gestures or expressions that offends the eye. The colours are
bright and pure, the decorative effect often charming.
In the matter of panel paintings on wood, we have the interesting notice in Bede that Abbot Benedict of Wearmouth at the end of the 7th century brought from Italy portable pictures on wooden panels for the decoration of his church, part of which still remains. The style of the painting on these, it has recently been noticed, would resemble the existing wall-paintings of the beginning of the 8th century in S. Maria Antiqua in Rome, already referred to. Movable panel pictures in the form of representations of the Madonna and Child were produced in immense numbers at Byzantium and were imported largely into Italy, where they became of importance in connexion with the revival of painting in the 13th century. As a rule, however, paintings on panel were not movable but were attached to a screen, a door, or similar structure of wood consisting in framing and panels. This form of decoration is of special importance as it is really the origin of the modern picture. The painted panel, which at first forms an integral part of an architecturally designed structure of wood, gradually comes to attract to itself more and more importance, tiU it finally issues from its original setting and, emancipated from all relations to its surroundings, claims attention to itself as an independent work of art.
Painted panels in an architectural setting were used for the decoration of altar-fronts or antependia, of altar-backs or, as they are commonly called, altar-pieces, choir-screens, doors of presses and the like; or again for ceilings. There was painting also on the large wooden crucifixes displayed in churches, where a picture of Christ on the Cross might take the place of the more life-like carved image. In Italy painted panels were used as decoration of furniture, notably of the large carved chests or cassoni so common at the epoch of the Renaissance.
Examples of early medieval date do not appear to have survived. In Germany, where, as has been noticed, the arts in the nth and 12th centuries stood at a higher level than in Italy or elsewhere in the west, certain antependia or altar-fronts from Soest in Westphalia of the 12th century are said to be the earliest known examples of German panel painting. One is preserved in the museum at Berlin. A little later the number of such panels introduced as part of the decoration of altar-backs, generally with folding doors, becomes very great. Painted panels as part of the decoration of screens are preserved in the choir at Cologne from the middle of the 14th century. In Italy the painted crucifix shared popular favour with the imported or imitated Byzantine Madonna-panels. A good example of the early painted altar-screen is preserved in Westminster Abbey.
Later, in the isth century, the painted panel, generally with a single figure of a saint, becomes a common part of the carved, painted and gilded chancel screen in English churches, and many specimens are still to be seen, especially in East Anglia.
§ II. Beginnings of the Picture: German and Early Flemish Panel Painting. — From the decorative panels introduced into wooden screen-work was developed in Germany and Flanders the picture proper, the mural painting passing out of use owing to the prevalence in the north of Gothic architecture, which does not admit of wall spaces for the display of pictures, but substitutes as a form of painting the stained-glass window. In Italy, where Gothic was treated as a plaything, the wall spaces were never sacrificed, and in the development of the art the mural picture took the lead, the painted panel remaining on the whole of secondary importance.
Priority in this development of the picture is claimed in Germany for the school of Prague, where a gild of painters was founded in 1348, but the first northern school of painting that influenced other schools and plays a part in the history of painting as a whole is the so-called school of Cologne, where painters such as Meister Wilhelm and Hermann Wynrich achieved reputation in the 14th century, and produced as their successor in the 15th Stephan Lochner, author of the so-called " Dombild " in the cathedral, and of the " Virgin of the Priests' Seminary." A little later than the earliest Cologne masters appears Hubert van Eyck, born near Maestricht at no great distance from the
Rhineland capital, who with his younger brother, Jan, heads the Early Flemish school of painting. Hubert is one of the great names in the history of the art, and is chiefly responsible for the altar-piece of the " Adoration of the Lamb " at Ghent, the most important masterpiece of the northern schools before the 17th century, and the earliest monument of the then newly developed art of oil painting. Table No. I. in Part II. of this article gives the names of the chief successors of the Van Eycks, and the school ends with the life and work of Quintin Matsys of Antwerp, in the first quarter of the i6th century. The spirit of the early Cologne school, and in the main of that of Flanders, is idyllic and devotional, but the artists of the latter school achieve extraordinary force and precision in their representation of the facts of nature. They are, moreover, the first painters of landscape, for in their hands the gold background of the medieval panels yields place to a rendering of natural scenery and of effects of distance, minute in details and fresh and delightful in feeling. The famous picture ascribed by some to Hubert van Eyck in the coUection of Sir Francis Cook at Richmond is a good example. The subject is the " Three Maries at the Sepulchre, " and the background is a wonderful view of a city intended for Jerusalem (see fig. 12, Plate IV.).
In Germany, on the other hand, the tendency of the 15th century was towards a rather crude realism in details, to which the higher artistic qualities of beauty and devotional sentiment were often sacrificed. This is a new phenomenon in the history of the art. In the older Oriental, the classical and the medieval phases of painting, though there is a constant effort to portray the truth of nature, yet the decorative instinct in the artist, his feeling for pattern, was a controlling element in the work, 'and the representation was conventionalized into a form that satisfied the ideal of beauty current at the time. Jan van Eyck was matter-of-fact in his realism, but avoided ugliness, whereas in Germany in the 15th and i6th centuries we find action and expression exaggerated to contortion and grimace, and all artistic qualities sacrificed to a mistaken idea of force. German art was, however, saved by the appearance of some artists of great genius who more than made up for the national insensibility to beauty by their earnestness and truth. Martin Schongauer of Colmar learnt his art from the painters of the Flemish Netherlands, and imbibed something of the feeling for beauty which the successors of Hubert van Eyck had never wholly lost. After Schongauer German art culminates at Nuremberg in the person of Albrecht Dürer, and a little later in that of Hans Holbein the younger. Contemporary with Dürer, Mathias Grunewald of Colmar exhibits a dramatic power in his creations that compensates for their exaggerated realism, and Bartholomaus Bruyn, of Cologne, prefigures the future success of the northern schools in portraiture. In Germany, however, the wars of religion in the i6th century checked the further growth of a national art. Holbein's migration to England is a significant sign of this, and German art in this phase of it may be said to come to an end in the person of Adam Elsheimer of Frankfort, who introduced German painting at Rome about the year 1600.
In the Netherlands the early religious school ends, as we have seen, with Quintin Matsys, and the next generation of Flemish painters for the most part practise their art in Italy, and import Italian fashions into the painting of their own country. From the ranks of these so-called Italianizcrs in the Flanders of the 16th century proceeds a little later the commanding personality of Rubens.
§ 12. The Rise of Schools of Painting. — The expression "school of painting" has more than once been used; what is the meaning of it? The history of painting has hitherto been treated in the article as a development that proceeded according to a natural law of evolution in independence of individuals. In painting, however, as in all the higher operations of the arts, the initiative of the individual counts for much, and the action and reaction on each other of individuals, and those groups of individuals whom common aims and practice draw together into schools, make up for us a good part of the interest of the historical study of painting. At certain periods this particular
