The Fifteenth Century
The second half of the fourteenth century saw a dynasty of French princes established in the Duchy of Burgundy, and the union of the states which had belonged to the Counts of Flanders, to the Duke's dominions. These political circumstances had the effect of diverting some of the best French miniaturists to the court of Philippe le Hardi, and of founding a grand Burgundian school of art, which led to the creation of the Flemish one. The Burgundian MSS. of the first half of the fifteenth century were usually executed at Dijon (the capital of the Duchy) or Besancon; and were thus simply works of French art, not very different in style from those produced at Bourges, Nevers, and Auxerre; but a certain local type was developed in the ornamental borders of the miniatures; and as soon as the political centre of gravity was shifted northwards, by reason of the greater wealth and importance of the Low Countries, Bruges and Brussels became the chief towns in Philip the Good's dominions, and a new element was introduced into Burgundian art. The Flemish artists of Bruges, Lille, and Liege had been renowned since the middle of the fourteenth century for their skill in miniature painting, and Van Eyck himself was a dependent of Philippe le Bon, in whose service he spent the last nine years of his life at Bruges (1432-1440). It is supposed that the earlier Flemish artists were the creators of grisaille painting, although that beautiful mode of pictorial illustration is first found in French books of the middle of the fourteenth century. (A specimen is given on [plate 14].) The finest examples of grisaille were produced by Flemish artists at Bruges between 1440 and 1470, and a book of Hours, illuminated for Jaquot de Brégilles in 1443, in the possession of the writer, is one of remarkable beauty. Another fine specimen, of somewhat later date, is the Miroir Historial, a miniature from which is reproduced on [plate 17]. Side by side with this kind of chaste work, splendid illumination of the rich French style was practised in Flanders, and a favourable example is given of a Book of Hours painted at Tournay about 1460, on [plate 16].
Grisaille painting originated evidently from the suggestions of carved stone-work in cathedral-decoration. The figures of saints occupying niches, which were familiar to the visitants of churches, were the first models that led to the painting of miniatures with the figures in grey tints. It must have been, for a true artist, delightful to triumph over the difficulty of achieving the effects of relief and of modelling with the aid of a single pigment only. To be the master of such an art, and to handle the monochrome in such a way as to run with perfect touch through a gamut of gradations in tone, would surely have been more gratifying than to win success by the splendour of full illumination. The artist did not, however, entirely abstain from the use of gold; he allowed it to shine on the crowns of kings and around the heads of his saints; and colour was used sparingly in the backgrounds. These backgrounds in the pictures of earlier date were ornamental diapered surfaces, but after the first decade or two of the fifteenth century, landscape backgrounds made their appearance. It was, however, some time before the miniaturist succeeded in realising effects of distance, and thus producing true pictures as distinguished from ornamental historiation. The Italians were the first to gain a tolerable knowledge of perspective, but the Flemings were not much behind them. It was not, however, till late in the fifteenth century that anything like a faithful expression of perspective is found in the miniatures of MSS.
In the latter part of the fifteenth century, pure grisaille was extended into camaieu; that is, the monochrome might be any other colour than grey, so long as it was used in the same manner. This, however, was usually confined to parts of miniatures, and not inconsistent with a lavish use of gold for the lights, and masses of different colour in other portions of the same picture. The quantity of gold that gave magnificence to the work of the miniaturist in Flanders and France in the last quarter of the fifteenth century became excessive. It was a relief to the eye when this blaze of gold receded before the outcome of late Flemish art. Scarcely any school produced work comparable for delicacy and truth to the miniatures painted in prayerbooks at Bruges and Ghent between 1490 and 1520.
Illuminated Borders in the Fifteenth Century
After the year 1400, as has been already said, the private Prayerbooks, or Books of Hours, which at that time were used in France and England, but not to any great extent elsewhere, began to increase in numbers and develop new styles of ornament. The pages with illuminated initials still preserved the older border, the basis of which was a double line of gold and colour issuing from the initial and running squarely round the page. At the corners and at intervals gold branches, bearing gold and coloured ivy-leaves, went forth in somewhat stiff curves to form the outer decoration of the border. This was in French MSS. In the English ones, heavy masses of gold and colour representing conventional foliage appeared at the corners, and out of the border-lines emerged the long sweeping tufts of feathery grass with red and blue buds, which have been already alluded to. Towards 1430 the ivy-leaves lost their prominence in France, and were only preserved in portion of the ornament. The straight framing lines were abandoned both in England and France, and a broader border was obtained by a methodical arrangement of hundreds of curling hair-lines, black or brown, out of which sprung little red and blue flowers of natural appearance. This pattern was drawn and massed so as to represent a broad frame, even and square, enclosing the page. This became a customary mode of ornamentation in both countries, so that a large proportion of English and French work was much alike in style, though not always in execution. When the middle of the century arrived, a modification began to take place in French MSS.; the fine black hair-lines of the borders gave place to wreathing green branches, less numerous, and thus more proportionate in quantity. The flowers and leaves springing from them became more numerous, more natural and less conventional. By this time Burgundian and Flemish Livres d'Heures were also produced in large numbers, and brilliant pictures of blossoms growing in the rich gardens of Burgundy added the weight of their influence to the tendency towards floral decoration. The flowers in the borders grew more realistic and varied, and were sometimes fine large examples of their species. This method was followed in England as well as in France. Next appeared in continental work backgrounds, either of gold or of colour, to the borders; which had previously been painted on the plain vellum. Finally, in France it became fashionable to break the border into spaces (taking various shapes), of which some had gold grounds and some were without grounds; or to treat the border in such a fashion that the branches and flowers should appear partly on gold, partly on russet, partly on blue, or in other combinations. This bizarre fashion did not take the taste either of English or of Flemish artists. The English retained their crowded border of flowers and branches painted on the plain vellum, while the Flemings began to paint rich natural cut flowers upon a monochromatic ground of pale gold or yellow. On this pale ground, free from all the convolution of twining branches seen in French and English work, they were enabled to throw shadows beneath the cut flowers, so that these appeared to stand out in strong relief, with excellent effect. The new fashion at once found copyists everywhere; the celebrated Hours of Anne of Brittany is one of the finer French examples. The imitations done in England were not very successful.
End of the Fifteenth Century
We now reach the last decade of the fifteenth century; in which the late Flemish school already alluded to arose in Bruges and Ghent. In combination with those beautiful borders of fresh cut flowers painted in apparent relief upon pale gold or yellow, the delicate art of Memling and Gerard David produced small and exquisite miniatures with architectural and landscape accessories; the like of which had not yet been seen in the illustration of books, unless we find a parallel in the lovely and no less exquisite pictures in Florentine manuscripts of the same period. The radical difference between the work of the north and that of the south—notwithstanding that each of them betrays to some extent the influence of the other—is, that the Fleming took his types from real life, the Florentine from his conceptions of angelic existence.
All the rest of Europe was behind the two favoured countries in which pictorial and decorative art now reached their culminating point. Sentimental writers have been, from time immemorial, in the habit of scouting at wealth and of pouring enthusiastic praise upon penury, as though the two conditions were equivalent to vice and virtue in morals, to dulness and genius in intellect. It is quite true that an impoverished state of society produces better poetry than a rich one; but it is equally true that the finest artistic work is born amid luxurious surroundings. It was the wealth of Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp, and Brussels which attracted talent to a warmer air in which it could grow and flourish, on the border land between the Celt and the Teuton, with all the advantages derivable from either side. In the same way the riches and luxury of Venice, Florence, Rome, Naples, Verona, Cremona, Padua, stimulated the faculties of men who had inherited the traditions of Græco-Roman art. It was a brilliant autumn in the annals of illumination, but a short one, by reason of the changes which the new art of Printing had brought about in all things. Dürer visited Bruges and Venice; he admired the work of Gerard David and of the Italian miniaturists, but he did not seek to imitate or to rival their efforts. He belonged to the modern world, and he gave to the art of engraving what he would, twenty years earlier, have given to the art of illumination. We have nothing to do here with his profession as a painter of canvases in which he followed the same tendency as had during the fifteenth century so wonderfully multiplied the number of Giotto's descendants in Italy. We may imagine, if we choose, what wonderful illuminators of manuscripts were lost in Schongauer, Dürer, and Lucas van Leyden, three men who owed their artistic existence and taste to the atmosphere of rich cities. From the year 1450 the career of Calligrapher and Illuminator had been doomed to extinction. Its members gradually retired from an unequal strife with the clever mechanics from Mentz; some became printers, some became engravers, and others joined the ranks of the canvas-painters. Those who remained true to their early training achieved the most brilliant triumphs of their profession before it was extinguished. This is the reason why we look to the Flanders, and to the Italy of 1480-1520, for the most absolutely perfect work that was ever produced in the illumination of manuscripts. Considering that it flourished side by side with the paintings of the Bellinis and of Andrea Mantegna, and that it was in touch with the times of Lionardo, of Raphael, of Michel Angiolo, of Titian, and of Paolo Veronese, we cannot wonder either at its marvellous beauty or at its sudden withering.
Of the late Flemish school, certain work done for the Austrian Archduchess Margaret (resident in Bruges with her brother Philip, as children of Maximilian who had become sovereign of the Low Countries in right of his wife Mary of Burgundy), of which the famous Grimani Breviary is only one amongst some ten or twelve examples—was the finest of its kind. The present writer has possessed one of them—a little volume internally justifying the tradition that it was illuminated by Gerard David for the Archduchess