Later Byzantine Work. Added to the above colors, toward the eleventh century, cobalt blue and turquoise, pale yellow, and a flesh tint.
Early Limoges Work relied upon blue, green, red, with purple and iron gray, and the lighter half-tones known before the twelfth century.
Later Limoges Work. Its full palette is composed of deep blue to lapis blue and light blue; scarlet, a red approaching chocolate, green, greenish yellow, white, and a semi-translucent manganese purple. In thirteenth-century work blue is the dominating color. The twelfth-century translucent colors give way to the consistent use of opaque ones in the years following.
Germanic Work. This contains less cobalt blue, but employes the colors of the Limoges workers, introducing, however, a great deal of turquoise and much more green and pale yellow than the French enamelers used. The German enamelers were fond of black, also.
Nearly every writer upon enamels quotes the convenient commendation of the Greek sophist, Philostratus, who went to Rome in the reign of the Emperor Severus, about 200 A.D., to teach rhetoric. In the description of a boar hunt in his “Icones,” wherein he describes the trappings of the horses of the barbarians (Gauls or Britons), Philostratus writes: “For the barbarians of the region of the ocean [islanders?] are skilled, as it is said, in fusing colors upon heated brass [copper?] which become as hard as stone and render the ornament thus produced durable.” The Romans in Italy knew nothing of such things. Labarte and other authorities would have it that this passage refers to Gallo-Roman work, though such is rarely to be met with; while others claim for it reference to the work of British craftsmen, perhaps under design-influence of the Romans. Probably enameling was known to the Celts and to the Britons independent of Roman occupation. Certainly the Scoto-Celtic and the Britanno-Celtic tendency in design has little in common with that of the ancient civilized world of Greece, of Rome, or of Egypt. It is just possible the ingenious Celts invented champlevé.
With the rise of the Eastern Empire in the fourth century A.D., with its capital at Byzantium, came in that style of art known to us as the Byzantine, just as the North Italians produced the Lombardic style and western Europe the Gothic. Byzantine enamel was rigid and conventional in design but highly decorative and symbolical. At first the direct influence of Greek and Roman art affected their pictorial representations, as we see Christus in earlier work depicted as a clean-shaven, beautiful young man, an ideal that soon gave way to the sad representation of the Man of Sorrows. From the tenth century on, Byzantine ecclesiastical art was barren of invention. With the waning of the empire in 1057, the art of the Byzantine enamelers declined, and that of the Italians and the western Europeans blossomed forth untrammeled by stiff convention. Lombardic architecture and Gothic carving had helped to pave the way for the broader art of the Middle Ages, which no longer confined itself to cloisonné but began to put forth champlevé enamels of great beauty likewise. Indeed, in Gothic times western craftsmen rarely made use of cloisonné except for personal ornaments and jewelry. The famous “Lindauer Evangeliar,” one of the chief treasures collected by the late J. Pierpont Morgan, exhibits upon its covers superb examples of early enameling.
With the revival of classical learning which brought about the Renaissance, and the subsequent development of secular thought, art ceased to be what it had been throughout the Middle Ages—merely the handmaid of the church. No longer did the enamelers, Byzantine, Gothic, or Lombardic, work solely to adorn religious works; and ecclesiastical design broadened into secular application, a return of classical usages to a heritage of beauty and unrestraint from which, for some centuries, art had been kept by ecclesiasticism. By the twelfth century the art was well established to Cologne, Trèves, Huy, Maestricht, and Verdun, thence traveling perhaps to Paris. Limoges and the Rhenish provinces of France became prolific in champlevé enamels by the end of the twelfth century. It is to 1189 A.D. that the earliest known enamels of Limoges are ascribed. There an enormous quantity of work, good, bad, and indifferent, was turned out during the thirteenth century, an art turning to a trade thereafter, and declining to neglect in the fourteenth, and then going out of fashion altogether.
However, toward the end of the fifteenth century the public in general had broken through Byzantine, Gothic, and Lombardic esthetic domination and breathed the clearer air of the Renaissance, becoming imbued with a desire for gentler, more beautiful things; and the old town of Limoges, ever awake to the commerce of demand, again started up her enameling ovens and went at the art with renewed vigor, retaining a supremacy that has handed down to us priceless treasures of the sort, exquisite and satisfying. This fine style may be said to date from 1530 to 1580 (being preceded by the early style 1475-1530), followed by a minute style, 1580-1630 preceding the decadence that dated from 1630 to the close of the manufactory in the eighteenth century.
Limoges enamels immediately bring to mind the names of such great artists in enamels as the Pénicauds, Courtoys, Limousin, Raymond, Martin Didier and Jean Court, dit Vigier, and in the decline Jean Laudin.
The painted enamels of the early style are executed with much white painting over purplish-brown grounds, the figures bearing strong resemblance to the Flemish type. The coloring in these examples is very beautiful. The painted enamels of the fine style exhibit the great advance achieved by draftsmen under Italian influence. The glazes are finer and the finishing process a more careful one. At this period painting in grisaille became popular. By this term is meant monochrome painting in enamel the light being worked up over a dark