University of Virginia Library

I.

We find four distinct periods in the pictorial art of
the Netherlands, and, through a remarkable coincidence,
each corresponds to a distinct historic period.
Here, as everywhere, art translates life; the talent
and taste of the painter change at the same time and
in the same sense as the habits and sentiments of the
public. Just as each profound geological revolution
brings with it its own fauna and flora, so does each
great transformation of society and intellect bring
with it its ideal figures. In this respect our galleries
of art resemble museums, the imaginary creations
they contain being, like living organisms, both the
fruit and the index of their surroundings.

The first period of art lasts about a century and a
half, and extends from Hubert Van Eyck to Quintin
Matsys (1400-1530). It issues from a renaissance,
that is to say, from a great development of prosperity,
wealth and intellect. Here, as in Italy, the
cities at an early period are flourishing, and almost
free. I have already stated to you that in the thirteenth

century serfdom was abolished in Flanders,
and that the guilds to manufacture salt "for the purpose
of bringing under cultivation marshy grounds,"
ascend to the Roman epoch. From the seventh and
ninth centuries, Bruges, Antwerp and Ghent are
"ports," or privileged markets; they carry on commerce
on a large scale; they fit out cruisers for the
whale fishery; they serve as the entrepôts of the
North and the South. Prosperous people, well supplied
with arms and provisions, accustomed through
association and activity to foresight and enterprise,
are better qualified to protect themselves than miserable
serfs scattered about in defenceless villages.
Their great populous cities with narrow streets, and
a saturated soil intersected with deep canals, are not
a suitable ground for the cavalry of barons.[10] Hence
it is that the feudal net, so close and so tightly
drawn over all Europe, had, in Flanders, to enlarge
its meshes. In vain did the Count appeal for aid to
his suzerain, the French king, and urge his Burgun
dian chivalry against the cities; overcome at Monsen-Puelle,
at Cassel, at Rosebecque, at Othée, at
Gavre, at Brusthem, at Liege, they always recover
themselves, and from revolt to revolt preserve the
best portion of their liberties, even under the princes
of the house of Austria. The fourteenth century
is the heroic and tragic epoch of Flanders. She possesses
brewers like Arteveldt, who are tribunes, dictators
and captains, and who end life on the field of
battle or are assassinated; civil war is mixed up with
foreign war; people fight from city to city, trade
against trade, and man to man; there are fourteen
hundred murders in Ghent in one year; the stores
of energy are so great that she survives all ills and
sustains all efforts. Men seek death twenty thousand
at a time, and fall in heaps before lances without
giving an inch. "Banish all hope of returning without
honor," said the citizens of Ghent to the five
thousand volunteers under Philip Van Arteveldt, for
"so soon that we hear that you are dead or discomfited
we shall fire the city and destroy ourselves with
our own hands."[11] In 1384, in the country of the
Four Trades, prisoners refused their lives, declaring
that after death their bones would rise up against
the French. Fifty years later, around rebellious
Ghent, the peasantry "chose death rather than ask
quarter, declaring that they would perish as martyrs
in a fair fight." In these swarming hives an abun
dance of food and habits of personal activity maintain
courage, turbulence, audacity and even insolence,
all excesses of brutal and boundless energy;
these weavers were men, and when we encounter
man we may expect soon to encounter the arts.

An interval of prosperity at this time was sufficient;
under this ray of sunshine the flowering thus
maturing is perfected. At the end of the fourteenth
century Flanders, with Italy, is the most industrious,
the wealthiest and most flourishing country in
Europe.[12] In 1370 there are thirty-two hundred
woollen factories at Malines and on its territory.
One of its merchants carries on an immense trade
with Damascus and Alexandria. Another, of Valenciennes,
being at Paris during the fair, monopolizes
all provisions exposed for sale with a view to display
his opulence. Ghent in 1389 has one hundred
and eighty-nine thousand men bearing arms; the

drapers alone furnish eighteen thousand men in a
revolt; the weavers form twenty-seven sections, and
at the sound of the great bell, fifty-two corporations
under their own banners rush to the market-place.
In 1380 the goldsmiths of Bruges are numerous
enough to form in war time an entire division of the
army. A little later Œnius Sylvius states that she is
one of the three most beautiful cities in the world;
a canal four leagues and a half in length joins her to
the sea; a hundred vessels a day pass through it.
Bruges was then what London is at the present
time. Political matters at this period attain to a
sort of equilibrium. The Duke of Burgundy finds
himself by inheritance, in 1384, sovereign of Flanders.
The grandeur of his possessions and the multiplication
of civil wars during the minority and
madness of Charles VI. divorce him from France;
he is no longer, like the ancient counts, a dependant
of the king, domiciliated in Paris and soliciting
aid to reduce and tax his Flemish merchants. His
power and the misfortunes of France render him
independent. Although a prince he belongs, in
Paris, to the popular party, and the butchers shout
for him. Although a Frenchman his politics are
Flemish, and when not in alliance with the English
he negotiates with them. In the matter of money
he certainly quarrels with his Flemings more than
once, and is obliged to kill a good many of them.
But to one who is familiar with the disturbances and
violence of the middle ages, the order and harmony
which is then established seem sufficient; at all
events they are greater than ever before. Henceforth,
as at Florence about the year 1400, authority
becomes recognized and society organized; henceforth,
as in Italy about the year 1400, man abandons
the ascetic and ecclesiastic regime that he may
interest himself in nature and enjoy life. The ancient
compression is relaxed; he begins to prize strength,
health, beauty and pleasure. On all sides we see the
mediæval spirit undergoing change and disintegration.
An elegant and refined architecture converts
stone into lace, festooning churches with pinnacles,
trefoils and intricate mullions, and in such a fashion
that the honey-combed, gilded and flowering edifice
becomes a vast and romantic casket, a product of
fancy rather than of faith, less calculated to excite
piety than wonder. In like manner chivalry becomes
a mere parade. The nobles frequent the Valois
court, devote themselves to pleasure, to "pretty conceits"
and especially to the "conceits of love." In
Chaucer and in Froissart we are spectators of their
pomp—their tourneys, their processions and their
banquets, of the new reign of frivolity and fashion,
of the creations of an infatuated and licentious imagination,
of their extravagant and overcharged costumes—robes
twelve ells long, tight hose and Bohemian
jackets with sleeves falling to the ground, shoes
terminating in the claws, horns and tail of the scorpion,
suits embroidered with letters, animals, and
with musical notes enabling one to read and sing
a song on the owner's back, hoods adorned with
golden garlands and with animals, robes covered
with sapphires, rubies and jewelled swallows, each
holding in its beak a golden cup; one costume has
fourteen hundred of these cups, and we find nine hundred
and sixty pearls used in embroidering a song on
a coat. Women in magnificently ornamented veils,
the breast nude, the head crowned with huge cones
and crescents, and dressed in gaudy robes covered
with the figures of unicorns, lions and savages, place
themselves on seats representing small sculptured
and gilded cathedrals. The life of the court and
of princes seems a carnival. When Charles VI.
is knighted a hall is prepared in the abbey of St.
Denis, thirty-two toises (about two hundred feet)
long, hung in white and green, with a lofty pavilion
of tapestry: here, after three days of feasting and
jousting, a nocturnal masked ball ends in an orgie.
"Many a damsel forgot herself, many were the
husbands who suffered," and, in contrast to this,
showing the sentiments of the age, they celebrate
the funeral of Duguesclin at the end of it.
In the accounts and chronicles of the period we
follow the course of a broad, golden stream, flowing,
glistening, ostentatious and interminable, that is to
say, the domestic history of the king and queen and
the dukes of Orleans and Burgundy; there is nothing
but entries into cities, cavalcades, masks, dances,
voluptuous caprices, and the prodigality of the newly
enriched. The Burgundian and French chevaliers
who go to contend with Bagazet at Nicopolis equip
themselves as if for a party of pleasure; their banners
and the trappings of their horses are loaded
with gold and silver, their dishes are all of silver
plate and their tents are of green satin; exquisite
wines follow them in boats on the Danube, and their
camps are filled with courtesans. This excess of
animal spirits, which, in France, is mingled with
morbid curiosity and lugubrious fancies, breaks out
in Burgundy into a grand and jolly kermesse. Philip
the Good has three legitimate wives, twenty-four
mistresses, and sixteen bastards; he attends to all,
feasting, making merry and admitting the townswomen
to his court; seeming at the outset to be
one of Jordaens' characters. A Count of Clèves has
sixty-three bastards; the chroniclers in their narration
of ceremonies constantly and gravely mention
those of both sexes; the institution appears to be
official: seeing them swarming in this manner, we
are reminded of the buxom nurses of Rubens and
the Gangamelles of Rabelais. "It was," says a contemporary,
"a great pity, this sin of luxury which
prevailed far and wide, and especially amongst princes
and the wedded. . . IIe was the gentlest companion
who was able to deceive and possess at the
same time more than one woman . . . and even there
prevailed likewise the sin of luxury among the prelates
of the Church and among all Church people."[13]
Jacques de Croy, archbishop of Cambray, officiated
pontifically with his thirty-six bastards and bastards'
sons, and kept in reserve a sum of money for
those to come. At the third marriage of Philip the
Good the gala seems to be a Gamache's wedding
commanded by Gargantua; the streets of Bruges
were hung with tapestry; for eight days and eight
nights a stone lion spurted Rhine wine, while a stone
stag discharged Beaune Burgundy; at meal times
an unicorn poured forth rosewater or malvoisie. On
the entry of the Dauphin into the city, eight hundred
merchants of divers nations advanced to meet
him, all in garments of silk and velvet. At another
ceremonial the duke appears with a saddle and bridle
covered with precious stones; "nine pages covered
with plumes of jewels" followed behind him,
and "one of the said pages bore a salad which was
stated to be of the value of one hundred thousand
gold crowns." Another time the jewels worn by
the duke are estimated at a million. I wish to
describe one of these fêtes to you; like those of
Florence at the same epoch they bear witness to the
picturesque and decorative tastes which here as in
Florence produced pictorial art. One of them took
place at Lille under Philip the Good, the Festival of
the Pheasant, which may be compared with the triumph
of Lorenzo de Medici; you will observe here
in a hundred naive details the resemblances and the
differences of the two societies, and accordingly of
their culture, their taste and their art.

The Duke of Clèves had given a "superb banquet"
at Lille, at which were present "Monseigneur," (of
Burgundy) "together with the lords, ladies and damsels
of his house." At this banquet there was seen
on the table an "entremets," that is to say, a decoration
representing "a ship with lifted sails, in which
was a knight erect and armed . . . . and before it a
silver swan, bearing on his neck a gold collar, to
which hung a long chain, with which the said swan

appeared to draw the vessel, and on the back of the
said vessel stood a castle most skilfully contrived."
On this allegorical machine the Duke of Clèves,
Knight of the Swan, and "slave of the fair," caused
proclamation to be made that he might be encountered
in the lists, "armed in jousting harness and in
war saddle, and that he who should do the best would
gain a rich golden swan, chained with a chain of gold,
and on the end of this chain a magnificent ruby."

Ten days after this the Count d'Etampes gave the
second act of the fairy spectacle. Bear in mind that
the second as well as the first act with all the others
began with a feast. In this court life is gross, and
people never tire of bumpers. "When the `entremets'
were removed there issued from an apartment a
multitude of torches, and after these there appeared
an armed attendant clad in his coat of mail, and
after him two knights clad in long velvet robes
furred with sable, with no covering to the head, each
one bearing in his hand a gay hood of flowers;" after
them, on a palfrey caparisoned in blue silk, "a most
beautiful lady appeared, young, of the age of twelve
years, attired in a robe of violet silk, richly embroidered

and padded with gold," she is "the princess
of joy." Three squires clothed in vermilion silk lead
her up to the duke, singing a song as they introduce
her. She descends, and kneeling on the table
she places on his brow a crown of flowers. At this
moment the joust is proclaimed, the drums beat, a
pursuivant-at-arms appears in a mailed suit covered
with swans, and then enters the Duke of Clèves,
Knight of the Swan, richly armed, seated on a horse
caparisoned in white damask and fringed with gold;
he leads by a gold chain a large swan accompanied
by two mounted archers; behind him march children
on horseback, grooms, knights armed with lances,
all, like himself, in white damask fringed with gold.
Toison d'Or, the herald, presents them to the duchess.
The other knights then defile before her on
their horses, decked with gray and crimson cloth of
gold, cloth decked with small golden bells, crimson
velvet trimmed with sable, violet velvet fringed with
gold and silk, and black velvet studded with golden
tear-drops. Suppose that the great personages of
state of the present day should amuse themselves
with dressing up like actors at the opera and in
making passes like circus-riders! The oddity of
such a supposition enables you to appreciate the
liveliness of the picturesque instinct at that day, as
well as the taste for outward display and the feebleness
of both at present.

These, however, were only preludes. Eight days
after the tourney the Duke of Burgundy gave his festival,
which surpassed all the others. A vast hall,
hung with tapestry representing the career of Hercules,
had five doors, guarded by archers dressed in
robes of gray and black cloth. Around the sides
extended five platforms or galleries, occupied by foreign
spectators, noble personages and ladies, most
of these being disguised. In their midst arose "a
lofty buffet, loaded with vessels of gold and silver,
and crystal vases garnished with gold and precious
stones." And erect, in the centre of the hall, stood
a great pillar, bearing "a female image with hair
falling to her loins, her head covered with a very rich
hat, and her breast spouting hypocras so long as the
supper lasted." Three gigantic tables were arranged,
each one being adorned with several "entremets,"
so many huge machines reminding one, on a grand

scale, of the toy presents given nowadays to the
children of the wealthy. The men of this time, in-
eed, in curiosity and in flights of the imagination
are nothing but children; their strongest desire is
to amuse the eye; they sport with life as with a
magic lantern. The two principal "entremets" consist
of a monstrous pie, containing twenty-eight persons,
"alive," playing on musical instruments, also a
"church with windows and glass, provided with four
choristers and a ringing bell." Besides these there
were twenty more,—a great castle, its fosses filled
with orange-water, and on a tower the fairy Melusina;
a windmill with archers and cross-bowmen firing
at mark; a cask in a vineyard with two fluids,
one bitter and the other sweet; a vast desert with a
lion and serpent contending; a savage on a camel; a
clown prancing on a bear amidst rocks and glaciers;
a lake surrounded by cities and castles; a carrack at
anchor, bearing rigging, masts and seamen; a beautiful
fountain of earth and lead, with small trees of
glass in leaf and blooming, and a St. Andrew with
his cross; a fountain of rose-water, representing a
naked infant in the attitude of the "Mannekenpiss"
of Brussels. You would imagine yourself in a variety
store at New Year time. This pêle-mêle of motionless
decoration did not suffice; over and above
this an active parade was necessary; we see defiling
in turn a dozen of interludes, and in the intervals the
church and the pie keep busy the ears at the same
time as the eyes of the guests; the bell rings with
all its might; a shepherd plays on a bag-pipe; little
children sing a song; organs, German cornets, trumpets,
glees, flutes, a lute with voices, drums, hunting
horns and the yelping of hounds succeed each other.
Meanwhile a rearing horse appears, richly covered
with vermilion silk, mounted by two trumpeters
"scated backward and without saddle," led by sixteen
knights in long robes; then a hobgoblin, half
man, half griffon, who, mounted on a boar and carrying
a man, advances with a target and two darts;
then a large white mechanical stag, harnessed in
silk, with golden horns, and bearing on his back a
child in a short dress of crimson velvet, who sings
while the stag performs the bass. All these figures
make the circuit of the table, while the last invention
especially delights the company. A flying dragon
passes through the air, his fiery scales lighting up
the recesses of the gothic ceiling. A heron and
two falcons are loosed, and the vanquished bird is
presented to the Duke. Trumpets sound a blast
behind a curtain, which curtain being withdrawn
discloses Jason reading a letter from Medea, then
combating the bulls, then killing the serpent, then
ploughing the ground and sowing the monster's teeth
from which arises a crop of armed men. At this
point the interest of the fête deepens. It becomes
a romance of chivalry, a scene from Amadis, or one
of Don Quixote's dreams in action. A giant arrives
bearing a pike and turban and leading an elephant
caparisoned in silk with a castle on his back,
and in this castle a lady attired as a nun and representing
the Holy Church; she orders a halt, proclaims
her name, and summons the company to the
crusade. Thereupon Toison d'Or, with his officers
of arms, fetches a live pheasant wearing a golden
collar decked with precious stones; the Duke swears
upon the pheasant to succor Christendom against
the Turk, and all the knights do likewise, each in
a document of the style of Galaor, and this is the
pheasant's vow. The fête terminates with a mystic
and moral ball. At the sound of instruments and
by the light of torches a lady in white, bearing the
name of the "Grace of God" on her shoulder, approaches
the Duke, recites a stanza and, on retiring,
leaves with him the twelve virtues—Faith,
Charity, Justice, Reason, Temperance, Strength,
Truth, Liberality, Diligence, Hope and Valor—each
led by a knight in a crimson pourpoint, the sleeves
of which are of satin embroidered with foliage and
jewelry. They betake themselves to dancing with
their knights, crowning the Count of Charolais the
victor in the lists, and, upon the announcement of
a new tourney, the ball ends at three o'clock in the
morning. Really there is too much of it; the mind
and the senses both flag; these people in the
way of diversions are gluttons and not epicureans.
This uproar and this profusion of quaint conceits
shows us a rude society, a race of the North, an
incipient civilization still infantile and barbarous;
the grandeur and simplicity of Italian taste is
wanting in these contemporaries of the Medicis.
And yet the groundwork of their habits and imag
ination is the same; here, as with the chariots and
pomp of the Florentine carnival, the legends, history
and philosophy of the middle ages take shape;
moral abstractions assume visible form; the virtues
become actual women; they are accordingly
tempted to paint and sculpture them; all decoration,
in effect, consists of reliefs and paintings. The
symbolic age gives way to the picturesque age;
the intellect is no longer content with a scholastic
entity; it seeks to contemplate a living form, the
human mind finding it necessary for its completeness
to be translated to the eye by a work of art.

But this work of art bears no resemblance to that
of Italy for the reason that the culture and direction
of the intellect are different; this is evident in reading
the simple and dull verses recited by the "Holy
Church" and the "Virtues," an empty, senile poetry,
the worn-out babble of the trouvères, a rattle of
rhymed phrases in which the rythm is as flimsy as
the idea. The Netherlands never had a Dante, a
Petrarch, a Boccaccio, a Villani. The mind, less
precocious and further removed from Latin traditions,
remained a longer time subject to mediæval

discipline and inertia. There were no sceptical
Averrhöeists and physicians like those described by
Petrarch; there were no humanist restorers of
ancient literature, almost pagans, like those who surrounded
Lorenzo de Medici. Christian faith and
sentiment are much more active and tenacious here
than in Venice or in Florence. They continue to
subsist under the sensual pomp of the Burgundian
court. If there are epicureans in social matters there
are none in theory; the most gallant serve religion,
as the ladies, through a principle of honor. In 1396
seven hundred seigniors of Burgundy and France
enlist in the crusade; all, save twenty-seven die at
Nicopolis, and Boucicaut calls them "blessed and
happy martyrs." You have just witnessed the buffoonery
of Lille which ended in a solemn vow to war
with the infidels. Here and there scattered traits
show the persistency of the primitive devotion. In
1477, in the neighboring town of Nuremburg, Martin
Kœtzel, a pilgrim in Palestine, counts the steps
between Golgotha and the house of Pilate, that he
may, on his return, build seven stations and a calvary
between his own house and the cemetery of his
native town; losing his measure he repeats the journey,
and this time has the work executed by the
sculptor, Adam Kraft. In the Low Countries, as in
Germany, the middle class, a sedate and somewhat
dull people, restricted to their own narrow circle and
attached to ancient usages, preserve much better
than court-seigniors the faith and the fervor of the
middle ages. Their literature bears witness to this.
The moment it takes an original turn, that is to say
from the end of the thirteenth century, it furnishes
ample testimony to the practical, civic and bourgeois
spirit, with abundant evidences of pious fervor; on
the one hand appear moral maxims, pictures of domestic
life, and historic and political poems relating
to recent and true occurences; on the other, lyric
laudation of the Virgin, and mystic and tender poetic
effusions.[14] In fine, the national genius, which is
Germanic, inclines much more to faith than to incredulity.
Through the Lollards and the mystics of
the middle ages, also through the iconoclasts and
the innumerable martyrs of the sixteenth century, it
turns in the direction of Protestant ideas. Left to
itself it would have developed not, as in Italy, into
a pagan renaissance, but, as in Germany, into a
recrudescence of Christianity. The art, moreover,
which, of all the others, best reveals the cravings
of the popular imagination, architecture, remains
gothic and Christian up to the end of the sixteenth
century; Italian and classic importations do not
affect it; the style gets to be complicated and effeminate,
but the art does not change. It prevails not
only in the churches but in laic edifices; the town-halls
of Bruges, Louvain, Brussels, Liege and Audenarde
show to what extent it was cherished not
only by the priesthood but by the nation; the
people remained faithful to it to the end: the town-hall
of Audenarde was begun seven years after the
death of Raphael. In 1536, in the hands of a Flemish
woman, Margaret of Austria, the church of
Brou, the latest and prettiest flower of gothic art,
bloomed out in its perfection. Sum up all these
indications and consider, in the protraiture of the
day, the personages themselves,[15] the donors, abbés,
burgomasters, townspeople and matrons, so grave
and so simple in their Sunday clothes and spotless
linen, with their rigid air and their expression of
deep and settled faith, and you will recognize that
here the sixteenth century renaissance took place
within religious limits, that man in making the present
life more attractive never lost sight of that to
come, and that his picturesque invention is the manifestation
of a vivacious Christianity instead of expressing,
as in Italy, a restored paganism.

A Flemish renaissance underneath Christian ideas,
such, in effect, is the two-fold nature of art under
Hubert and John Van Eyck, Roger Van der Weyde,
Hemling and Quintin Matsys; and from these two
characteristics proceed all the others. On the one
hand, artists take interest in actual life; their figures
are no longer symbols like the illuminations of
ancient missals, nor purified spirits like the Madonnas
of the school of Cologne, but living beings and
bodies. They attend to anatomy, the perspective is
exact, the minutest details are rendered of stuffs, of
architecture, of accessories and of landscape; the
relief is strong, and the entire scene stamps itself on

the eye and on the mind with extraordinary force
and sense of stability; the greatest masters of coming
times are not to surpass them in all this, nor
even go so far. Nature evidently is now discovered
by them. The scales fall from their eyes; they have
just mastered, almost in a flash, the proportions, the
structure and the coloring of visible realities; and
moreover, they delight in them. Consider the superb
copes wrought in gold and decked with diamonds,
the embroidered silks, the flowered and dazzling
diadems with which they ornament their saints and
divine personages,[16] all of which represents the pomp
of the Burgundian court. Look at the calm and
transparent water, the bright meadows, the red and
white flowers, the blooming trees, the sunny distances
of their admirable landscapes.[17] Observe their
coloring—the strongest and richest ever seen, the
pure and full tones side by side as in a Persian carpet,
and united solely through their harmony, the
superb breaks in the folds of purple mantles, the
azure recesses of long falling robes, the green draperies
like a summer field permeated with sunshine,
the display of gold skirts trimmed with black, the
strong light which warms and enlivens the whole
scene; you have a concert in which each instrument
sounds its proper note, and the more true because
the more sonorous. They see the world on the
bright side and make a holiday of it, a genuine fête,
similar to those of this day, glowing under a more
bounteous sunlight and not a heavenly Jerusalem
suffused with supernatural radiance such as Fra
Angelico painted. They are Flemings, and they
stick to the earth. They copy the real with scrupulous
accuracy, and all that is real—the ornaments of
armor, the polished glass of a window, the scrolls of
a carpet, the hairs of fur,[18] the undraped body of an
Adam and an Eve, a canon's massive, wrinkled and
obese features, a burgomaster's or soldier's broad
shoulders, projecting chin and prominent nose, the
spindling shanks of a hangman, the over large head
and diminutive limbs of a child, the costumes and
furniture of the age; their entire work being a glorification
of this present life. But, on the other hand,
it is a glorification of Christian belief. Not only are
their subjects almost all of a religious order, but
again they are imbued with a religious sentiment
which, in the following age, is not to be found in the
same scenes. Their best pictures represent no actual
event in sacred history but a verity of faith, a summary
of doctrine. Hubert Van Eyck regards painting
in the same light as Simone Memmi, or Taddeo
Gaddi, that is to say, as an exposition of higher theology;
his figures and his accessories may be realistic,
but they are likewise symbolic. The cathedral
in which Roger Van der Weyde portrays the seven
sacraments is at once a material church and a spiritual
church; Christ appears bleeding on his cross,
while at the same time the priest is performing mass
at the altar. The chamber or portico in which John
Van Eyck and Memling place their kneeling saints
is an illusion in its detail and finish, but the Virgin
on her throne and the angels who crown her show
the believer that he is in a superior realm. A hierarchical
symmetry groups personages and stiffens
attitudes. With Hubert Van Eyck the eye is fixed
and the face impassible; it is the eternal immobility
of divine life; in heaven all is fulfilled and time is
no more. In other instances, as with Memling, there
is the quietude of absolute faith, the peace of mind
preserved in the cloister as in a sleeping forest, the
immaculate purity, mournful sweetness, the infinite
trust of the truly pious nun absorbed with her own
reveries, and whose large open eyes look out upon
vacancy. These paintings, in turn, are subjects for
the altar or private chapel; they do not appeal like
those of later ages to grand seigniors whose churchgoing
consists of mere routine, and who crave, even
in religious history, pagan pomp and the torsos of
wrestlers; they appeal to the faithful, in order to
suggest to them the form of the supernatural world
or the emotions of fervid piety, to show them the immutable
serenity of beatified saints and the tender
humility of the elect; Ruysbroeck, Eckart, Tauler
and Henry de Suzo, the theological mystics of Germany
antecedent to Luther, might here resort. It is
a strange sight, and one which does not seem to
accord with the sensuous parade of the court and the
sumptuous entries of the cities. We find a similar
contrast between the profound religious sentiment
of the Madonnas of Albert Dürer and the wordly
splendor of his "House of Maximilian." The reason
is, we are in a Germanic country; the renaissance
of general prosperity and the emancipation of the
intellect which results from it here revive Christianity
instead of destroying it as in a Latin country.