Half a dozen soldiers or houses might
indicate an army or a city, and even some particular army or city named
in the text, but the individual soldiers, though representing the army
of Alexander or Roland, would wear the equipment or armour of the
artist's military acquaintances, or his overlord's own company. The
city, whether Ghent or Bagdad, would consist of the same sort of houses
peaked and parapeted, the same towers and pinnacles that the illuminator
saw before him in his daily walks. His conception of a scene from
Scripture history would probably be framed more or less upon the
traditions of the schools transmitted from the Sphigmenou Manual or the
master's portfolio of "schemes," but while a prophet, an angel, or a
divinity would wear ideal raiment, Abraham and Pharaoh would be arrayed
in the costume of a contemporary burgomaster, and an almost contemporary
French king. In one memorable instance, we are told, so realistic was
the scene that Isaac was about to be despatched with a horse-pistol; and
in another, representing the birth of Cain, Adam was bringing to the
French tester bedside a supply of hot water from the kitchen boiler in a
copper saucepan. This kind of anachronism, it is true, is to some degree
chargeable on all early work; we see it among the early Italian painters
no less frequently perhaps, but mostly accompanied with so much of
allegory or imagination that we scarcely notice it, or if we do, we wink
at it as part of the times of ignorance.
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