISIicusetnent.) expression, beauty. Michel Colombe is not a very clearly defined figure in art-history ; but the anonymous works which, in their quest for paternity, naturally group themselves about him, add considerable substance to this shadowy personality. Throughout Touraine there were sculptors who carved in stone or marble beautiful Virgins, at once elegant and artless, calm and healthy, and free from vulgar real- ism. In earlier figures of this type, a violent movement of the hip had pro- duced a tumultuous disorder in the draperies. This disappears ; the figure IS drawn up, and the robe falls about it in quiet folds. These statues are charac- teristised, not by the sovereign majesty of the Virgin Queens of the thirteenth century, but by the somewhat rustic elegance dear to Jean Bourdichon and the Master of Moulins. The violent " imagiers " are now modelling gentle feminine faces. The Virgin of Ecouen, and still more, the Virgin of Olivet (Fig. 316) are among the most seductive figures of French statuary. Here nervous energy and will-power were not demanded ; the artist gave himself up to a novel pleasure, the delight of creating and contem- plating a charming form. The men who loved these works were as yet unacquainted with Italian beauty, but they were fully prepared to receive and welcome it. They were beginning to essay the refinements of the Italian craftsmen. Florentine art was about to teach them to endue the whole body, in its sup- pleness of attitudes and draperies, with that purity of line they had already achieved in the features of the face. Had she FIl.. 331. — SEI'ULCHRE IN THE CHURCH OF SAINT-ETIENNE, AT SAINT-MIHIEL. LIGIER-RICHIER. (Photo. " Monuments Histoyiijucs") 160 GOTHIC STYLE TO CLASSICAL ART 332.— FIGURE OF A CHILD. LIGIER-RICHIEK. (Tlie Louvre, Paris.) been born a few years later, the Virgin of Olivet would have been, not more graceful, but less homely in her elegance, and her draperies would have been more delicate in texture. When, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Jean Perreal be- came the overseer of the tomb of Francis I, Duke of Brittany, he chose marbles at Genoa, had them trans- ported at great expense to Lyons, and carted from Lyons to Roanne ; thence they followed the course of the Loire to Nantes, where they were carved by Michel Colombo and his pupils. It was not only a new material which was then brought into France, The beautiful marble, destined to become more and more the medium of the sculptor, exacted a delicacy of execution impossible with the stone of the old " imagiers " ; its close and tender grain, its whiteness, its polished surface necessitated suppler and more precise modelling. The ornamental vocabulary was the first thing to be transformed. The interlaced ribs and serrated foliage of the Flamboyant Style disappeared from an architecture of regular lines. Flat pilasters and entablatures were decorated with candelabra, arabesques, and garlands in low relief ; a decoration sub- ordinated like an embroidery to the plane of the surface and its framework. The Italian workers in marble, who had come to France as early as the reign of Charles VI 11, inter- mingled their ornamental style with that of monuments, the figures of which remained purely Gothic. But very soon these figures themselves began to cast aside their pecu- liarities of costume and physiognomy, general- ising, idealising, and tending towards that type of beauty which Florentine discipline and the study of the antique had recently revealed. It was then only that French art was penetrated to its depths by the classic spirit. 161 M Flc;. 333. — SKELETON IN I'HI CHUKCH OF SAlNT-EriENM AT liAK-LE-DUC. I.K'.IEK-RICHIER. {r/ioto. Laurent.) ART IN FRANCE FIG. 334. — SCRKEN FROM AUfiEROLLES, IN THE CLUNY MUSEUM, PARIS. Around royal or princely sarcophagi arose beautiful alle- gorical figures clad m those con- ventional draperies known as antique, which reveal the form of the body. The recumbent figure was no longer encased m rigid armour ; he wore the cuirass of the Roman pattern, outlining the breast, the abdomen and the thighs. Very often he rose on the funereal slab, and rested on his elbow after the manner of an antique river-god, or knelt before a fald-stool. The face was still a portrait, but the figure was that of an impersonal hero. The monuments at Saint Denis demonstrate this transformation of sculpture very clearly. In order to pass from the Gothic world to that of the Renaissance, we must make a pilgrimage through this Way of Tombs. The evolution of form corresponds to a moral evolution. The sculptors of the Middle Ages had fixed images of death in these recumbent kings, and the royal insignia added little to the miserable prestige of the stone corpses. But in the sixteenth century, the king is not even repre- sented in the rigidity of death ; he is seen kneeling upon a beautiful sculptured structure, surrounded by fine allegorical figures ; for the sinister " pleurants'no longer attend Louis XII, Francis I and Henry II. The tomb of Francis I, constructed by Philibert Delorme (Fig. 347), is a triumphal arch, and the base, sculptured by Pierre Bontemps, records the exploits of the king. In the tomb of Henry II, the great figures cast by Germain Pilon are not there to 162 FIG. 335. — THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT, ON THE CHOIR-SCREEN IN AMIENS CATHEDRAL. GOTHIC STYLE TO CLASSICAL ART 336. — TUF, CHATIil. OF THE CHATEAU u'AMiiOISE. {Photo. Neurdein.) lament the dead, but to recall his virtues and his glory. The idea is as pagan as the architecture, and as the divine bodies of the figures. In spite of the sculptured corpses that lie beneath the arcades, these tombs are no expression of the humble Gothic philosophy ; the man is not stretched out upon the slab, resigned and sub- missive ; he has not accepted death ; his tomb IS no temporary resting-place in which he awaits his resurrection ; it is a triumphal monument which commemorates and amplifies an illus- trious life, and assures him of the im- mortality of glory after his brief exist- ence on earth. Setting aside Cellini, goldsmith and metal-worker, the artists Italy sent to France were chiefly painters, and yet it was above all the French sculptors who most readily assimilated Florentine plastic art. There is no common measure as between the amiable masters of Moulins, or the graceful miniaturists of the school of Bourdichon, and tne superb draughtsmen of Florence. The interval which the Flemings, the most supple and gifted of crafts- men, only bridged over by a century of application, was not to be spanned instantaneously. Two admirable sculptors, however, succeeded in assimilating the refined elegance and the supreme science of Floren- tine design. Jean Goujon (born about 1515) translated Primaticcio's long and supple figures with their clinging draperies, into bas-reliefs. In his figures at Ecouen, in the Louvre, and on the Fontaine des Innocents, he adheres very closely to a madel which we feel to be, not a solid body in space, but a drawn or painted figure. He applied himself to the achievement 163 M 2 |mfe \ '■'"■• 337-— UOOKS OK THE CHURCH OF SAIN T-SArVFUK. AT AIX IX I'KC )\-FN'CF. ART IN FRANCE 338. — CHATEAU d'aMBOISE ; DOOR OF THE CHATEL. {Photp. Ni-Jirdcin.) o[ one of the most difficult subtle- ties of Florentine sculpture ; in bas-reliefs of the most attenuated type, in which, however, the bodies take the most undulatmg attitudes, some few centimetres of relief very elegantly indicate the gestures of a figure m motion. Even the superb Diana of the Chateau d'Anet, so proud in her divine nudity, seems to be adapt- ing her haughty head and her long limbs to the exigencies of a faijade (Fig. 352). The sculptor's supple forms assume the attitude best adapted to the space with a grace- ful ease, just as do those of the decorative painters at Fontaine- bleau. But the pupil has more youthful freshness than the Italian masters he imitates ; his chisel strengthens and sharpens the contours of the decadent painter ; he brings all the probity of a Primitive to bear upon his transposition into marble of the somewhat languid grace of the last disciples of Correggio. In the Fontaine des Innocents, he has confined the forms of Undines in the narrow spaces between the pilasters, and on their limbs, suppler than sea-weed, he has thrown draperies as fluid as the waters that flow from their urns (Figs. 349, 351). In the less exclusively classical work of Germain Pilon (born in 1 535), the unlettered and naively naturalistic art of the fif- teenth century "imagiers " survives. On the tomb of Birague (Fig. 354) and on that of Henry II, he has placed vigorous portraits ; but these exact effigies are of bronze after the manner taught by Cellini, and the sculptor, although he has frankly FIG. 33g.- -CHOIU SCREEN IN THE CATHEDRAL OF CHARTRES. 164 GOTHIC STYLE TO CLASSICAL ART KK;. 340. — TO.MB OF UENE II OF LORRAINE ; CHURCH OF THE CORDELIERS, NANCY. {Photo. Acurdfin.) reproduced the peculiarities of faces T and costumes, shows a sovereign elegance, unknown before the Italian influence. How majestic are these figures in their fine draperies ! This precision of style, combined with grandiloquence, was long to persist in French sculpture, and more especially in the statuary of tombs. Germain Pilon was one of those who most admirably combined fidelity of por- traiture with the rhetoric of a funereal oration. He has a further claim to distinction in the French school, in- asmuch as he, as well as Jean Goujon, discovered the secret which enabled the Florentine masters to give a kind of subtle life to the marble ; he borrowed their flexible forms with their refined extremities ; he endued his works with certain tactile qualities, which makes us feel the suppleness of the tissue and the quiver of the satiny surface on the epidermis of his nymphs. The Fhree Graces or Theological Virtues who were destined to carry the hearts of the royal couple have a brilliant elegance which thenceforth never failed in its appeal to French taste ; it is only surprising that the precious burden should have been confided to young girls whose vocation for the dance is so obvious (F13. 355). Gothic art, both religious and feudal, had asked very little of painting, and m the artistic centres of France, pictorial pro- duction was not, generally speak- ing, comparable to that of the " imagiers " and architects. Thus, during the seventeenth century, when the king desired to asso- ciate painting with royal luxury, he could not find in his own HG, 341. — TOMIi OF THE CAKDINAI.S OF AMBOISE ; ROUEN CATHEDRAL. 165 ART IN FRANCE FIG. 342. — FIGURES ON THE TOMB OF IMllI.iri'K UE COMMINES. (The Louvre, Paris.) kingdom the resources which were so abundant in the case of architecture and sculpture. He accordingly appealed to the foreigner ; painters came from Flanders, and, above all, from Italy ; they brought the manner of their own country with them, and did not find m France a national style with which they had to compound. The works they left behind them on French soil are to be ex- plained by their native, and not by their adopted country. Once again it is on record that Flanders sent out excellent craftsmen, while Italy bestowed on France, together with her artists, a new aesthetic process. Francis I had already made some attempts to attract the most famous of the Italians, and after the battle of Marignan, he brought home Leonardo da Vinci, who died soon afterwards ; he then addressed himself to Andrea del Sarto, but was unable to retain him ; at last he succeeded in capturing II Rosso, a pupil of Michelangelo and Pnmaticcio, a decorative painter trained in the facile school of Correggio. Others came to attach them- selves to these two masters. The innumerable frescoes with which they covered the walls of Fontamebleau have disappeared for the most part, destroyed by time or damaged by restoration. But their work is less interesting in itself than in its relation to the new conceptions it intro- duced in France. II Rosso and Primaticcio represented an art quite unknown there ; they practised the Florentine manner, that is to say, a learned art. They were thoroughly versed in the 166 FIG. 343. — TOMB OF LOUIS XII AND ANNE DE IlkETACiNE AT SAINT-DENIS. GOTHIC STYLE TO CLASSICAL ART 344- -I I'l'KK I'AKT OF THE FIREILACK IN T}IK CHATEAU d'eCOUEX. subtleties of anatomy and perspective ; they represented supple and graceful bodies moving in space, with ease and mastery. This school of drawmg com- pleted the mstruction derived from casts of antique works. The painters II Rosso, Prima- ticcio, and Niccolo dell' Abbate, in conjunction with Greek statues and the treatises of Vitruvius and Serlio, were the most active agents of classicism in France. Through the teaching of these artists and of these works, French art was led to assimilate the Italian and the antique doctrine, of which it had hitherto only understood and imitated the decorative amenities ; and it discovered that the worship of the human body was the basis of classic art. This pride m physical beauty, and this audacious display of nudity were new things in France. The me- diaeval artists had tolerated nudity only as a method of insistence on human misery, on the shameful nakedness of the unredeemed ; they imaged the glorious splendour of the elect as adorned with rich stuffs, furs, and jewels. The beau- tiful nude forms of classical art delighted a court distinguished by gallantry of manners and avowed sensuality. And this art taught a further aesthetic lesson, one ^\'hIch was not at first very clearly under- stood, but which gradually per- meated French art ; it learned that beauty of drawing is related to the ideal proportions of the human body ; the architectural treatises which were translated at this period further taught the canon of the 167 FK.. 345 I.AI.I.EMKNT. (("liiny Museum, Paris.) ART IN FRANCE classical orders. French art pondered long the geometry of beauty which Florence had re-discovered, and thence- forth it was never to forget it. It was at Fontainebleau that it took its first lesson. Jean Cousin seems to have been one of the most learned professors of the new style (Fig. 370). The Italians also brought with them a new iconography. It was necessary to give names to their beautiful figures, and a significance to their gestures. It is quite possible that the painters of the period felt but little interest in the ad- ventures of Ulysses or of Diana ; but the learning of the Humanists was about to familiarise the French intellect more and more with the world of mythology and of Grasco-Roman history. That antiquity which presented itself somewhat con- fusedly to the imagination as a domain where humanity seemed to lack all typical individualism was the ideal epoch for the existence of those slightly abstract figures French artists were FIG. 346. — TOMB OF THE DUC DE nntzt IN ROUEN CATHEDRAL. thenceforth to create. In the FIG. 347. — TOMB OF FRANCIS I, AT SAINT-DENIS second half of the sixteenth century, obscure poets and me- diocre painters prepared the ground for the two forms of art in which the French classical spirit was to find its highest ex- pression : tragedy and historical painting. The great compositions at Fontainebleau delighted the im- agination with splendid visions, but they were only indirectly related to contemporary life, by means of allegory or mythological allusion. There was room for a realistic art, that of portraiture. From the reign of Francis I, a veritable mania for portraits obtained at the French Court. 168 GOTHIC STYLE TO CLASSICAL ART KK;. 348. — C.ER.MAIN I'li.DN. HUST OF A CHILD. (The Lou vie, Paris.) At that period of elegance and gallantry, men and women elaborated the art of pleasing by every refinement of toilet and of physical culture. They delighted to see themselves reproduced in miniatures or pictures ; throughout the century, artists were occupied in depicting with delicate colours and dainty brushes gala costumes and carefully manipulated faces. In the inventory of Catherine de' Medici's fur- niture, three hundred and forty-one portraits figure among the tapestries, enamels, and mirrors. Once again it was the painters of the North, the Flemish immigrants, who applied the minute sincerity of their methods to French sitters. Their style was similar, if their skill varied. The majority of these portraits represent the face only ; the attitude of the body was very rarely used to complete the individuality of the type. The Flemings of the fifteenth century had also loved to enclose the face and the hands of their models in a little frame. But though the later artists show the same scrupulous precision, their honesty is less brutal. In the cultured society of the day, they learned to be truthful and yet amiable ; Flemish realism was tempered by the tone of good society, by French courtesy. To judge by contemporary portraits, men, down to the reign of Francis I, were extra- ordinarily ugly ; after this date, agreeable drawing and colour give a certain elegance to the most vulgar types. The paint- ing is light, delicate, and slight in texture ; but the smallest gradations are cunningly utilised, and every stroke of the brush tells. The Clouets arc the 169 Krc;. 349. — JEAN r.oujON. FONTAINIJ IJIJS INNOCENTS, I'AKIS. ART IN FRANCE most famous of these Flemish crafts- men, pohshed by French amenity (Figs. 365, 366) : the father, Jean Clouet, no doubt from Brussels, who worked at the Court, in Touraine ; his son, Francois, called by his con- temporaries Jannet ; and Corneille, called Corneille de Lyon, and some- times Cornelis de la Haye, who was working at Lyons about 1 540. As befits mere portraitists, these painters are more shadowy to the historian as personalities than their sitters ; the few authenticated works by them, and the numerous pictures which are grouped around these by analogy, evoke the aristocracy of the sixteenth century with great vitality. There are few historical periods the actors in which are more familiar to us than those of the reigns of Francis I, Henry II and Henry III. If they could revisit us, we should recognise all the men who lived round Francis I : the king with his large nose, and his sleepy eyes, broad-shouldered, and decollete like a woman, and all the gentlemen of the religious wars, scented and affected like their FIG. 350. — GERMAIN rll.ON. BUST OF HEXRY III. (The I.ouvre, Paris.) kings, the three sons of P Catherine de' Medici, whose shivering senility and puerile coquetry they imitate. Jannet and Corneille de Lyon have admirably rendered the aristocratic pallor and milky complexions of the Court ladies, with tints as light as water-colours ; their painting, consisting entirely of glazes, is diaphanous as a fair skin. In the portrait of Elisabeth of Austria, the brilliant accessories of the costume, the silk, and the gems of the ornaments make the fine porcelain textures of the flesh 170 ^^B - ^1 '^^ HHMF^PWVif:: FIG. 35T. — JEAN GOUJON. FONTAINE DES INNOCENTS, PARIS. GOTHIC STYLE TO CLASSICAL ART appear still more fragile and delicate. Corneille de Lyon was fond of setting these white faces against a green background, for the sake of the rosy irradiation such a scheme imparts to them. Few colours were used in these portraits ; sometimes these were dispensed with altogether ; simple drawings, with a few touches of red chalk, suffice to suggest the vivacity of the glance and FIG. 353. — TOMli Ol-' I'llILiri'U 1)1". CMAnirr. CJ'he Louvre, I'aris.) tion, that this, after having created the Gothic form, should have abandoned it altogether in favour of classical art. The other European countries went through the same meta- morphosis. But the classic regions, such as Italy, had never fully accepted rU".. 352. — JKAN C.OUJiiX. DIANA, FHOM THiJ chAtkau u'anet. (The Louvre, Paris.) the nervous fold at the corner of the mouth in a smooth and carefully made up face. We are indebted to this fashion of chalk drawings for our knowledge of the figures in history down to the time of Louis XIII. Stripped of all non-essentials, and reduced to a few lines, this art gives a keen and penetrating subtlety to the definition of types, even when the artist's hand lacks decision. It seems a strange development in the destinies of French civilisa- i-ii;. 354. 71 -CiF.RMAIN I'lI.ON. KENIi; L)K lilKA(;LE (The Louvre, Paris.) ART IN FRANCE FIG. 355. — GERMAIN PILON THE THREE VIRTUES. (The Louvre, Paris.) pointed architec- ture, and the true homes of Gothic art, England, Flanders, and Germany, never achieved classical purity. France, on the contrary, spoke the modern language of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- turies with the same sincerity she had shown in the use of the me- diaeval tongue of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. She change her ideal, and : 356. — SIDEnOARD, TIME OF HENRY II. (The Louvre, Paris.) alone was able to change her ideal, and to create works which expressed her genius and propagated it beyond her frontiers in the age of faith as m the age of reason. Like Chris- tianity, the art of the thirteenth cen- tury extended beyond the political frontiers, which were, indeed, by no means clearly defined ; re- ligion, which was its soul, made it a u n 1 V e r s a 1 FIG. 357. — SIDEBOARD, ATTRI- BUTED TO HUGUES SAM BIN. (Museum of Bourges.) FIG. 358. — BERNARD PALISSY. ENAMELLED I'OTTERV. (The Louvre, Paris.) \72 GOTHIC STYLE TO CLASSICAL ART language. At the close of the Middle Ages, the enfeebled religious spirit made way for naturalism ; the plastic arts, more deeply rooted in the soil, drew inspiration from it, and the unity of Christian art was broken up. Clas- sicism came to re-unite European art, imposing a common ideal, bor- (The Louvre, Paris.) rowed for the most part from antiquity. From this time there has been at the base of artistic language a kind of essen- tial syntax, a sort of abstract universality, which becomes very apparent as soon as there is a dearth of original temperaments. In this classical art, the pre- occupation with pure beauty became more and more en- grossing to the artist ; construc- tion, painting and sculpture were so many learned and difficult exercises, designed to evoke feelings in which very little religious sentiment had survived. Orthodoxy was forced to make so many concessions, that theologians conceived scruples as to 360.— HERNAK'l) lAl.ISSV. (The l.ouvre, Paris.) the maintenance of re- lations between faith and art. The men of the Reformation, and then those of the Counter- Reformation, watched and condemned the fancies of painters and sculptors. Theologians, as well as artists, thought it more seemly that plastic pro- duction should be exer- 361.— JEAN rri.NICAVD I. ENAMELLED liU'TVClt. (Cluny Museum, Paris.) 173 ART IN FRANCE 362. — TAl'ESTRY OF THE LEIJEND OF SAINT-QUENTIN. (The Louvre, Paris.) Roman divinities, born of a collaboration between artists and poets, never ceased to belong to them. In all countries and in all ages, those who seek to vivify an ideal body turn back to paganism. The worshippers of pure beauty all meet on Olympus. Christianity was a creed still too vital and too jealous to lend itself to the caprice of artists ; paganism, on the other hand, belongs cised upon images other than those of Christian iconography. Religion withdrew from art, and circumscribed its domain that it might the more easily defend it. From the sixteenth century on- wards, artists and poets alike demanded new re- sources from antique mythology ; the Grasco- KIG. 364. — DIANA AND HEk NVMl'HS. (Museum of Rouen.) 174 ADORATION OF THE SHEPHERDS. (Museum of Avignon.) to them ; plastic genius suffices to bring the heathen gods to life again. It is true that when French art abandoned its religious and mediaeval traditions, it caused many vigorous roots to wither in the ground. It has often been made a reproach to the French classical school that it lacked the artless GOTHIC STYLE TO CLASSICAL ART FIG. 365. — JEAN CLOUET. FRANCIS I. (The Louvre, Paris.) FU;. 366. — FRANCOIS CLOUFT. Fn.ISABETH OF AUSTRIA. (The T.Diure, Paris.) and absolute sincerity of the Gothic artists, that it offered a superior sort of pastime to cuUivated minds, and did not represent the French soul in its entirety. It may be urged without any subtle intention, that French sculptors and painters show more sincerity in the representation of Venus or Apollo than in that of Christ or the Virgin ; in the fcrmer, they are concerned to produce pure plastic forms, and lack of candour is no longer an outrage, when all are agreed that art is merely a diversion. As early as the fourteenth century, the French m 1 d d I e classes were so far in- structed in the history and religion of antiquity, that the pagan ori- gins of their own civil- isation were Fir,. 367. — CHARI.KS IN. W.\X MKDAII.I.ION. (Cluiiy jMuseum, Paris.) FK;. 36S. — CATHICRINK I)K MkDICI. WAX M]-:i>Al.I.ION. 75 (Cluny Museum, Paris.) ART IN FRANCE one day to be more familiar to them than the hnks that bound them to Christianity ; while this pseudo-antique art was m process of formation, Humanism was instruct- ing a public to the end that it might understand its mtentions. It was, no doubt, an artificial cul- ture ; it made distinctions between popular and scientific art ; it severed the innumerable ties, which, in the Middle Ages, united a Christian people and its religious art. And yet this classicism was never, in France, isolated by its aristocratic character. The most sincere poets of classical art, Poussin, Lorrain, David, Prudhon and Ingres were not very profound Humanists. Erudition plays no part in the pagan charm of their masterpieces ; but an instinctive and profound predilection sometimes reveals to us the close kinship between the French genius and antique modes of thought and feeling. 369-- -RAI.I, AT THE COURT (IF HEXm' III. (The Louvre, Paris.) FIG. 370. — JEAN COUSIN. THE LAST JUDGMENT. (The Louvre, Paris.) 176 FIG. 371. — FRANfOIS CLOUET CHARLES ly. The Louvre, Paris.) GOTHIC STYLE TO CLASSICAL ART BIBLIOGRAPHY. L. de Laborde, La Renaissance a la cour de France, 2 vols., Paris, 1850-1855; Comple Jes Batimenh duRoi de 1528a I 571 , 2 vols.. Paris. 1 877- 1 880. ^. Miniz, La Renaissance en I lalie el en France a I'ipoque de Charles VI I L Paris, 1885.^ Mrs. Mark Pattison, The Renaissance of Art in France, London, 1879. — W. Liibke. Geschichle der Renaissance in Frankreich (Archi- tekiur), Stuttgart. 1883. — H. von Geymijller, Die Baukanst der Renaissance in Frankreich, Stuttgart, 1901.— L. Palustre, La Renaissance en France,} vols., Paris, 1879-1889. - A. Berty, La Renaissance monumentale en France, Paris. 1864, 2 vols.— P. Vitry, Tours et la Touraine (Les Villes dart). Paris. n.d.-F. Bournon, Blois el Chambord ( Les Villes d'arl), Paris, n.d. Pfnor, Monographic du Chaleau d Anel, Paris. -Champollion-Figeac and Pfnor. Monographie du Palais de t-onlainebleau, Paris. 1863,2 vols. - Philibert de Lorme. Noucelles Invenlions pour bien bastir, Paris, 1561 ; L'Archileclure, vol. I, Paris, 1567 Cvol. II not published). — M. Vachon. Philiberl de I'Orme, Paris, 1887.— H. Lemonnier, P/i(7/5er/ c/e Lorme (R.A.A.M., 1898, I),-H. Clouzot, Philiberl de I'Orme, Paris. 1910. J.-A. du Cerceau, Les plus excellenls basliments de France, 2 vols.. 1 576- 1 579. -R. de Geymiiller, Les du Cerceau, Paris, 1887.— L. Vitet, Le Louvre, Paris, 1853.- A. Berty, Topographic hislorique du Vieux Paris (neighbour- hood of the Louvre, 2 vols., Paris, 1866-1868. — L. Batiffol. Le Louvre el les plans de Lescol (C.B. A., 1910, I).-G. Charvet, Les Edifices de Brou {R.S.B.A. D.. 1897).-J. Gauthier, L'Archileclure civile en Franche-Comle au XVT si'ccle iR. S. B. A. D., 1899). -Abbe Bouillet Sainl-Elienne-du-Mont, Paris, 1897.— V. Calliat and Leroux de Lincy, £g//5e Saint- Euslache, Paris, 1850. — L. Courajod, Alexandre Lenoir, son journal et le Musee des Monu- ments franfais, voh. II and 111. Paris. 1886-1887.- R. Koechlin and Marquet de Vasselot. Lo Sculpture a Troyes et dans la Champagne meridionale au XI I^ siecle, Paris. 1901. Paul Denis, Ligier-Richier, Nancy, 1906. A. Castan, L' " Archilecleur" Hugues Samhin (R. S. B.A. D.. 1890).- E.Thioliier, Sculptures foreziennes de la Renaissance (G. B. A.. 1901. 1).— P. \/hry, Michel Colombe el Sculpture francaise de son temps, Paris. 1901. Reveil, CEui're de Jean Goujon. engraved by Reveii, Paris. 1 868. R. Lister, Jean Coujon, his Life and Work, London, 1903.- H. Jouin, Jean Goujon. Paris, 1906. P. Vitry. Jean Goujon, Paris, n.d.- L. Palustre, Germain Pilon (G. B. A.. 1894, I). A. de Boislisle, La Sepulture des Valois a Saint-Denis {Mem. de la Societe de I'Hisloire de Paris, vol. Ill, 1876). Vitry and Briere. L'Eglise abbaliale de Saint-Denis el ses tombeaux, Paris, 1908. J. Gauthier, Conrad Meyl et les sculpleurs de Brou iR. S. B. A. D., 1898). De Champeaux , f/is/o/re de la Peinture decorative. Paris, 1890. L. Dimier. Le Primatice, Paris, 1902. E. Miintz. L'Ecole de Fon- tainebleau el le Primatice (G.B. A., 1902, II). H. Bouchot, Les Portraits aux crayons des XVI'' et XVI F siecles conserves a la Bibliotheque N alionale, Paris, 1 884 ; Le Portrait en I'rance au XVr siecle (G. B.A., 1887,11) ; LesClouetei Corneille de Lyon. Pans, 1892. A.Germain Les Clouel. Paris, n.d. F. Wickhotf, 'Die Bilder ueiblichcr Halhfiguren (J ahrbiicher of the Museums of Vienna. 1901). L. Bourdery and E. Lachenaud, Lc'onarc/ Li'mous/n, Paris. 1897. - E, Dupuy. Bernard Palissu. Poitiers. 1902. — Edm, Bonnaffe, Les Faiences de Saint-Porchaire (C.B. /I.. 1895, 1). 77 N I'lG. 372. — THE LUXEMnnURG I'AI.ACE, PARIS. CHAPTER II THE EVOLUTION OF CLASSICAL ART Roually in Paris.- The New Architecture in the Towns : Town Houses and Country Houses. — Religious Architecture : the Jesuit Style. Sculpture : the Decoration of Facades \ Memo- rial Sculpture ; Royal Statues. Painting Becomes an Integral Fr-.lor in French Life. The Immigration of flemish Painters in Provence and in Paris. - The Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. Italian Influence. Simon Vouei ; Lesueur. Contemporary Life, C allot, the Brothers LeNain. Sebastien Bourdon. The Classical Style: Poussin, the Antique, Christianity. Composition and Execution ; Influence of Poussin on the Taste nf His Time. — Claude Gellee, called Le Lorrain. From the time of Francis I, art had been too closely allied to the monarchy not to feel its misfortunes. It languished during the years of religious strife, evil administration, and foreign warfare. All great enterprises were abandoned, and the painters of Fontamebleau vegetated idly around the palace. When the peace came, there was a revival of artistic activity. When Henry IV found himself at last safely established in that Paris which he had entered with so much difficulty, he hardly quitted it for the rest of his life. The monarchy, nomad in the sixteenth century, had become sedentary and Parisian. It established itself in the Louvre and the Tuileries, and began the construction of the great gallery which was intended to unite them. In spite of the multiple cares of the monarch, and the brevity of his reign, the capital of the kingdom gained considerably from becoming the royal residence. With Henry IV the masons entered the city, and masons are followed by painters and sculptors. 178 THE EVOLUTION OF CLASSICAL ART m^ FIG. ^7". — THE SMALL GALLERY OF THE LOUVRE (gALERIE u'aIOLLON), FKom AN ENGRAVINC; I!Y LSRAEL SILVESTRE. (r;ilillothc(iiie Natioiiale, Print Rodin.) A modern Paris was soon to take the place of the mediasval town ; its present physiognomy began to develop. The classical style, which was popularised by mansions, churches, and private dwelling-houses, has never ceased to dominate French archi- tecture from this period. In the renovated city, the only Gothic buildings that were left after a short time were religious struc- tures, spared by virtue of their sacred character. Houses with heavily loaded roofs and slight walls strengthened by cross-beams ceased to be built. In the engravings of the seventeenth century we already find the modern street with its more regular alignment, and the high square facjades with their symmetrical windows. Very soon private houses began to show pilasters, capitals, and cornices. But at first, archi- tects were content with the quiet and unostentatious cheerfulness obtained by the picturesque combination of red brick, white stone, and blue sla^e. It was suitable to a society which, constrained to recuperate financally, and rejoicing in its recovered tranquillity, was content to put off its artistic pretensions to the future. This style was not so Netherlandish and "Huguenot" as is sometimes supposed. Its amenity had already found favour in the days when Louis XI inhabited his Plessis " at Tours. But in the seventeenth century, Vitruvius and Serlio were so widely read that French architecture could not long abstain from the adoption of the classic orders. Brick was considered a vulgar material. We may judge of the favourite effects in this medium from the remains of the Place Dauphine (Fig. 375). the Place Royale (376), and 179 N 2 I "'• 374-~l"l' LONG (iALLERV OF THE LOUVKE, FROM AN EN(. RAVING liV LSRAEL SMAESTRE. (I!i1)l!nthcque Nation.Tlo, Print Room.) ART IN FRANCE FIG. 375. — THE PLACE UAUPHINE, FROM THE I'ONT- NEUF, FROM AN ENGRAVING BY P^RELLE. (Bibliotheque Nationale, Print Room.) the central pavilion of the palace of Versailles (Fig. 478). In the heart of Louis XIV's majestic building, the modest country house of his father still exists. But the transformation of the towns was not con- fined to the style of their facades. It is certain that the good king Henry IV had conceived a new plan for his great city. Like all mediaeval towns, Paris was choking within its walls ; the Seine was its sole great highway ; the city could only breathe on the banks of its river. The congested Gothic buildings rose to a great height ; no clear spaces were reserved round churches and palaces to secure their scenic effect. Classical architecture, with its regular facades, requires a spacious setting if the eye is to appreciate its unity of composition. The design of streets and squares was also complementary to the architecture : the Place Royal and the Place Dauphine are built on a unique plan. Public buildings, such as the College des Quatre-Nations (Fig. 388), were provided with broad wings, that they might present an im- posing theatrical appearance to the king's sight. At the beginning of his Di scours de la Melhode, Descartes speaks of the perfect town, geometrical and regular as an architect's plan. In Poitou, in the very heart of the country, Richelieu realised this ideal ; like many other works of pure reason, it lacks nothing but life. In Pans, architects were unable to expand freely. The Louvre made laborious attempts to extend its long faqades in the midst of a congested district. It remained entangled in a maze of private 180 FIG. 376. — PLACE DES VOSGES (fOR.MKRLY PLACE ROVALE), PARIS. THE EVOLUTION OF CLASSICAL ART !t.^ i «^^«^1 '^^:S^-f3 377. — CIU'KT OK 'DIE IIOIICI, SL Ll.V, I'Al^ls. houses, while Marie de' Medici erected her palace of the Luxem- bourg outside the town, in a region of gardens and convents. The Florentine queen was thinking of her Pitti Palace at home ; but the haughty ostentation of strength characteristic of Tuscan architecture could not find favour in Pans. Salomon de Brosse built an hotel on the French plan, between courtyard and garden ; the fagades with their lofty roofs are enlivened by the simple design of the windows, and the beauty of the dressed stone ; though it lacked the ornamental richness of the new Louvre, the general effect has a very refined elegance (Fig. 372). Following the royal example, the nobility and the middle classes began to make new dwellings. Richelieu had lived in the Petit Luxembourg in order to be near the Queen-Regent ; he had the Palais Royal built to be near the king. The quarter of the Marais and the He Saint- Louis were soon covered with stately houses. In the interiors were galleries adorned with stucco and paintings, en the facades, the somewhat frigid deco- ration of the classic orders. Domestic architecture in its turn adopted this system of ornament, hitherto reserved for royalty. The mansions in the Marais which have survived still preserve a kind of melancholy dignity, though tradesmen's vans have replaced coaches in their courtyards. On those facades which architects designed m accordance with the 181 FIG. 378. TAI-AIS CAKI>1NAI. (lUHI.lo I lll\(Jt'Ii N A riON A I.k), VA K I S. ART IN FRANCE l-U;. 379. — FOUNTAIN IN THE GARDEN OF THE LUXEMBOURG, PARIS. rules of Vitruvius, commercial advertisements now hang upon the crumbling cornices and weather-worn stone (Fig. 377- 378). The wealthier citizens had also country-houses (" maisons des champs "). where they could entertain their guests on a larger scale. These houses retained no trace of the feudal construction still visible in the chateaux of the sixteenth century. They are regular buildings, square on plan ; the faqades, though they are ornamented with pilasters and pediments, owe their agreeable elegance to the design of the windows and the beautiful roofs. Lateral buildings project, enclos- ing a fore-court ; the building itself seems to be coming to meet the visitor and conduct him to the hospitable threshold. How different are these cheerful dwellings from the closely guarded, distrustful Italian palaces ! At the back of the house, the garden presents itself as a kind of perennial gala decoration ; flowers or clipped shrubs make a heavy lace-work on the soil ; jets of water fall into flat basins ; then there are radiating alleys, with trees ranged on either side to amuse the eye without shutting out the horizon. The engrav- ings of Perelle and Israel Silvestre show us the kind of life for which these chateaux were de- signed ; they depict carriages and horsemen arriving, and passing through the iron gates into the fore-court, or gentle- men and ladies grouped about the fountains and fl ower-beds of the gardens, FIG. 380.— h6 TEL DE viLLE, AT LYONS. cxchangiug cercinonious 182 IlllflSllffl THE EVOLUTION OF CLASSICAL ART greetings and conversing. It was for the reception of visitors that M. de Maisons built the chateau on the banks of the Seine which bears his name, and that Fouquet erected the Chateau de Vaux ; it was to make his re- ceptions more magnificent Fit;. 382. — IKON fiATE IN THi; GALKKIU d'aTOLLON, I.OLVKE. 1-KOM THE CHATEAU DE .M.\ISONS- I.AI-i-ITTE. {Photo. L'A rchitectc. ) tion of art effected by contact with Italy and antiquity. It was content to exercise a gentle con- trol over the pagan ex- uberance which had taken possession of the plastic arts, and might have shocked thoughtful FIG. 381. — CH.\TEAU DE CANY. that the King of France created Versailles (Figs. 381-385). The first half of the seventeenth century was marked by an extra- ordinary Catholic revival. Religious orders, either new or re-constructed, re-captured some of the territory lost by Catholicism since the Reformation. This Christian emotion found expres- sion in architecture, sculpture, and painting ; but all it contributed to these was a renewed fervour ; Catholicism accepted the transforma- Flr;. 383.— CHATEAU DE M AISONS-I.AFFITTE. 183 {Photo. L'Architcctc.) ART IN FRANCE 4. — CHATEAU DE DAMPIERRE. Christians. The Jesuits, who, in their colleges, reconcile Christian theology and antique 'thought, taught very elegant combinations. Wherever they have directed the intellect, in education as m art, they have found a classical language for their Catholicism, They it was who de- termined the architectonic forms which were to re- place the Gothic style. Pere Martelange designed for urban churches and convents reductions of St. Peter's at Rome, and of the Gesii Church. This Roman style was widely distributed, thanks to the religious orders, just as was the rejuvenated authority of the Pope. Nothing was left of the Gothic principle of directing pressure to the ribs, pillars, and flying buttresses ; once more, the building relied for solidity upon compactness, and the problem was how to give this mass an elegant silhouette, and to mask the masonry with a decorative^fa<;ade. This so-called "Jesuit architec- ture' seems to be a revival of Romanesque, because both are derived from antiquity, the one by filia- tion, the other by imitation; they have the same affinity as the learned terms created by the Humanists, and their popular equivalents. But the Romanesque masonry was extremely simple ; the new architecture im- plied a scientific system of stone-cutting ; it was the work of draughtsmen who had made very correct plans treatises and the proportions FIG. 385. — CHATEAU DE VAUX-LE-VICOMTE. on paper, inspired by classical of Roman monuments. Never- theless, these divergences were not irreconcilable ; at Notre-Dame- des-Doms, the people of Avignon succeeded in applying a classical decoration to an old Romanesque building. 184 THE EVOLUTION OF CLASSICAL ART FIG. 386, — FA(,:ADF, of the ClIUNCH OF SAINT-GERVAIS, PARIS. In the interior, the eye, accustomed to the soaring move- ment of Gothic vauhs, finds the barrel vauUs resting on the supporting walls very heavy ; the windows pierced in this vault increase the effect of heaviness by revealing the thickness of the masonry ; the pilasters, the capitals, the cornices display the elegant purity of their design on every side, but they are powerless to lighten the square pillars and the solid forms. The Italians ampli- fied this style by ornamental pomp ; in France, decoration re- mained more sober ; it was by happy proportion that French architects sought to satisfy the re- ligious sentiment of their day, as in the churches of Saint Paul, Saint Louis, the Sorbonne, the Val-de- Grace, Saint Louis des Invalides, and Saint Sulpice (Figs. 386-389). A similar transformation took place externally ; the vault still had to be supported, but the flying buttresses, instead of describing a frank angle, were curved inwards as if to disguise their function, and thus lost something of their supporting power. The facade became a kind of architectural exercise, where the same elements had always to be arranged : two or three antique orders surmounted by a triangular pediment. The angle formed by the upper storey and the lateral aisles was adorned by a console which affords a kind of transition. This type of facade was not constituted all at once ; the first architects who had to apply them to the latest Gothic churches show indecision and 185 1 U.. 387. — CHURCH OF THE SORBONNE. ART IN FRANCE FIG. 388. — CHAl'EL OF THE COLLEGE DES QUATRE-NATIOXS (I'ALAIS DE l'iNSTITUT, 1>AKIs). fantasy. At Saint Etienne du Mont (Fig. 311), the architect is still very far from the chilly simplicity of the classical style. The stone is gay with decorative amenities, like a piece of Renais- sance furniture. Pierre Biard's rood-screen is of a period when architects were still pre-occupied with dainty details. But Saint Gervais is correctly cold and bare ; Salomon de Brosse adapted his columns and entablatures with some elegance to the project- ing cornices ; this ingenious deco- ration was, however, too narrow for the body of the building, which protrudes on either side (Fig. 386). In this architecture, imaginative effort is confined to the dome ; this was the problem to which all constructors, after the creation of Santa Maria dei Fiori at Florence, and St. Peter's at Rome, had aspired to devote their talents. All the principal Parisian churches of the seventeenth century have a cupola, Val-de-Grace, the Sorbonne, the Invalides, the Chapel of the College des Quatre-Nations ; they dominate the city, and like the Gothic towers and spires, indicate the church of God from afar. But when French architects borrowed the Italian cupolas, they modified them a little ; they re- tained the national taste for a high timber roof, and were thus enabled to give additional height to the exterior silhouette of their spherical vaults. Their little cupolas, ornamented with sculpture and decked with metal, swell proudly heavenwards, without pressing heavily upon their points of support. -CHURCH OF VAL-DE-GRACE. 186 THE EVOLUTION OF CLASSICAL ART I-'IC. 390. — BLST Ol-- ilKNKN' IV. (The Louvre, Paris.) There has been some injustice in the frequent reproach brought against this architecture of its lack of sincerity and of expressive power. It IS to the full as Christian as that of the thirteenth century ; but the Christianity it stands for is no longer that complete Christianity which concentrated the whole thought and life of man. The Frenchmen of the seventeenth century demanded a system of definite ideas from their religion ; their churches had to be lecture-halls, of majestic, but reasonable proportions. Their somewhat low-pitched vaults re- echoed the periods of eloquent Oratorians ; a cultivated public assembled beneath them on appointed days to listen to well-constructed sermons on morality, which confirmed their faith by making it as intelligible as possible. The activity of the architects benefited the sculptors and painters. Statues were required for the new churches, and for town-houses and their gardens. The king set the example : Henry IV ordered the works at the Louvre, interrupted in the reign of Henry II, to be resumed. The financiers, in their turn, coveted a richly decorated gallery, a reduction of that of Fontainebleau, or of the small gallery in the Louvre, which was just finished. On the ceilings, nymphs and Atlantes intermingled with the arabesques, and supported the framework of the paint- ings ; the same mythology re-appeared in the gilded stucco-work and in the pictures. The gardens began to be peopled with statues, m the Italian fashion. Finally, on the more sump- tuous facjades, statues enrich the archi- tectonic decoration. At the Louvre, Jacques Sarrazin crowned Lemercier's j:)avilion with a pediment on grace- ful Caryatides. But this classical sculpture found its only brilliant culmin- ation at Versailles. I"U;. 391. — GLII.I.AUME UUrKE. HIINKV IV AND MAKII5 DK' Ml^DICl. 187 ART IN FRANCE KIG. 392. — JEAN WARIN. GAS.SENDI. Henn de Conde by Sarrazin at Chan- tilly (Fig. 402), and that of Mont- morency at Moulins, by Francois Anguier (Fig. 399). The others are modest, but always serious m their in- spiration. If they lack the subtle charm of the Florentines, or of the French sculptors of the sixteenth century, the faces and attitudes express profound sentiments with a sincerity which takes the place of eloquence. There is more conviction than grace in these calm portraits and folded hands. Their sculp- tors have not always succeeded in giving The Renaissance had not disturbed the mediaeval tradition of funereal monuments. The most famous men of the seventeenth century had their tombs in the churches. But small chapels cannot contain huge monuments. For the most part, these memorials were reduced to a decorative facade of black and white marble applied to the wall. Some few princely monuments retain a certain pomp, with mourning Virtues, and genu in tears, as on the tomb of 393. — JEAN WARIN. RICHELIEU. I-Ui. 394. — JEAN WARIN. ISUST OF RICHELIEU (BIBLIOTHEQUE MAZARINE, PARIS). lightness to the Louis XIII costume, so gallant in wool or silk, but heavy and massive in stone or bronze ; only a few among them ever thought of following the example of Germain Pilon, and throwing a loose mantle over the shoulders of their figures, to simplify a complicated equip- ment, or soften a too rigid skirt. Their works were frank and uncom- promising images of serious and believing burgesses. All the portraits, however, were not executed for tombs. A fashion introduced from Italy, that of portrait-busts, soon became popular. 188 THE EVOLUTION OF CLASSICAL ART 1 u;. 395. — DAKTH^LEMV I'KIKIK. MAKIE I)E liARBANCON-CANV. (Museum, Versailles.) (Pl'oto. Mieuseiiioit. ) Naturally, it is the great personages of the realm, the king and his ministers, who appear in these works of marble or metal. Dupre and Warm, who engraved medals with elegant ex- actitude, also modelled bronze busts with delicate minuteness (Fig. 391- 394). But patrons were not content with these reduced portraits. From Henry IV onwards, all the French kings had their statues. All who crossed the Pont-Neuf, completed in the reign of Henry IV, passed before a bronze effigy of the king, mounted on a horse cast in Italy. At the corners of the pedestal, Francheville placed long, contorted, uneasy seated figures, following the tradition of Michelangelo. At the Hotel-de-Ville, which the king completed, there was a bronze bas-relief by Pierre Biard on the tympanum of the central door, representing Henry IV on horseback. The son of this sculptor executed a Louis XIII for the Place Royale ; here again the King of France bestrode an Italian horse. The Louis XIV of the Place Vendome at last was given one of French race. At the entrance of the Pont au Change there was a monument on which three bronze figures by Simon Guillain, represented Louis XIII as a soldier, and Anne of Austria in court costume, turning towards the little Dauphin. In each of these statues there is a robust, if slightly heavy sincerity, which was habitual when art did not allow itself to be guided, and ruined, by Florentine idealism (Fig. 398). At this period, the glorification of French kings by statuary in accordance with a ritual first Roman, and then Italian, was a novel idea. Henry IV, Louis XI 11, Louis XIV, and Louis XV had not, like their ancestors, monumental tombs in Saint Denis. No re- I k;. 396. — riEKKE iram;hk\ii.i.k. ohi'Hels. (The I.ouvre, Paris.) 189 ART IN FRANCE KIG. 397- — BARTHELEMY rUIEUR. ABUNDANCE. IMONTHIORENCV MONUMENT (The I.nuvre, Paris.) cumbent effigy on a marble slab commemor- ates them as it did the mediaeval kings ; we have not even one of those hvmg images of them, kneeling before God, with which the Valois kings adorned their monuments. Royal statues now glorify only royalty ; they rise in the public squares like idols, or the symbols of a new worship. The monarchy benefited by this imitation of the Marcus Aurelius, who, from the top of the Capitol, still extends his dominating gesture over Rome. Painting more especially reminds us that we are entering upon a new era. In the Middle Ages, the true painters were the makers of coloured windows and the illumin- ators. These mediums of colour died with Gothic art. After the Renaissance, the monarchy, the Church, and the middle classes patronised painting, to which they looked for decorations for their palaces and their churches, and pictures for their dwellings. It is in this art, more docile than sculpture, and apter in the expression of emotion, that we shall henceforth find the most delicate manifestations of French thought. The new religious architecture employed painters very freely. Innumerable "saintetes (sacred pictures) were required for the newly built churches and con- vents. In certain towns, such as Paris, Avignon, and Aix, citizens were in the habit of associating painting with their pious exercises. Every year, in the month of May, the Goldsmiths' Guild in Paris gave a large picture to Notre- Dame. These " Mais," which the whole town saw, sometimes served to demonstrate some youthful talent. It was by amiable customs of this nature that the cities of Flanders and Italy, from the Middle Ages onward, recognised their spiritual 190 L FU;. 398. — Sl.MOX GUILLAIN. LOUIS XIII, ANNE OF AUSTRIA, AND THE DAUl'HIN. MONU.MENT FORMERLY ON THE I'ONT AU CHANGE. (The Louvre, Paris.) THE EVOLUTION OF CLASSICAL ART FIG. ;:;qC). FKANCOIS ANGLIER. TOMU (11- THK DUC 1)1-; MOXT.MOREN'CV, CHAl'KI. OF THIC I.'S'CHE, AT Mori. INS. (/V/oA). Nciirdciu.) solidarity in their collective ad- miration of a masterpiece. France had too long been deprived of such sentimental communion, which fires artistic energies. A Parisian public of increasing refinement was henceforth to assure the con- tinued vitality of French art. A continuous immigration from the North is to be found at the source of this French painting. Flanders had always allowed her surplusage of artists and craftsmen to overflow into other lands ; they propagated their industry in the majority of the French provinces ; they set out to study Italy, or merely in search of work. Dutch- men, Flemings, Picards, Lorrains, and Champenois, they went from town to town, painting portraits or Church pictures. Sometimes a long undertaking kept them stationary, and they settled where they were, forgetting their native land and the Italy of their dreams. They founded colonies in many of the large French towns, and it was because they Gallicised the Germanic syllables of their names that we do not at once recognise their origin. It was one of these travelling artists, who, passing through Nor- mandy, determined the vocation of Poussin. At Bordeaux, Flemish artists were painting portraits of the jurists, while Dutch- men were draining the marshes of Saintonge. When Scbastien Bourdon came to Montpelhcr. he found that Netherlandish artists had long been established there. At Toulouse, the Flemings FIG. 400. — FRANCOIS ANGVIUK. .MOMMFNT OF- TIIIC I.ONGfEVII-I-I-: FAMILY, (The Louvre, P.irls. ) 191 ART IN FRANCE fig. 401. — miciiki. r.ouhdin. tomb of louis xi, at notre-dame de-cli';rv. {.Photo. LiiiiovsiH.) and their pupils painted the notables of the district in a stiff and serious manner, representing them clothed in black, and kneeling at the foot of a Crucifix, with the insignia of the magistracy. But it was more especially on the high road to Italy that they left traces, at the great halting places, Paris, Lyons, and Provence. The dynasty of the Stellas, the men and women of which alike painted and engraved, settled at Lyons. The churches of Provence contain a number of pictures which illustrate the continuous infiltration of Flemish art, from the manner of Van Eyck to that of Rubens, with all the intermediate styles. At Aix, several pictures by Finsonius, a native of Bruges, show the strong colour of the Flemings struggling with the black shadows of Caravaggio, and the glowing yet murky atmosphere of Tintoretto. Other painters of the same group, such as Jean Daret (of Brussels), watered down Flemish effects in Bolognese compositions. Rubens alone was strong enough to elevate this heavy realism by a mighty breath of inspiration. Avignon continued to be a centre of art, and a town which welcomed painters. It had a public capable of understanding them, of attracting them, and of giving them work. Its churches still contain a great number of pictures painted for pious donors. They are large composi- tions, m most of which the rounded figures dear to Guido Rem move among the opaque shadows of Caravaggio. Some of them have re- tained a certain natural- istic solidity, which the FI<;. 402. — JACQUES SARRAZIN. TOMB OF HENRI DE COND6. FROM THE CHURCH OF SAINT-BAUL. CHATEAU DE CHANTILLV. 192 THE EVOLUTION OF CLASSICAL ART FIG. 403.— I'lllI.U'l'E UE CHAMl'AIGNE. DKAI) CHRIST. (The Louvre, P.iris.) commonplace elegance of the prevailmg mode has not succeeded In enervatmg. One of these artists, Nicolas Mignard, called Le Romain, became famous even in Paris by painting sacred subjects with logical exactitude. His somewhat frigid culture is more naturally displayed m portraiture. The nobility of Comtat and Provence did not lack painters to fill its galleries with family portraits. The province continued to capture artists on their way to and from Rome. This did not suffice to constitute an original school ; but it made the region fertile in painters. in spite of much restoration and demolition, Flemish works are still very numerous in the Parisian churches of the seventeenth century. They consist of small, facile panels, gaily coloured with a fat impasto, or large altar-pieces in which the painter has attempted to speak the tongue of Rubens. The Louvre and various private houses also welcomed Flemish decorations of mythology or landscape. Henry IV retained Pour- bus, who was passing through Pans, and Pour- bus has soberly recorded the jovial malice of the " Vert Galant," and the somewhat heavy majesty of the queen. In 1620, when Marie de' Medici was seeking a painter for her great gallery in the Luxembourg, she ;. 404. — I'HII.llM'l-; UK CHAMI'.\1GNE. I'OKTKAIT OF MOTHER CATHEKINE, .\<;NES AKNAII.T AND or SISTKK CATHERINE, SAINTE SIZANNE. (Louvre, K'lris.) 193 ART IN FRANCE r^ FIG. 405. — CLAUDE MELLAN. I'ORTRAIT OF PEIRESC. (ENGRAVING) (Bibliotheque Nationale, Print-Room.) summoned Rubens. There could, of course, have been no question of keeping him permanently ; but he left a considerable sum of work behind him, and also several of his pupils, such as Justus van Egmont and Van Mol. The painter of the Queen-Regent at a later date was the Brussels master, Philippe de Champaigne (1602-1674). He was asso- ciated wtth the Jansenist party, and his works reflect their gravity of thought and the austere piety of their lives. The robust method he had acquired in his native school was not used by him to play with the beauty of appear- ances, but to elevate painting to • r» J the nobility of Christian and philosophical meditation. His Dead Christs and his portraits combine a profound sense of reality with an intensity of moral life very unusual in Flemish art. Cham- paigne and Poussin had so many similar preoccupations, that we must suppose the Fleming often to have waived his naturalistic ten- dencies under the influence of a psychological idealist. He must be classed with those innumerable immigrants from the north who brought their manual dexterity to France, and, in exchange, took over French modes of thought (Figs. 403, 404, 406). A crowd of competent craftsmen of second- ary rank worked in addition to the famous masters most in favour ; they sold landscapes, sea-pieces, and copies at the fairs ; they painted flowers, birds, draperies, and vases in cartoons for the 94 FIG. 406. — PHILIPPE DE CHAMPAIGNE. PORTRAIT OF RICHELIEU. (The Louvre, Paris.) THE EVOLUTION OF CLASSICAL ART KIG. 4C7. — LAGNKAU. rok IKAI T. (Drawing in the Louvre, Paris.) Gobelins tapestries, around figures by Le Brun. Throughout the seventeenth cen- tury, French painters, when com- pared with Flemings and ItaHans, may be seen to have possessed original qualities ; but they lacked dexterity of execution ; they were like children whose education has been begun too late ; they were no longer of an age when artlessness is attractive, and they had none of the easy assurance of maturity. The French School further lacked that technical or theoretical certitude which was the strength of the Flemings and Italians. Even in the first third of the century, the sculptors, and more especially the painters who gathered in Paris, were numerous enough to generate a certain esprit de corps. They were no longer isolated workers, attached for some temporary task to the person of the king or some other Maecenas ; a large circle of middle class and ecclesiastical patrons upheld their industry. But in order to sell their works, they had been obliged to enrol themselves in the ancient guilds of their craft. They belonged at first to the venerable corporation of St. Luke. But this approximated them to mere artisans, and this confusion, impossible even in societies where painting is a tradition, and has deep roots in the soil, must have seemed still more intolerable in France, where this art, a new comer, so to speak, presented itself with the titles of nobility acquired during the Renaissance. An Academy of Painting and Sculpture was formed, under the royal protection. This institution, which dated from 1 648, existed until the Revolution. It was, from its very foundation, and it continued to be, a cor- poration which defended the interests of 195 o 2 FIG. 408. — J.\CQL'i;s CAI-I.OT. ACTOKS OF THE CO.\ll';i)IK riAI.IlCtJNE. (I'.ibliothcque Nationale, I'rint-Koom.) ART IN FRANCE FIG. 409. — DANIEL UUMONSIIKK. I'OUTRAIT OF THE DL'C DE LON(;UEVII.I.E. (The Louvre, Paris.) its members, an academy or learned society bent on elaboratmg a doctrme, a school which formed pupils ; under Louis XIV it became, in addition, a sort of administration which regu- lated artistic work, and it was more especially in this character that it was not irreproachable. Its organiza- tion, in fact, permitted the State to govern the artist. But, on the other hand, it is incorrect to say that it ever set itself in opposition to national taste by its doctrines. Under the ancient regime, it included all artists worthy of the name ; the number of its members was un- limited. The rare dissidents re- mained outside the fold for personal and not for doctrinal reasons. It represented successively the most diverse forms of French art, the style of Le Brun, the style of Boucher, the style of David. During the time when this modern painting was born and was growing in France, a variety of influences was at work, and it is impossible to find any common tendency in the innumerable caprices of French artists. While craftsmen innocent of doctrine were pouring in from the North, French painters were seeking for a creed in Italy. The great Italian masters were no longer brought into France ; but French novices went in great numbers to study their methods. For France, as for all Europe, the universal source of art vvas Rome. Those who never crossed the Alps were not the least Italianised ; they were FIC. 410. — JACQUES CALLOT. THE SIEGE OF I.A ROCHEI.LE (FRAGMENT). (Bibliotlieque Nationalc, Print-Room.) 196 THE EVOLUTION OF CLASSICAL ART FIG. 411. — JACQUES CAI.LOT. EXKCLTION OF MAKAL DFKS I.N "'LES MISEKES DE LA GLEKRE." (I!iliIiothei]ue Xationale. Print-Room.) inspired by copies and engravings ; 412. — AISRAHAM nflliLr.) ART IN FRANCE FIG. 426.- -COURTOIS. CAVALRY SKIRMISH. (Tht: Louvre, Paris.) with fragments of lime, and grains of porphyry and marble : ' Here,' said he, ' take this back to your museum, and say : this is ancient Rome.' " Nothing could tempt him from his beloved city. He wished to live and die on that soil in which a whole world slumbers, in that atmosphere, heavy with memories, the grave poetry of which entered into his soul.(fle dreamed literally of giving a picture of antique life : he read ancient authors to glean characteristic traits of manners) He did not place a wand surmounted by a hawk's head in the hand of a priest without due reflection. It was to indicate that this priest was an Egyptian, and the procession one sees in the distance in the Burial of Phocion serves to indicate the date of the Athenian hero's death. He is always well pleased when his archaeological knowledge prevents him from inventing. But more than this : to illustrate ancient events is, of course, to return to the forms of Greek sculpture. The heroes of Plutarch and Livy have this advantage over modern cele- brities, that they present them- selves to us in all the grace of antique statuary. Thus the claims of truth and beauty, which are at the root of classic thought, are reconciled. The painter made no distinction between art and history, be- tween Alexander and Apollo. \He had, however, to work for The religion of his time, and to depict a martyr or a no.. 427. miracle occasionally. But church paintings demanded a rhetorical grandiloquence, and Poussin had to strain his voice to address the crowd from afar. He preferred to condense some 204 LE SUEUR. MELPOMENE, ERATO, AND POLYHYMNIA. (The Louvre, Paris.) THE EVOLUTION OF CLASSICAL ART FIG. 42a. — 1,E SUELK. SAINT SCIIOLASTICA AND SAINT BEMCOICT. (The Louvre, Paris.) Biblical or Gospel thought in small compositions^ He has treated the sacred Books as he has treated pro- fane literature, with no more tender- ness or mysticism, and with the same anxiety to be perfectly intelligible. All that IS necessary in order to understand him, is to have read the works that inspire him. Yet his manner was not absolutely novel ; it was that of Raphael, the painter of the Loggie and of the Cartoons. Raphael was the inventor of this iconography in which the plastic, psychological, and archaeological dis- coveries of the Renaissance were turned to account. Poussia^ndeed, admired Raphael as much as he admired the antique. ( He was little concerned with the youthful Urbinate of radiant Madonnas and luminous landscap^ he carried away nothing from the Vatican Stanze beyond a few beautiful attitudes, and the group of the Muses on Parnassus. But he penetrated to the very soul of the narrative art of the Loggie and the Cartoons. It was in this " illustrated Bible " that he learned how to tell a story in attitudes, physiognomies, and agitated draperies, enframed in landscape and architecture. Poussm was not, like certain of his contemporaries, Rubens or Rembrandt for instance, the creator of a pictorial world ; his originality lies primarily in his organising faculty ; (his genius manifests itself almost^entirely in his powerful composition, a pic- turesque composition which knits lines and planes of light closely together, a moral composition which subordinates a variety of attitudes and types to a dominant idea. A strong intelligence FIG. 429. — I.E SUEIK. SAINT lAlI. I'KEACHING AT El'HESLS. (Tlie Louvre, Paris.) 205 ART IN FRANCE governed his execution. Even when the painter is most inspired, he never seems to be carried away by his ardour ; he has none of those bravura passages so frequent among the Italians and the Flemings, who are intoxicated by a fine effect, and give themselves up tothe delight of rendering it skilfujIyT) Even his vocabulary has an abstract charac- ter. ^;4e drew a great deal from antiques and from Nature, but did not paint with the model before his eyes. Nothing in his works ever makes us feel the contact of reality ; accent reveals the joy of a no 1- k;. 430. S^BASTIEN ISOURDON. FOUQUET. (Museum of Versailles.) painter in the contemplation of the beautiful. His study of antique statues has given him a taste for clearly-defined forms, simple planes, and rhythmic attitudes ; his nymphs and satyrs have an elegance of form and attitude which implies a long plastic educaJidfrj; they were fashioned by antique and Renaissance art. (His drawing is marked by a virile grace ; the forms are a little hard and sculpturesque, and in spite of colour that sometimes lacks consistence, they have that con- centrated energy, that density peculiar to large figures reduced to a small scal^ An occa^onal (fij^ccAana/ or Triumph of Flora just serves to indicate that the master was sometimes fired by the ardour of Titian \\in these cases the nudities which recline on the dusky grass become more amber or ruddy of tone, and a golden twilight overlays the deep, dark blue of the sky. But this was a transient phase in his art ; in general, Poussm does not look to colour for the enrichment of his thought. He groups his attitudes mentally in very simple landscapes. The light is diffused in broad patches, bringing the masses of 206 FIG. 431. — LE SUEUR. DE.\TII OF SAINT BRUNO. (The Louvre, Paris.) THE EVOLUTION OF CLASSICAL ART FIG. 432. — I'OfSSlN. HIS PORTRAIT, ItV HIMSELF. (The Loiivru, Paris.) the ground and of the fabrics into a few planes, and throwing the figures into rehef by frank contrasts of light and dark surfaces) When his conception had taken definite form in his mind, he felt no anxiety as to its realisation. He painted with a steady hand, innocent alike of nervousness and dexterity, but the tissue of co'our was less closely woven than the structure of the light and the design. Hence, when his aging hand began to tremble, his pictures suffered very little ; the vigour of conception remained un- impaired, and ensured the cohesion of his loosely painted composit^ns. He composed his ru;)blest(Jand- scapes)in his old age. /The harmony of his lines becomes broader and calfneriwhen it is noT"encumbered by the gesticulations of a human 'drama. His Nature has no fresh- ness ; it IS instinct with an austere majesty, untouched by any fantasy of light or colour ; all brilliance is suppressed that the structure of trees and soil may be the more nakedly presented. The great over- hanging clouds are echoed by the simple planes of f ~ f the ground and the dense foliage. An impression of serene eternity breathes from this balanced har- monyP This landscape in which the ruins slumber is that described by V'irgil, when Saturn, reigning over Latium, had not yet abandoned the earth to mortals. The Humanists of the seventeenth cen- tury were not surprised to find gods, satyrs, nymphs, or some river deity leaning on his urn, by the roadside, or on the banks of the Tiber. 207 FIG. 433. — I'OUSSIN. RESCUE OF THp; VOLTHFUL PVRRHLS. (The Loiivio, Paris.) ART IN FRANCE FIG. 434. — POUSSIN'. ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE. (The Louvre, Paris.) Although he spent very httle Uljie in Pans, Poussin had many fervent admirers in the capital. (_Scarcely was his glory assured in Rome, and his work well known in his native land, when he had no rival in FranceT) Collectors overwhelmed him with commissions ; a picture was looked upon as a great favour, and when one arrived in Paris, the little society of Poussin's devotees was all astir. They assembled in front of the new painting to discuss its merits. The im- portance of these little works in the history of the French mind is very considerable. In the first place, Poussin satisfied the contem- porary taste for antiquity. He had assimilated all that could be known or divined on the subject, and had condensed it in his com- positions. His pictures were not destined, like those of the Flemings, for princely galleries or Jesuit altars ; they are not, like those of the Dutchmen, marvels of dextentv and precision; they never astonish, nor do they teach the science of painting. But they afford a kind of discipline, and always associate the intelligence FIi;. 435. — POUSSIX. THE SHEPHERDS OF • (The Louvre, Paris.) 208 THE EVOLUTION OF CLASSICAL ART -rOL'SSIN. THE CHILDHOOD OK BACCHUS. (Coiide Museum, Chantilly.) With the pleasure of the eye. Adapted to the dimensions of our field of vision, so that a single look can take in the whole composition without losing a single detail, they re- quire to be analysed and examined in a small room. Like the great French writers of the seventeenth century Poussin condensed into brief works sentiments which were floating vaguely in space, not having yet found their perfect forms. The virile poetry of this great logician blossomed under the sky of Rome, and passed afterwards into the French soil. The enthusiasm of archaeologists and artists does not fully explain the fascination of Rome for the men of the North. Throughout the ages, Celt and Teuton have dreamed of Italy, and have succumbed to her charm. The Germans of Barbarossa and the Frenchmen of Louis XII knew the nostalgia awakened by that smiling land, where they tasted a joy not easily evoked under their o\s'n sterner skies. Thus the countries whose artists crossed the Alps in great numbers were those who had to wait longest for men to depict their own landscapes faithfully ; the vision of transalpine landscape painters was long obsessed by memories of Rome or Naples. Among those poets born of the contact of North and South, Claude Gellee was one of those who most fully api)reciated the warm light of Mediter- ranean skies. Claude Gellee, called Le Lorrain (1600-1682), lived at Rome in a cosmopolitan circle, where men of every nation went by the name of their native land. An Ignorant and simple spirit, he was little concerned with the historic memories 1' FIG. 437. — I'OLSSIN. DIOGENES THROWING AWAY HIS (The Louvre, Paris.) 209 ART IN FRANCE FIG. 438.— POUSSIN. Al'OLLO IN LOVE WITH DAI'HNE. (The I.ouvre, Paris.) which breathe from Roman soil. His work appeals to no Humanist curiosity, and his compo- sitions, in spite of their nobility, have little to say to the discursive classicism of Frenchmen. His land- scapes deal with the soft splendour of southern skies. His dazzled eyes beheld a magic architec- ture. Sometimes it is a port ; the sun, before dis- appearing into the ocean, darts its expiring rays caressingly on facades of marble, and gilds the crests of innumerable little waves. Or it is a plain, and dark groves of trees make the illimitable distance lighter and more limpid. All the shade and solidity are in the foreground, near the edge of the frame ; in the centre of the picture, the objects become brighter as they recede, penetrated by the light and set ablaze as it were by the ardent atmosphere. These landscapes were lovingly contemplated : they have been copied and plagiarised extensively. Claude brought something of the radiance of Italy everywhere with his colour ; even in the works of mediocre imitators, there is some reflex of those glowing memories which never fade from the mind of the Northerner who has once crossed the Alps. -vi\/ Between the brilliant Renaissance and the sun of Louis XiV, the first half of the seven- teenth century seems to lie somewhat in the shade. But in this twilight, that classic spirit, the discipline of which was thenceforth to govern all forms of intellectual activity in France, was definitely evolved. The generation of Louis XI 11 appears to have been sacrificed, be- FiG. 439.-POUSSIN-. THE DELUGE. causc the magnificence it (The Louvre, Paris.) made possiblc was only 210 THE EVOLUTION OF CLASSICAL ART '■"'■" ^^mi Sra ^S^M^fit, '^mii ^^^^^^^WdttMiiu-," MsrJBB ^HKiJiBHul^^ iii itf^ 'SkI i |1||^^ V ^^^^H^B il ^^^^^9 R^EkHI^'^^ m f^ . _ ' ' ^-^H KIG. 440.- -Cl.ALOK l.i)IU