Page:A History of Wood-Engraving.djvu/138

136 work was characterized by the curiously modified Italian taste which marked the French Renaissance. They understood design, and showed considerable power in it; they regarded the main lines and principal harmonies and contrasts of masses which are necessary to it; but they transformed its simplicity into elegance, and overlaid it with ornamentation and trifling detail which marred its effect, and gave to their works an appearance of artificiality, of over-labored refinement and mistaken scrupulousness of taste. As a rule, indeed, taste was their characteristic rather than a developed sense of beauty, and skill gather than power. Finally, they passed, by a natural progress, into a complexity and fineness of line which are unsuitable to wood-engraving; they lost the sense of unity in the abundance of detail, and were forced to give up engraving in wood and adopt engraving on copperplate, which was so much better fitted to the meaningless excess of delicacy and accumulation of ornament in which the French Renaissance ended.

The most talented of the French designers for wood-engraving was Jean Cousin (1501–1589), a member of the Reformed Church, little favored at court and much neglected by his contemporaries. He appears to have been of a robust and independent spirit, an admirer of Michael Angelo and the Italians, and an industrious and painstaking workman in many branches of art. A large number of designs are ascribed to him; but, as is the case with nearly all the French engravers, there is great difficulty in making out what really was his work. Among the characteristic products of French wood-engraving were representations of royal triumphal entries into the great cities of the kingdom. Two of these are ascribed to Cousin—the entry of