Page:Charles Moore--Development and Character of Gothic Architecture.djvu/324

Rh impulse of the time and the locality operated in the direction of an architectural development which was not favourable to the special development of painting.

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries painting as an art in France advanced rapidly under the influence of the example of the early Italian schools. But this painting had no connection with that Gothic architecture with which we are concerned.

FIG. 190. Gothic painting in France was thus of a very primitive and conventional kind, though it was not ill adapted to its purpose as associated with architecture. How far its conventions and archaisms were the mere imperfections of immaturity, and how far they may have resulted from a sense of architectural fitness, I do not attempt to decide; but, judging from what was at the same time accomplished in sculpture, it would seem that had painting received equal attention in the Gothic scheme, its severer conventions would soon have given place to a more developed style.

It was not, however, in the field of painting proper, but in that of stained glass, that chromatic design, in Gothic architecture where the great openings afforded ample