It is really a mark of
over-haste to be truthful, or at least to be understood, and at the
worst it is no more than the natural rebound from the evil constraint of
the old Byzantine tyranny over scheme and costume and invention. It is
often truly diverting in its very _insouciance_. But its priceless value
to us--and here the same remark applies to all styles of pictorial art
before the fifteenth century--is the ocular record of dress,
architecture, implements of peace and war, incidents of daily life,
etc., for which no _Encyclop?dia Britannica_ of verbal explanation could
ever be more than the poorest makeshift. As we say, this same happy
anachronism is common to other schools of illumination, and we cannot
fail to notice it from Byzantium to Britain, but it is the intense
realism of the Netherlands that forces it upon us so strongly that we
are bound to speak of it.
The oldest notice of illuminated work in the Netherlands is in a
Benedictine chronicle of the ninth century, where mention is made of two
ladies, daughters of the Lord of Denain, named Harlinda and Renilda,[50]
who were educated in the convent of Valenciennes. "In 714 they left
their native province to found a monastery on the banks of the
Maas--among the meadows of Alden and Maas-Eyck.
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