The lettering was, in the older Gothic, explicit and unstinted, in double or quadruple lines, in which case it counts as decoration banded across top or bottom. Again, it is as trifling as a word or two affixed to the persons of the play to designate them. This lettering may be French or Latin.
EARLY BACKGROUNDS
Backgrounds of the early Fifteenth Century deal much in conventionalised, flat patterns, but fifty or sixty years later, when figures began to be more crowded, there was but little space left unoccupied by the participants in the allegory, and this was filled by the artifices of architecture or herbage that formed the divisions into the various scenes. Later the designing artists decided to let into the picture the light of distant fields and skies, and thus was introduced the suggestion of space outside the limit of the canvas.
LATER DRAWING
After the Gothic drawing, came the avalanche of the Renaissance. That altered all. The Italian taste took precedence, and from that time on the cartoons of tapestries represent modern art, trailing through its various fashions or modes of the hour. The purest Renaissance is direct from the Italian artist, in tapestry as well as in painting, but it is interesting to see the maladroitness of the Flemish hand when left to draw cartoons for himself after the new manner.
After the Renaissance came exaggeration and lack of sincerity; then the improvement of the Seventeenth Century, notably in France, and after that the dainty fancies of the Eighteenth Century, and here we are dealing with art so modern that it needs no elucidation. The drawing in tapestries is a subject as fascinating as it is inexhaustible, but, however much one may read on it, nothing equals actual association with as many tapestries as are available, for the eye must be trained by vision and not by intellectual process alone.