Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/147

Rh them, painters remarkable for their resistance to Italian influences, there is a silveriness of colour and a clearness of expression, which distinguish them very definitely from their Flemish neighbours, Hemling or the Van Eycks. And this nicety is not less characteristic of old French poetry. A light, aerial delicacy, a simple elegance, une netteté remarquable d'exécution—these are essential characteristics alike of Villon's poetry, and of the 'Hours of Anne of Brittany.' They are characteristic too of a hundred French Gothic carvings and traceries. Alike in the old Gothic cathedrals and in their counterpart, the old Gothic chansons de geste, the rough and ponderous mass becomes, as if by passing for a moment into happier conditions or through a more gracious stratum of air, graceful and refined, like the carved ferneries on the granite church at Folgoat, or the lines which describe the fair priestly hands of Archbishop Turpin in the song of Roland; although below both alike there is a fund of mere Gothic strength or heaviness.

And Villon's songs and Clouet's painting are like these. It is the higher touch making itself felt here and there, betraying itself, like nobler blood in a lower stock, by a fine line or gesture or expression, the turn of a wrist, the tapering of a finger. In Ronsard's time that rougher element seemed likely