Page:Of Six Mediaeval Women (1913).djvu/168

 in every detail with the inventory record of the Chapel of Hesdin. We may also compare a picture (No. 783, "The Exhumation of St. Hubert") in the Flemish room in the National Gallery, where a somewhat similar scheme is shown.

Of the MSS. and Illuminations only brief mention can be made. Surviving examples, and the records of the time, testify to the splendour and the sum of them. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, the French miniature was influenced in no small degree, both in technique and in colour, by glass painting. Towards the end of the century this influence yielded to the prevailing enthusiasm for architecture and sculpture, and in Bibles and Psalters alike there appear scenes with figures as in bas-relief, with architectural backgrounds and decorative details. The same spirit that evolved tender foliage out of the hard stone of cathedral and church evolved also the delicate hawthorn-leaf enriching the initial letter of the MS. It mattered little whether the material worked on was stone or parchment. Each was but a means for giving expression to a newly discovered scheme of beauty—the beauty of Nature. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries a renewed impetus had been given to the arts of writing and illumination. This was partly because a demand had arisen for a secular literature to supersede the tiresome and time-worn recitations of minstrels, and partly because, in