Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/146

124 art so essentially mediæval. Taking it up where the middle age had left it, they found their whole work among the last subtleties of colour and line; and keeping within the true limits of their material they got quite a new order of effects from it, and felt their way to refinements on colour never dreamed of by those older workmen, the glass-painters of Chartres or Lemans. What is called the Renaissance in France is thus not so much the introduction of a wholly new taste ready made from Italy, but rather the finest and subtlest phase of the middle age itself, its last fleeting splendour and temperate Saint Martin's summer. In poetry, the Gothic spirit in France had produced a thousand songs; and in the Renaissance French poetry too did but borrow something to blend with a native growth, and the poems of Ronsard, with their ingenuity, their delicately figured surfaces, their slightness, their fanciful combinations of rhyme, are but the correlative of the traceries of the house of Jacques Cœur at Bourges or the 'Maison de Justice' at Rouen.

There was indeed something in the native French taste naturally akin to that Italian finesse. The characteristic of French work had always been a certain nicety, une netteté remarquable d' exécution. In the paintings of François Clouet, for example, or rather of the Clouets, for there was a whole family of