in pictorial imagination proper, and here we strike already upon the central defect in painting of the pure French tradition. For certainly this is French; there is no admixture of northern or eastern influence; what external influence there is is Italian, and comes through the colony of the Siennese school, which accompanied the Popes to Avignon. Here we may note a reminiscence of Siennese art in the figure with a pigtail in the scene of the Crucifixion.

This Siennese influence is, I think, the predominant one in the purely French art of the later fourteenth century. It is most marked in the two panels belonging to Madame Lippmann, which were published in THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE, June, 1903, and it may be seen again in the beautiful drawing of the Death and Assumption of the Virgin (p. 287) from the Louvre. This has been ascribed both to Beauneveu and to Jean d'Orleans. It appears to me a finer work than either of these artists could have produced, but in point of style and date approaches more to the latter than the former. It shows as yet no sign of that particularized naturalism which marks the new movement of the fifteenth century; it is still blandly, somewhat inexpressively ideal and heroic in types and gestures, but it has one surprising new quality, a quality which distinguishes it completely from the Parement de Narbonne, a new freedom of composition; a feeling for balance instead of symmetry, and most important of all an idea of decorating the picture space without filling it evenly throughout as Jean d'Orleans does. This, indeed, is one of the elements which goes to make up the art of Pol de Limbourg; indeed it already foreshadows one of the most surprising designs of the book of Hours at Chantilly.

But something more was wanted to bring about the rejuvenation of art which the early fifteenth century discloses. And that, though it may have been developed in France, was due to artists of a different race.

As always happens at a period of transition in art, we get the signs of a new idea Occurring contemporaneously with the dying efforts of the old. The new idea, is, I think, already apparent in the designs of an artist, Jacques Bandol, who, in 1378-9, (four years later than Jean d'Orleans Parement) executed the cartoons for a great series of tapestries illustrating the Apocalypse, which belong to the cathedral at Angers (p. 287). Jacques Bandol is generally called Jean of Bruges, and, though it cannot be proved, it seems probable that he was of Flemish origin.

Here we come upon the vexed question of nationality, on which a few words are necessary. The period with which we are concerned is one of extraordinary cosmopolitanism in the arts; the political boundaries of to-day had but little meaning for the artists of the fourteenth century. What is important is to note centres of patronage, centres in which artists, from whatever country they came, met together and developed to some extent a common style. Moreover we are concerned with a tradition which up to at least the middle of the fourteenth century is common to the various centres of north-west Europe, though in that common tradition we can already distinguish the tendencies to particular varieties caused by difference of race, and we can watch the gradual growth of these varieties, till in the fifteenth century they become separate species, Flemish and French.

At the time when the Parement de Narbonne was executed there were two centres of patronage, that of Lewis van Male count of Flanders, and that of Charles V of France. Of these two the French centre was incontestably the more important. Later on, when, under the dukes of Burgundy, the ancient Lotharingia became once more a political reality, the relative position was almost reversed, and a third centre, that of Dijon, plays an all-important part. But

even these centres did not imply the same homogeneity or the same exclusiveness that the town guilds of the succeeding century imposed, and we frequently find the same artist working now at one centre, now at another. Still, it may be safely stated that Paris is the predominant centre till nearly the close of the fourteenth century. Nevertheless, we find that the greater number of artists of distinction even at Paris were born on the further side of the FrancoFlemish border, and it can hardly be maintained that the great movement of the fifteenth century was French in at all the same way as we consider the movement of the thirteenth century to have been.

Bandol, therefore, is typical of the conditions in which the new movement arose : he was a Fleming who worked in France and assimilated himself to the French tradition; but he imported into it something that his race gave him-a new vitality, a refreshing ugliness.

In 1371 we find him already painter to King Charles V, already showing in the miniature to the Bible Hystorians of that date (Museum Westreenianum at the Hague) signs of a new quality, a relentlessness and brusquerie in the rendering of character. But we can appreciate his qualities best from the specimens of the great Angers tapestry. These are, it is true, adapted from a miniature now at Cambrai which unfortunately I have not seen; but this need scarcely throw doubt on Bandol's greatness as a designer, for the adaptation of these to so vast and monumental a work implies great power of co-ordination, a strong sense of proportion, and above all a power of feeling design largely. Moreover, the actual quality of line-and this is a matter of the greatest importance is Bandol's, since he executed the cartoons for the tapestries. And here, though the weaving into tapestry obscures something of the precision of the drawn line, we can, I think, see a new power, the hint of a new rhythm which was destined.

germs

to replace the effete elegance of the old. Bandol makes the stuff of his drapery thinner; it falls in straighter, less mazily involved contours; he already has no dread of angles and straight lines. The noses protrude more definitely from the face, the cutting of the eyes is sharper and gives a new vivacity. We see, in short, the of what may be called the fifteenth-century rhythm. It starts by a reaction against the over sweetness, the want of life, in the continuous curves and unbroken meanderings of the older style. It, too, was destined in turn to become more and more accentuated as each generation of artists seized and exaggerated its characteristic qualities, till, in the papery and crumpled folds of later Flemish and German art we again find calligraphy divorced from vital expression.

In Bandol's tapestries this new feeling for sharpness and angularity is scarcely more than a suspicion, but it enables him to get a new life into his figures, something terrible and brusque in the poses and expression of the great prophets in their niches which commence each series of small scenes. In the faces throughout there is a new sense of the characteristic, almost of the ugly. Bandol's decorative feeling, too, has a freshness and novelty which surprises; this is not only seen in the skilful adaptation of the figures to the spaces, in the imposing effect of the architectural niches, but in the freedom and fancy of the borders, in the use of flowers and butterflies, introduced not in any rigid pattern but scattered here and there with a delicate tact, a feeling for free and naturalistic grouping which reminds one of the unsymmetrical design of China and Japan.

It is impossible to ascribe with certainty any picture to Bandol, but there is one work akin in style to his tapestries, though probably of a later date, the diptych lent by the Museo Nazionale of Florence (p. 289), to which it came as part of the Carrand collection. Each leaf is made into an

elaborately carved architectural shrine in the purest French style of the end of the fourteenth century. In the two lower arches of the shrine are pictures, while prophets and angels fill the space between the flying buttresses and pinnacles above. The whole treatment of this reminds one of the niches with seated prophets, surmounted by angels bearing banners, in the large panels of the Angers tapestries, while the abruptness and vivacity of movement and the sharp incisive quality of the line makes the likeness to Bandol and the distinction from most of his contemporaries the more marked. Curiously enough, in spite of the elaborately architectural design of these panels, which would naturally conduce to a purely decorative and schematic treatment, the artist of this singular piece gives proof of a power of purely pictorial design of which I can find no other example in contemporary art. In the left-hand leaf the Virgin is seated on a gothic throne with arched sides, through which peer a crowd of keen-faced angels, while in front and below are grouped saints in a sacred conversation.2 What strikes one most is the depth and consistency of the pictured space, so distinct from the flat design of the Parement de Narbonne or even of the Martyrdom of St. Denis by Malouel. Here the illusion of depth behind the panel surface is helped out by painting on the ledge of the frame a continuation of the carpet on which the saints are seated. The frame itself thus forms the step by which we enter the chamber, built out by the artist behind the surface of his panel. Even more remarkable is the right-hand leaf which we reproduce. As sometimes happens in paintings of an early date, the gold background, the elaborately tooled brocading of the draperies, and the intense research for beauty of quality, obscures for us at first the essentially pictorial imagination which the artist displays. It is so, for instance, that few

2 A conception with which Filippo Lippi and his Umbrian followers have made us familiar. Was this taken from earlier Northern examples like this?

people realise what an immense step in space construction, in perspective and consistent light and shade, is marked by Fra Angelico's Coronation of the Virgin in the Louvre. Here the contrast is even more striking, as indeed the artist's work is more astonishingly in advance of his time. Compare for a moment this crucifixion with Jean d'Orleans' Parement. There the artist has never begun to conceive his scene in three dimensions. He has taken the elements of his story one by one and fitted them on to the flat surface of his panel. Starting with the Christ, Mary, and St. John, he proceeds to fill

up the spaces that are left over with the less important figures, reserving to the angels, cherubim, and the inscribed scroll the duty of occupying all the odd corners which his design has hitherto left blank. When we turn to the Crucifixion of the Florentine diptych, we can scarcely believe the evidence of our eyes; we can scarcely believe that an artist of the last quarter of the fourteenth century should have been able to conceive so essentially pictorial a grouping. The three crosses are seen going away in perspective, and at such an angle that the Christ fills the field, while the thief to the left is seen from behind, and his figure is actually cut by the architectural framework. This implies a complete revolution in the method of conception of the subject, a real visualization of the scene in actual three-dimensional space. If we retain the lines of this composition and imagine it carried out in chiaroscuro, we should have, not a primitive miniature-like design, but something much nearer to a Tintoretto. Scarcely less remarkable are the figures below, the seated weeping figure to the left again cut by the frame, the ease and naturalness of the grouping, the boldness with which the figures in front are allowed to cut the outlines of the cross, and the striking sense of a realized space which this gives. The figures are in fact arranged round the cross, not merely in two blocks on either side. In feeling it marks, too, a new idea, a

derlam was, in spite of occasional visits to Paris, essentially a Flemish artist. He worked, it is true, for the Burgundian court, but he did not execute his great altarpiece for the Chartreuse at Dijon on the spot, but at Ypres, whither he moved from Hesdin about 1391. The two shutters of this great triptych, now in the museum at Dijon (p. 291), are painted on the outside-the wood carving of the inside was by another Fleming, Jacques Baerse. We are fortunately able to give a date to these paintings. It appears from the accounts of the dukes of Burgundy3 that they were being executed in 1392. The importance of this date has perhaps scarcely been realized in considering the development of the art of the fifteenth century. If we remember that Jan Malouel's great composition (p. 293) was in all probability not painted till after 1397, and that in pictorial composition it remains far more archaic than Broederlam's, we shall realize how great an innovator he was, how profoundly he left his mark on later art.

lessening of the religious, an increase of the actual human element. The naturalness of the poses, the sharply turned heads, the lifelike rendering of people in animated conversation, make a quite new impression here as compared with the would-be tragic sentiment of the Parement. That represented a nobler tradition perhaps, one in which the ideal religious significance predominated. Here the Crucifixion has become a genre scene; we are already well on the way to Jan van Eyck. Already, then, at this stage in the development of Franco-Flemish art, it is, perhaps, possible to trace in embryo the characteristics of what are destined to become two separate styles, the French and the Netherlandish. Already something in Bandol's types reminds us of his Teutonic origin, and from a number of slight indications I believe that it will be found that this work belongs to the Flemish rather than the French branch. It seems, indeed, to come somewhere between Bandol and Jacquemart de Hesdin. Such indications are, a certain premature baroque feeling in the architecture of the Virgin's throne, the clumsy proportion of some of the heads, notably the St. John, and the peculiar drawing of the legs in the crucified Christ. The straightness of the shins, the summary outline of which is in contrast to the purer French treatment with its undulating line and almost exaggerated salience of the muscles, is just such as we find later on in Flemish painting.

Moreover, the power of pictorial composition which this shows in so surprising a degree is just the one quality which, for some reason, the purely French artists never acquired. On the other hand the purity of design of the architectural framework suggests that though the painter may have been a Fleming the work was done at a French centre.

It is precisely for this power of pictorial imagination that the next artist we will consider is distinguished. Melchior Broe

For this picture discloses the most puzzling mixture of influence, and may, perhaps, one day afford the clue to many curious problems concerning the growth of naturalistic painting in Europe. Certain particulars of the architecture, such as the domed building above the Presentation, and the peculiar form of the battlements in the same picture, are so Italian as to make one believe that Broederlam had travelled in Italy. He has introduced certain details which belong to the architecture of his own time and country into a whole which is entirely Italian. Nor does this remind us only of actual buildings in Italy; Broederlam must have also studied paintings. The Presentation is almost a Flemish version of a picture by Bartolo di Maestro Fredi, at Siena. From Siena, too, must have come the vase and lily of the Annunciation. But

3 See Dehaisnes Documents et Extraits.'