Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/290

256 concept of the mind. Erasmus tells us that he once heard a preacher in Paris preach during forty days on the Parable of the Prodigal Son, so that he devoted all Lent to it. He described his journeys on his setting out and on his return, the bill of fare of his meals at the inns, the mills he passed, his dicing, etc., torturing the texts of prophets and evangelists to find some that might seem to give some support to his twaddle. “And because of that the ignorant multitude and the fat big-wigs considered him almost a god.”

To realize the place conceded to the minute execution of details, it suffices to examine some paintings by Jan van Eyck. Let us first take the Madonna of the chancellor Rolin, at the Louvre. In any other artist the laborious exactness with which the materials of the dresses are painted, also the marble of the tiles and the columns, the reflections of the windowpanes, and the chancellor’s breviary, would give an impression of pedantry. Even in him the exaggerated finish of the details, as in the ornaments of the capitals, on which a whole series of Biblical scenes is represented, is hurtful to the general effect. But it is especially in the marvellous perspective opened behind the figures of the Virgin and the donor that his passion for details is given rein. “The dumbfounded spectator,” as Monsieur Durand-Gréville says in describing this picture, “discovers between the head of the divine child and the Virgin’s shoulder, a town full of pointed gables and elegant belfries, with a big church with numerous buttresses, and a vast square, cut across all its length by a staircase on which come and go and run countless little touches of the brush, which are so many living figures; his eye is next attracted by a curved bridge swarming with groups of people who pass and repass; it follows the meanderings of a river on which tiny barks make ripples; and in the midst of which, on an island smaller than the nail of a child’s finger, rises up a lordly castle with numerous turrets, surrounded by trees; it traces on the left a quay planted with trees, and covered with foot-passengers; it goes even further, passing beyond the green hill-tops, rests for a moment on the distant line of snowy mountains, to lose itself, at last, in the infinite space of a sky, which is hardly blue, where floating vapours are vaguely discerned.”

Are not unity and harmony lost in this aggregation of details,