Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/289

Rh produce on us quite different effects. Apart from this fundamental difference, it may be shown, by the comparison of particular specimens, that the literary and the pictorial expression have far more traits in common than might be supposed from our general appreciation of the one and the other.

Let us take the brothers Van Eyck as being the most eminent representatives of the art of the epoch. Who are the men of letters to be matched with them, in order to compare their inspiration, their modes of expression? We have to look for them in the same environment whence came the great painters, that is to say, as we demonstrated above, in the environment of the court, the nobility and the rich middle classes. There we may assume an affinity of spirit to exist. The literature which may be matched with the art of the brothers Van Eyck is that which the patrons of painting protected and admired.

At first sight the comparison seems to bring to light an essential difference. Whereas the subject-matter of the artists is almost entirely religious, the profane genre preponderates in literature. Still, we must remember that the profane element occupied a much larger place in painting than might be supposed from what has been preserved. On the other hand, we run some risk of overrating a little the preponderance of profane literature. The history of literature, being naturally concerned with the tale, the romance, the satire, the song, historical writings, might easily lead us to forget that pious works always occupied the first and the largest place in the libraries of the time. In order to make a fair comparison between fifteenth-century painting and literature, we must begin by imagining side by side with the surviving altarpieces and portraits all sorts of worldly and even frivolous paintings, such as hunting or bathing scenes. The above-named Fazio mentions a picture by Rogier van der Weyden representing a woman in a sweating-bath, with two laughing young men peeping through a chink.

Art and letters in the fifteenth century share the general and essential tendency of the spirit of the expiring Middle Ages: that of accentuating every detail, of developing every thought and every image to the end, of giving concrete form to every