de Roye, speaking of sirens that were seen, not very far from a calvary, on the occasion of Louis XI’s entry into Paris in 1461, says: “And there were also three very handsome girls, representing quite naked sirens, and one saw their beautiful turgid, separate, round and hard breasts, which was a very pleasant sight, and they recited little motets and bergerettes; and near them several deep-toned instruments were playing fine melodies.” Molinet tells us of the pleasure which the people of Antwerp felt at the entry of Philip le Beau in 1494, when they saw the Judgment of Paris : “But the stand at which the people looked with the greatest pleasure was the history of the three goddesses represented nude by living women.”
How far removed from the Greek sense of beauty was the parody of this theme got up for the entry of Charles the Bold at Lille in 1468, where were seen a corpulent Venus, a thin Juno and a hunchbacked Minerva, each wearing a gold crown.
These nude spectacles remained customary during the sixteenth century. Dürer, in the diary of his journey in the Netherlands, described the one he saw at Antwerp at the entry of Charles V in 1521, and as late as 1578 William of Orange, at his entry in Brussels, saw among other items a chained and nude Andromeda, “which one would have taken for a marble statue.”
The inferiority of pictorial as compared with literary expression is not confined to the domain of the comic, the sentimental and the erotic. The expressive faculty of the art of this period fails as soon as it is no longer supported by that extraordinary turn for visualizing, which explains the marvels of its pictures. When more is required than the direct and accurate vision of reality, the superiority of pictorial expression at once vanishes, and then is felt the justice of Michelangelo’s criticism: that this art aims at achieving several things at the same time, of which a single one would be important enough to demand the devotion of all its powers.
Let us once more consider a picture by Jan van Eyck. In so far as accurate observation suffices, his art is perfect, especially in facial expression, the material of the dresses, and the jewellery. As soon as it becomes necessary to reduce reality in some sort to a scheme, as is the case when buildings
