CHAPTER VII
GOTHIC SCULPTURE IN FRANCE
Thefact that during the twelfth century a remarkable school of sculpture was developed in the Ile-de-France, in connection with the Gothic art of building,—a school in some respects far in advance of all others of the Middle Ages—has not received the attention it deserved from students of the history of art. Modern writers, following Vasari, have so generally regarded the revival of the arts as having originally taken place in Italy, and the names of Pisano and Cimabue, as the pioneers of revival, have become so fixed in our minds, that we are naturally unprepared (so far as our knowledge is derived from the literature of the subject) to find that a no less remarkable revival had place in the west of Europe a hundred years before the great Italian awakening.
Attention has indeed been called by Flaxman,[1] and more recently by Cockerell,[2] to the fact that the façade of Wells Cathedral stands as a witness to the existence of an advanced school of sculpture in Western Europe contemporaneous with the art of Niccola Pisano; but the significance of this fact has made but little general impression. And neither Flaxman nor Cockerell appears to have recognised the further fact that nearly a hundred years before the date of the sculptures of Wells a school of sculpture existed across the Channel which had produced works at St. Denis, and at Chartres, of even greater merit.
The earliest schools of sculpture on this side of the Alps were those of Southern Gaul, where, more than elsewhere in
