SCULPTURE FROM AMIENS CATHEDRAL. FOURTEENTH CENTURY.
What we should call realism comes out wonderfully in the treatment of the statue of St. Martha at St. Urbain, Troyes, a work of the fifteenth century.
Gothic art, too, was a familiar art, intimate and sympathetic with human life in all its varieties.
In the beautiful illuminated Psalters, Missals, Books of Hours, and chronicles of the Middle Ages, the life of those days is presented in bright and vivid colours. We see the labourers at work in the fields, ploughing, sowing, reaping, threshing, treading the wine-press. We see the huntsman, the fisherman, and the shepherd; the scribe at his work, the saint at his prayers, the knight at arms. The splendour and pomp of jousts and tournaments, with all their bright colour and quaint heraldry; we see the king in his ermine, and the beggar in his rags, the monk in his cell, the gallant with his lute—delicate miniatures often set in burnished gold, and adorned with open fret-work or borders of flowers and leaves.
These borders in course of time from a purely fanciful ornamental character become real leaves, flowers or fruit, as in the Grimani Breviary, attributed to Memling, the famous Flemish painter, where the borders are in some pages naturalistic paintings of leaves and berries, birds and butterflies, on gold grounds with cast shadows. Here we get the naturalistic feeling dominating again and the pictorial skill of the miniaturist triumphing, but the effect is still rich and ornamental.
When the printing press in the middle of the fifteenth century began to rival the scribe with his manuscript, it offered in the woodcut a new method to the artist, which led to a new development of graphic power and design by means of line and black and white, though at first intended merely as a method of furnishing the illuminator with outlined designs as book illustrations and ornaments to be filled in with colour and gold.
ST. MARTHA (ST. URBAIN, TROYES).
MEMLING. "DELIVERANCE OF ST. PETER" (GRIMANI BREVIARY).