the glass of Le Mans, Chartres, and Strasbourg, and for the most part the code of imagery had been worked out by enamel-workers and illuminators of books before it was adopted for stained glass.
There was a great expansion in the production of sculpture and its application to architecture during the twelfth century, and an enormous increase of power in dealing with it. Here again, however, all the great types and traditions of treatment seem to have been invented or rather developed by the Carolingian schools. For instance, there are two delightful small impersonations of Land and Sea carved amongst the early Gothic sculptures of the west front of Notre Dame at Paris. Such impersonations derive directly from Romanesque ivories and illuminated books of the German school and thence may be traced to Alexandrian art. In the Carolingian age imagery had, for the most part, been on a small scale, in metal-work and ivory, but some of it had been of great beauty in conception and of masterly execution. By the middle of the twelfth century several notable schools of architectural sculpture had been developed in Italy, France, and Spain. In England beginnings were made towards the development of what became a special English tradition; the west front treated as a background for an array of sculptured figures having reference to the Last Judgment. Some remnants found at York and others extant at Lincoln are evidence for this.
Sculpture, stained glass, and the large schemes of painting which covered the interiors of Romanesque churches, were very largely inspired by painted books. These illuminated volumes are almost the most wonderful products of the whole Romanesque period. What the book of Kells is to Irish art, and the Lindisfarne book to the Anglo-Celtic school of Northumbria, is well known. Several superb Carolingian volumes are just as remarkable, and this pre-eminence of the book was sustained until the end of our period. Some hundred splendid books and rolls written and painted in the twelfth century are marvels of thoughtful invention and skilful manipulation. At this time types and symbols were still dealt with in the great manner; many of the designers at work seem to have had the imagination of Blake with ten times his power of execution. For example, take the designs of an "Exultet" roll in the British Museum; the first painting is Christ majestically enthroned; then comes a group of rejoicing angels; then the interior of a basilica shewn in section with nave and aisles and in the midst a colossal Mater Ecclesia standing between groups of clergy and people; the next is Mother Earth, a woman's figure half emerging from the ground, nourishing an ox and a dragon; further on is the Crucifixion with its "type," the passage of the Red Sea; and near the end, after a flower garden with bees, the Virgin and Holy Child. This appears to be an Italian work of the middle of the twelfth century.
The artists of Charlemagne made use of mosaic in large schemes of
