Page:Charles Moore--Development and Character of Gothic Architecture.djvu/273

Rh to be characteristic of Byzantine design. In fact, they often display a remarkable degree of grace, action, and expression. Figs. 165 and 166, from a Greek manuscript of the tenth century, will illustrate their qualities of design, though much of their beauty is lost by the absence of the colouring. The student of Greek art will hardly fail to perceive in these diminutive figures some features that are of distinctly Hellenic origin. The influence of such works as these upon some of the early schools of Southern and Central Gaul, and afterwards upon the more Northern schools, will upon comparison become clearly apparent.

The degree of what may be properly called classic feeling and skill in design that was sometimes reached in these early schools is shown, for instance, in the sculptures upon the lintel of the Church of Notre-Dame du Port at Clermont-Ferrand, which date from the end of the eleventh century, and of which Fig. 167 is a single figure of remarkable beauty.

But the schools of art south of the Loire were not progressive; they hardly displayed any powers of original invention—they had little independent vitality. They were essentially imitative schools—they gave birth to no important developments; and after the twelfth century they gradually passed into decline.

North of the Loire, however, the case was different In Burgundy the Abbey of Cluny, in the early part of the twelfth century, maintained schools of art in which sculpture, though still largely bound by former conventions, gave evidence of a new impulse derived from a fresh observation of nature. Of this sculpture the Abbey Church of Vezelay and the Cathedral of Autun afford, in the archivolts and tympanums of their portals, characteristic examples.

These schools of the South and of Burgundy, with perhaps also in some measure the schools that then existed along the Rhine, were the chief sources of stimulus and guidance to the early sculptors of the Ile-de-France. In this latter region the conditions for the growth of a school of art were, by the beginning of the twelfth century, exceptionally good. And not only was the character of the