We must once more change our method of study. That is the immediate result of the Exhibition of Old French artists—painters, draughtsmen, enamellers, sculptors—which, in 1904, in the Pavilion de Marsan at the Louvre, brought together several hundred fascinating, and perhaps half a dozen overpowering works. With the proofs furnished by these masterpieces full of earnestness and beauty, a chapter in the history of French and European art will have to be rewritten—not, to be sure, altogether in the sense intended and proclaimed by those who prepared this exceedingly important arrangement.

Comparatively few mediæval French works of art have been preserved to us. The Hundred Years’ War, the devastations of the League, and the Great Revolution made a clean sweep of them with fiendish thoroughness. With the châteaux, abbeys, and monasteries, their contents so far as works of art were concerned also perished. What survived has up to now appeared to a pre-conceived idea scarcely native. One historian of art wrote after another, that, up to the period of the Renaissance, the plastic artists who worked in France came partly from the Low Countries, partly from Italy, but were only quite exceptionally, if at all, Frenchmen. From a geographical standpoint, we might speak of a French mediæval art; but from the nature and form of the work, on the other hand, we should admit only a Flemish or Italian, but no French art.

This view is no longer defensible. France, too, had, in the Middle Ages, her own artists and schools of art, and if she also offered hospitality to foreign talent, she was not dependent on it. The strong, creative genius that developed in Northern France from the prosaic semi-circular arch of the Byzantine style the pointed-arch poetry of the Gothic, knew also how to make use of the chisel and paint-brush as means of expression, and to satisfy by painting and carving its impulse for depicting form. The mediæval art of France is not inferior to any other. It must no longer be treated as a mere appendage of art development in the Low Countries and Lombardy.

To be sure, if the learned compilers of the Exhibition Catalogue—George Lafenestre, Henri Bouchot, Leopold Delisle and other academicians or directors of museums and libraries—claim to have discovered, in the pictures and statues, a particular French national feature which distinguishes them clearly from other contemporary works, they are led astray by patriotic prejudice. The works bear the stamp of a period, not of a people. Nothing is more like a fourteenth- or fifteenth-century French work of art than a Flemish or Italian, and vice versâ. It is noticeable that people have taken Bourdichon’s masterpiece, one of the gems of the collection—the portrait of the little Dauphin Charles Roland, to be a work of Memling; and of the most beautiful paintings of one and the same painter—des Moulins—have long ascribed one to Van der Goes, the other to Ghirlandajo.

No; the temperaments of the artists at this period were not differentiated nationally. They are, moreover, not so at the present day either, and if analogies are established between artists of the same origin, they may, in all cases, be naturally explained otherwise than by a common descent. The influence of strong personalities, who influence as prototypes, external successes, which form a current of fashion and incite to imitation, or simply a tenaciously held tradition of a school, in which in a long series of artist generations has grown up, suffice to impress on the art of a country through extensive epochs, a certain family physiognomy, which only a mystically inclined mind will be tempted to refer to race and blood.

Topographical and national classifications have in fact no inward spiritual justification in art, but at most a value of convenience, in so far as they render possible external groupings, which facilitate a survey. The whole art of Europe is one. It has developed from the Greek, the tradition of which has remained living through all the centuries, and has crept, from country to country, connecting inseparably all separate national developments with their common origin. The Greeks were the teachers of the Romans, and their inspirations and rules were carried down into the Christian catacombs, and from them blossomed the art of the Middle Ages.

Byzantine artists from the Roman empire of the East itself or from Italy, initiated, at the Court of Charlemagne, the barbarians of the Frankish kingdom in the mysteries of their craft, and carried the Promethean spark, however weakly it glimmered, from Attica to the banks of the Seine and Scheldt, where it did not expire, but, later on, was fanned again to bright flame by the fresh breeze of the Renaissance. The Eastern branch of Greek art withered into actual Byzantism, whose last off-shoots are the Russian icons of to-day. The Church in the East, to suit the fetish-loving views of her superstitious semi-barbarians, attributes to the picture the meaning and value of an idol, and opposes mistrustfully every deviation from the canon which, according to her conception, might weaken the power of the idol. In the West less credence was given to the picture’s magical virtue, its form obtained no dogmatic consecration, the Church allowed the artist freer movement, and thus development was possible, which broke through the stiff, lifeless rule of the school, and found its way back to the inexhaustible primitive source of Greek art itself, namely, nature.

The emancipation from the Byzantine system is not the work of Cimabue and Giotto, or of an individual at all, but an effort of almost all the artists of Western Europe at the close of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century. The portrait of John II. (1310-64) in the Exhibition, which was painted about 1359, of course in tempera on a gold ground, by Girard of Orleans, is of a marvellous realism, unchecked by the slightest restraint of any studied rule. The head in profile, turned towards the left, of the melancholy-looking man in the ’fifties with the long, well-formed nose, the scanty moustache and beard, and the long hair, gleams with warm life. Girard copied his model modestly and truly, without troubling himself about a golden profit, and he could put soul into the portrait of his king in the measure in which he himself felt the latter’s inward life.

The awakening of a feeling for nature in art is generally ascribed to the Flemings, particularly to the brothers Van Eyck. That, too, is arbitrary, as a glance at the works of the old Frenchmen, who flourished contemporaneously with the Van Eycks, or even before them, teaches us. The feeling for nature was always active in the few with bright eyes and joyous consciousness of life, who dedicated themselves to art from inner impulse. The themes to which the plastic arts had for many centuries to restrict themselves were certainly as unfavourable as possible to a healthy naturalism. The only subjects the painter dared to treat were illustrations of the Old and New Testament, legends of the saints, and the symbols of faith. Scenes of heaven and hell, Biblical miracles, and personification of the dogmas of the Church could assuredly no more be painted from the model than the Holy Ghost, or transubstantiation. And yet nature herself came to her rights in this fundamental representation of the supernatural and what lay outside of nature, for she does not allow herself now to be driven out, even by the violent methods of the pitch-fork spoken of by Horace in a famous verse. Without taking particular thought about it, or with a cunning conscious of its purpose, the artists fashioned their works most foreign to actual life out of elements of reality, and achieved them by nature, truth, and life. For this reason even the earliest miniatures of the manuscripts become a trustworthy source for the history of manners. Because the art-workers of limited capacity, who wrought servilely according to the tradition of their gild, reproduced accurately all the accessories—clothes, weapons, furniture, buildings, and scenery—as they actually saw them.

The little picture, “The Virgin and Child,” which is ascribed to Jean Malouel, and was painted about 1395, and can therefore have owed nothing to the Van Eycks, then in Dijon, and perhaps, too, elsewhere, certainly still quite obscure young people, is of such charming realism that one might rather class it as a genre picture than as a sacred picture. The Virgin is making the Child a frock, and is just drawing the thread tight, with the needle turned in a correct horizontal direction, and the child Jesus is amusing Himself by putting His rosy little foot in His Mother’s red leather slipper, of enormous size to Him, which she has taken off and placed before her. There is no reason why we should not assume that Malouel—if it was he—gave his patron—perhaps the Duke of Burgundy—his (the artist’s) own dear wife and little son as a Holy Family.

In “The Death of the Virgin,” of the same school of Burgundy, but about a century later, the apostle, kneeling at the foot of the death-bed and reading his prayer-book devoutly, with a big pair of spectacles on his nose, is, in spite of the pathos of the moment, so natural as to be almost comic. “The Miracle of the Saint,” with his head in his hands, who is walking barefoot, by a pupil of Nicolas Froment—perhaps by the master himself—painted, about 1480, at Aix in Provence, attests the painter’s most naïve indifference to probability. In the middle of the street where the decapitated saint is walking, and the executioner, leaning on his sword, stands dumbfounded, kneel, in measured symmetry, to the right and left of the saint, the founder and his consort; he with four little sons, she with four little daughters in a row, like so many organ-pipes, behind them. The picture of the city is, however, so realistic that even to-day an old corner of Aix is recognisable in it, and the gazers running up or standing in knots and laying their heads together, or hurrying to the windows, are of everlasting human verity.

Exactly the same holds good of the altar decoration, ascribed to John of Orleans (circ. 1374), a wonderful sepia painting on white silk. The sections which depict the Scourging of Christ by two brutal fellows with hang-dog faces, the Carrying of the Cross, with the Mocking of Jesus by the rabble of Jerusalem, and the Entombment, with the Blessed Virgin kissing the corpse, show that striving after truth, which has hitherto been pronounced to be a peculiarity of the Dutch. In the “Martyrdom of a Holy Bishop”—most likely by Jean Malouel (circ. 1400)—the martyr, in mitre and pallium, gazes from a strongly barred prison window, near which an angel kneels, and through the bars of which the Saviour in person administers to him the viaticum. But the castle in the Lombard style—stone rafters and corbels with red tiled spaces—on to the ground-floor of which the oval window opens, may be regarded as an architectural design.

Nicolas Froment’s famous “Burning Thornbush” from Aix Cathedral (1475-6) is entirely fabulous in the middle. A soft, cloud-like, lumpy hill of rock supports a dense group of thick-stemmed trees, the tops of which unite in a kind of gigantic bird’s nest, wherein the Virgin and Child sit enthroned. But this miracle, with no measure of reality to gauge it, is framed in a deep landscape with great distances; in which white towns lie by mirroring waters, and thickly-leaved trees rise up from green hills to the bright sky, and in the foreground, beside an angel of Annunciation, sits, surrounded by his drove of wethers and his quaintly posed dog, the white-bearded shepherd with his legs crossed in the most natural posture you could conceive.

In the case of almost all the paintings in the Exhibition, and chiefly of the best of them, this proposition can be repeated. The painter loyally carries out the subject commissioned, treating it faithfully according to the traditional formula; but what is not covered by the formula he shapes with sovereign freedom and an honest joyous realism which is by no means the prerogative of the Dutch and Germans, as has been so long believed, but is to be met with, according to the evidence of this Exhibition, in the same measure in the French.

Sculpture might become crude in the earlier Middle Ages, but it did not cease to be fostered. Sculpture in stone or wood was the complement of building, that strongest expression of mediæval energy, ivory-carving, or the jewel of precious metal, the adornment of the altar or the state-rooms in the palace. Painting, on the other hand, after the collapse of the old world, went back to the adornment of books, and from this the great art of wall- and easel-painting was again developed only after the age of the Crusades. This, in many details, betrays its origin from miniature. For a long time it was nothing but an enlarged miniature. The works in the Exhibition show, at any rate up to the last third of the fifteenth century, all the features that distinguish the pictorial ornamentation of the manuscripts: the gold ground, the neat, nay, painful perfection, the gay, unqualified, almost glaring, colours, the equal clearness of objects in the furthest background and in the foreground, the puerile joy in innumerably repeated complicated decorations of the surface, the framing, with richly figured wreaths, ornamental borders, or picture margins. Even the standing formulæ of manuscript miniatures are repeated for centuries in the paintings, viz., the movements of all the personages at the Annunciation, Crucifixion, Entombment, and Ascension. Only towards the end of the fifteenth century does painting fully escape from the still clinging egg-shell of the miniature, and grow accustomed to a large, bold line, and a freedom of composition which finally reckons with considerations of distance, and prevails upon itself to neglect comparatively the subsidiary in favour of the essential. The glorious Master of Moulins has, it is clear, no longer the old inherited habit of feeling himself banished to a page in a book. He no longer shows the same somewhat mechanical respect to all work, principal and accessory. In the “Virgin and Child between the Founders,” and particularly in the “Nativity” with the twilight landscape in the background, and the fat poodle in front sitting on the kneeling cardinal’s mantle, the precedence of values is observed, and the painter reserves his piety and devotion for the noble parts.

The author of these pictures—one of the greatest painters that ever lived—is only known as the Master of Moulins, or the Painter of the Bourbons. His name was probably Jean Perréal, but there is no certainty about it. Only a few definite names have come down to us from the beginnings of modern art. We must search for them in the inventories and account books of princely households or cathedral chapters. The artists did not yet sign their works; they indulged in no dreams of immortality. They did not yet feel they were the supermen, that the Renaissance, later on, made of them, and that, in the estimation of the upper class, especially of its feminine and effeminate portion, they have remained till the present day. They were honest and genuine artisans, just like other respectable artisans; and in France they, for the most part, enrolled themselves in the Saddlers’ Guild, perhaps because they, like the latter, had originally, as miniature painters, to do with parchment, i.e., a species of leather. They regarded it as a special distinction to be appointed servant,—valet or varlet—of a prince, on whose commissions for church and palace they lived. Jean Malouel and his pupils, Jacques Cone and Jean Mignot, Jehan Fouquet, his sons Jean and François, and his great pupil Jean Bourdichon, Enguerrand Charonton and Nicolas Froment, perhaps also Perréal and King René the Good (1409-80), are perhaps the only painters whose personality stands out clearly outlined in the dawn of art history before Clouet, and his contemporary Corneille of Lyons. Perhaps a number of forgotten names may yet be dug up from archives. The obscurity of the few who have either been handed down to us, or been rescued from oblivion by industrious investigators in recent years is a heavy injustice. They deserve to shine with the same glory as the most illustrious that Vasari has preserved for us in a work of amusing studio gossip.

Jehan Fouquet stands in a line with the greatest portrait painters of all times. He may be named in the same breath with Holbein—nay, with Velasquez. His portrait of a man in the Liechtenstein Gallery at Vienna, which shone as one of the gems of the exhibition, is perhaps the most powerful work that the great master created, and the “Man with the Wine-glass,” in the Vienna collection of Count Wilczek, is hardly inferior to it in significance.

Of the numerous suggestions of an artistic, moral, and psychological nature that were the outcome of this unique exhibition, the deepest and most abiding—at least for me—was that one felt the spiritual condition of the artists who created these works on commission and, for the most part, according to precise instructions from princes and prelates, lords and governments of cities. In nearly every one of them is played the great drama of the struggle of souls thirsting for freedom with the fearful oppression of intellect of the darkest Middle Ages. Secret corners and angles, easily overlooked backgrounds of the pictures, suggest already the future art, untrammelled by the world, which will overcome this art of the guilds, with its fixed, dogmatic formulæ. A Fouquet, a Bourdichon, a Clouet who, in kings and princes sees, and paints with horrible realism, poor, sick, ugly, dull fools, stands no longer under the control of royalty. He is inwardly a disrespectful rebel, and is, in his way, a prelude to the procession of the market-women to Versailles, which, two or three centuries later, was destined to overthrow the kingdom. A master of the “Mount Calvary” (1460), who makes the holy women and disciples stare with such unmoved, wooden countenances at the Body of Christ, not because he is incapable of painting sorrow-stricken faces—all the details of the painting witness to his artistic power—but because he contemplates the incident with coldness of heart, and expresses his unbelief to the initiate as plainly as the rack and stake of the period allowed. In these early works there is a very soft and very weak rumble of thunder of a very far-off storm. They are a first indistinct announcement of the Revolutions that are slowly preparing.