No appreciation of this value developed until nearly the end of the nineteenth century. In 1852 a set of ten, formerly belonging to Louis Philippe, with a total length of one hundred and twenty feet, sold for about $1,200, and at the same sale another set of six, running to eighty feet, was bought for $400. At present the intrinsic value of these wonderful creations is quite fully appreciated, and any one who can secure a fifteenth-century work for less than $300 a square yard is fortunate. And yet during the whole of the eighteenth century tapestries were ruthlessly cut up to form floor rugs, used for packing bales of merchandise, or, as at Angers, slashed into strips to protect the roots of orange-trees from the cold, or nailed on the stalls of the bishop’s stable so that the episcopal nags might not scar their precious flanks. This last outrage, by the way, was perpetrated on the unique series of the Apocalypse, a sequence of panels eighteen feet high with a total length of four hundred and seventy-two feet, woven in Paris about 1370 from designs by Jean de Bruges, court painter to the Emperor Charles V, for the use of the Duke of Anjou in his private chapel, and at a cost (in the money of to-day) of upward of $60,000. They had been given to the cathedral by King René in 1480, but by the beginning of the nineteenth century they were quite out of fashion and therefore useless; so until a rag merchant sufficiently accommodating could be found they were used as noted above and finally sold (the opportunity at last offering) in 1843 for $60, the purchaser ultimately returning them to the cathedral when some glimmerings of intelligence came back to the ecclesiastical authorities.

When this sort of thing was the rule in France and England and Germany for more than a century during which civilisation and culture were progressing with such notable rapidity, it is a miracle that anything has come down to us, particularly when you remember what the Calvinists and Sansculottes and Reformers did to monasteries and châteaux and entire cities in the two preceding centuries; but a good deal did so come down, including even the poor remains of the very much domesticated tapestries of Angers. There is only one other fourteenth-century set woven at Arras that can positively be identified, and that is the series now (or recently) in the cathedral of Tournai, though we know from wills and inventories that at the beginning of the fifteenth century they existed in hundreds. The remains of this early work are fine and strong in design, powerful as decoration, clear but faded in colour. With the fifteenth century there came an amazing advance, similar to the sudden appearance of the Van Eycks in painting at exactly the same moment. The “Burgundian Sacraments”—or what remains—now in the Metropolitan Museum as the gift of the late J. P. Morgan, is one of the finest examples in existence of this earliest of the great periods. Admirable as it is, it fails in perfection of beauty before the wonderful works of art that immediately followed. With the beginning of the fifteenth century tapestry weaving came suddenly to a level of supreme excellence that places it for a hundred years on a level with the other arts, however august they may be. Very few of these masterpieces remain in Belgium; you must search for them in Paris, in London, in Madrid, in New York, in the museums of all the world, but the search is rewarded by the discovery of an art that, however brief its day, was one of the great arts of the world.

Each art has its own medium of expression and to this medium it absolutely adheres in its periods of greatness, adapting itself to its limitations, working within them, and even making them tributary to its excellence. Limitations are, after all, the greatest gift of God to man instead of being, as the last century feigned, something that deplorably existed only to be transcended; without them man would revert to the condition of the jellyfish or the primal ooze of the depths of the sea; with them he has an opportunity to demonstrate his divine elements through a development that is both in spite of and because of the firm lines they draw that cannot be overpassed. One of the great things in art is its revelation of the possibility of spiritual achievement by and through the narrowest physical limitations. When, on the other hand, architecture tries to assimilate the peculiar methods of bridge building; when painting intrudes into the province of sculpture, literature, photography, or even music; when music becomes mathematical or takes to itself the habits of the circus performer; when sculpture deliquesces into a sloppy kind of black-and-white illustration; when stained glass and tapestry become pictorial; when, in fact, all the arts forsake their own provinces and deny their own limitations, as they have tended to do during the last century, splashing over, the one into the other, they cease to be arts at all and become unprofitable aberrations.

Only three great arts have come into existence during the last two thousand years—music, stained glass, and tapestry—and each developed its own exact and individual mode of expression. Music was as old as architecture, painting, sculpture, poetry, and the drama, but under the influences of Christianity it gradually transformed itself into what was almost a new art and one that has remained the only vital art through all the unfriendly influences of modern civilisation. Stained glass was an absolutely new art, taking its rise in the twelfth century, culminating in the thirteenth, decaying through the two following centuries, and entirely disappearing in the eighteenth century. It is an art of Christianity, of Frank genius, and of the Île de France. Tapestry is also a new art, beginning about 1350, culminating a century later, dying almost in a day (as a great art), about 1520. It also is Christian, but, unlike glass, it is primarily secular, and it is explicitly and almost exclusively Flemish, the great contribution of a distinguished race to the imperishable art of the world.

It was the glorification of a national industry—weaving—and is significant as showing how, under wholesome impulses and in a stimulating environment, a simple industry may be transfigured and made into art. Its medium was peculiarly delicate, subtle, and beautiful, threads of spun wool, silk and gold and silver woven by hand into a fixed warp of strung threads. These filaments of silk (as in the finest work) had peculiar qualities of beauty, combining both lustrousness and depth, while the colours being entirely vegetable dyes, with none of the harsh horrors of the analine by-products of coal-tar, were infinitely varied and of unique richness and soft splendour. Fortunately, this new artistic mode was developed sufficiently prior to the breakdown of art which was signalised by the career of a man in himself a very great artist—Raphael—to permit a full century of life, and at the hands of a people who had a peculiar appreciation of decoration and of decorative methods. The result was startling, for a new art was born and one of the most distinguished quality. As colour decoration the tapestries of Flanders come near being the very finest things in the world, although we must judge them from a few examples only, the admittedly greatest having long since fallen victims to greed, fanaticism, and the stolid ignorance of the eighteenth century. Fortunately for the general public, the remaining masterpieces are now widely scattered and may be studied with comparative ease, the Metropolitan Museum in New York being particularly rich and having, either in its own name or by loan, the Burgundian Sacraments, the matchless “Mazarin” Christ in Glory, the almost equally beautiful “Coronation of the Virgin,” as well as scores of others, many of them of supreme excellence.

It is as impossible to describe a tapestry in words as it is to do the same by a Chartres window. In point of composition the tapestries of the fifteenth century are matched only by the greatest pictures; even when they are crowded with figures there is the most masterly spacing of masses, the most consummate balance of form. When one realises that in every case the design is the work of the members of the guild and not of the more famous painters of the time, the wonder grows over the apparently universal feeling for the highest type of artistic expression. Compared with the best of the Flemish tapestries, the boasted and “much admired” composition of Raphael in the “Disputa” and the “School of Athens,” of Michael Angelo in the Sistine Chapel, is mathematical and academic. In line and line composition there is the same exquisite sensitiveness that is almost Greek or Japanese in its subtlety and rhythm, while the colour, though in many cases faded, is as pure and musical in its several tones as it is resonant and splendid in combination. And through all this consummate mastery and this supreme artistic sense run a peculiar charm and distinction that are found only in such unique products as the pictures of Jan van Eyck, Fra Angelico, the Lorenzetti, Carpaccio, and their kind. Through them you enter into a dim and golden fairyland full of wistful music and haunting memories, where fair ladies, courteous knights, delicate-winged angels, aureoled saints in blazing dalmatics pass like dreams through far countries, “where it is always afternoon” and where the land is always lovely, the skies serene, the flowers and birds and little beasts friendly and well beloved. Chretien de Troyes and the troubadours and the Court of Love, King Arthur and Roland and King René, Guenivere, and the gracious queens and gentle ladies of all the Middle Ages live again, or rather prolong their lives through a passive immortality into which whoever understands is welcome to enter and sit him down in peace.

XIV
ART IN THE RHINELAND

FROM Charlemagne’s ambitious centre at Aix-la-Chapelle the influence of a new culture went west rather than east, and it is not until the eleventh century that we can look for art of any sort along the valley of the Rhine and in the lands of old Lorraine. There was little enough elsewhere, but when, at the finger-touch of a new monasticism calling a new northern blood to action, civilisation began again in Normandy and then in the Île de France, its echo in the Rhineland was far and long delayed, and never more than an echo at most. There were bad kings until the second Crusade and the coming of the Cistercians in 1174, and little culture; but from then on there was a distinct spiritual revival, a new impulse in religion and in life, and as a result the output of art of all kinds was greatly increased. The three elements entering into the new architecture were: the revived tradition of the old work of the Carolings, much of which still existed in ruinous form, the new ideas brought home from Syria by the crusaders, and the infiltration of Lombard fashions from north Italy, with the Cistercian monks always exerting their austere and reforming influence toward simplicity.

Many of the earliest examples of this new work—at least the earliest now existing—are across the Rhine, in Thuringia and Saxony, and are outside our survey. Gernrode, Essen, Hildesheim, are all beyond our territory, but Cologne is this side the river and contains some of the most organic and best of the late tenth and early eleventh century work. Sta. Maria in Capitolio and St. Martin are both of that very peculiar type of plan that has an apse and apsidal transepts of equal size and semicircular in plan. The central tower is supported on four piers made up of groups of four, as at San Marco in Venice, and the apse and transepts are surrounded by ambulatories, the main walls being carried on columns, set rather close together and carrying round arches. It is an interesting and ingenious scheme, with great possibilities of development, though it has almost never been used elsewhere; probably it is of Syrian origin, the idea being brought home by early crusaders, though it may be Byzantine, in which case also it was probably derived from Antioch, where the crusaders found so much of value to them in the development of the later art of Europe. St. Martin’s has also a very beautiful tower with a high broach spire and admirably designed corner turrets. The composition of the church from the east, with its curving apsidal lines, its delicate little colonnades of Lombard form under the eaves, and the graceful yet powerful towers, is noble and dignified, and the whole building is far more organic and logically articulated than the bigger work of a century later farther up the Rhine.

The Church of the Apostles is nearer this later type and has its unfortunate agglomeration of ill-placed towers, but St. Gereon is sui generis; it can hardly be said to have any plan at all, for it is made up of a simple little aisleless church of three bays with a round apse and two small transept-like towers, joined on to an irregular decagon of a nave, somewhat elliptical in plan, with large niches in each of the eight lateral sides and a square porch or narthex at the west end. This anomalous “nave” is early thirteenth century it is true, while the eastern church is one hundred and fifty years older, but the Gothic work is on foundations undoubtedly Roman and takes the place of a structure of somewhat similar plan built by the Empress Helena. The sequence is curious; there was first a circular or elliptical Roman building, on the foundations of which the Empress Helena built her church, the crypt of which still remains, then the easterly choir was built by Archbishop Hanno late in the eleventh century, and finally the original main church was torn down and rebuilt on Gothic lines about 1225.