Louis--Characteristics of French Gothic illumination--Rise of the
miniature as a distinct feature--Guilds--Lay artists.
We have now reached the parting of the ways. The study of Nature is fast
superseding the dogmas of the monastic code, and what some writers have
characterised as the hieratic is giving way to the naturalistic
treatment of art. Like the pointed architecture itself, it is an outcome
of the spirit of the age. Exactly when it begins we cannot say. As in
the physical sciences, our limits are necessarily somewhat arbitrary to
suit our convenience in classification. We take the beginning of the
thirteenth century as a convenient dividing line between old and new. We
accept it as the boundary between the artistic sway of the East and
South--and that of the West and North--between the lifeless fetters of
prescription and the living freedom of invention. The contrast between
the two is very strongly marked. The soft and curling foliages of the
sunny South are for a season giving way to the hard and thorny leafage
of the wintry North. It would seem as if pointed architecture began with
the hard and frozen winter of its existence, and if it had been the plan
or design of one individual we might have accepted this peculiarity as
part of the scheme, and all that followed as a natural consequence and
development.
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