JAPANESE PLANT DRAWING. WOODCUT PRINTED IN COLOUR.
JAPANESE PLANT DRAWING. WOODCUT FROM A BOTANICAL WORK.
Mediæval brasses are often very fine in the quality and use of outline, and show a wonderful amount of exact characterization in portraiture, as well as beauty of ornamental effect in the use of plain surfaces relieved upon rich pattern work, and good disposition of draperies. Those of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, more especially the Belgian examples, are very useful to study for these things, as well as for the fine taste, the simplicity, and the broad artistic feeling shown under the strict limitation of the material, while they are remarkable for extraordinary delineation of character by very simple means—the lines and sunk parts being incised in the smooth brass plate and filled in with black encaustic substance, while the colours of the heraldry are frequently enamelled. Note the beautiful lines of the drapery in the example given from Bruges, and the fine relief of the figures upon the rich diapered ground. In England the figures and borders were cut out in the brass and inserted in the stone slab, which formed the background; but the Flemish brasses show a different treatment, the figures being relieved upon a rich diapered ground, also incised upon the brass, which takes the form of a complete panel or plate covering the stone slab.
BRASS OF JORIS DE MUNTER AND WIFE (BRUGES, 1439). FROM CREENY'S "MONUMENTAL BRASSES."
One may trace in the later brasses the efforts of the designer to gain more relief and graphic emphasis in his figures by introducing lines of shading and cross lines and greater complexity generally, as well as a tendency to escape the limits of the panel, no doubt under the influence of the rising power of pictorial art, which from the Renascence onwards seems to have dominated by its influence all the other arts. But in the case of brasses the beauty of design, the charm and simplicity of the earlier treatment, as well as the rich decorative effect, disappear with the attempt to render complexities of effect and qualities of drawing for which the material and purpose were unsuited.
The same change of feeling left its mark upon the sculptor's work in sepulchral monuments and effigies, which, in the Gothic period up to the end of the fifteenth century, are frequently refined and beautiful pieces of delicate portraiture, wrought with extreme care and elaboration, with a strong yet restrained sense of the ornamental value of the detail; but which, under the pictorial influence and the search for more obvious and superficial naturalism, became more or less forced in effect and vulgarized in sentiment as well as execution, and finally lost in classical artificiality and theatric pomp.
