were the joy and boast of every man, woman, and child in England, who, day by day, and week by week, assembled to worship in the old houses of God which they and their fathers had built, and whose every vestment and chalice and candlestick, and banner and organ, and bells and pictures, and image and altar and shrine, they looked upon as their own and part of their birthright. (Studies by a Recluse in Cloister, Town, and Country.)

The artist sculptor, no longer tied to the copying over and over again according to a formula supplied to him, looked for the motives of his ornamentation in the human, animal, and vegetable life around him. The vine was not the only symbol, and if symbolism were required it was open to any one to apply it from all the flora of nature, and so, as we shall see, in capital and corbel, in roof and screen, in sculptured stone, or carved wood, he would use the clinging ivy, leafwork and fruit of oak, the trailing eglantine, the fern and all the common plants and fruits familiar to his locality. Happily for his art, the traditions derived originally from the cloister taught him to avoid mere imitation. The guilds, however independent in the working of their regulations, were still under the control of the Church.

A guild or corporation was a kind of large family comprising all those who aspired to the craft it practised. It had its various grades of apprentice, craftsman, and master, the last an office of honour often accorded to some great lord. It possessed, usually, its own chantry chapel in the cathedral church, its hall, its processional banners, benevolent fund, collars, jewels and other insignia, and enjoyed numerous civic privileges. To this day, as is well known, the shadow remains in our city companies and in various guilds in other countries. The The purpose of their existence was a practical one, always, however, in submission to or under the

influences of religion. A notable circumstance is that in every country these associations were placed under the patronage of St. Luke. The origin of the invocation is uncertain. It is known, of course, that in hagiology St. Luke is considered to have been an accomplished painter and sculptor. Some, however, hold that, by a fortuitous circumstance not unparalleled in the rise of legendary stories, the founder of the system was a Florentine painter of holy life, and of the same name, in the twelfth century. The image makers

tailleurs d'images, imagiers, beeldersnyders or beeldemakers, amongst other appellations in France and in the Netherlands-were the sculptors of the Middle Ages with no distinctions as to material, whether stone, or wood, or ivory. The system of their guilds probably differed but little in the various countries, and at the beginning, at least, they worked freely and independently. Paris was the first-about the end of the fourteenth century-to combine in one corporation the guilds of the imagers with those of the painters and illuminators, and to bring them under a stringent code of statutes. The huchers or huchiers (Flem. screenwerkers) were a lower class of workmen, makers of chests and furniture of all sorts, and the architectural part of choir-work as distinguished from the imagery. All, whether carvers of images or other decorative work, coffer-makers, huchers or table or bench makers, were under the master carpenters, and the strictest regulations were enforced regarding the quality of wood to be used. In Flanders the profession of wood sculpture was one of the most ancient in the guild of Saint Luke, and by the end of the fifteenth century formed a distinct corporation, undertaking such important works as were everywhere in evidence; choir and stall work as at Rouen or Amiens, or the great retables for which the wood-carvers of the Netherlands were everywhere famous. The principle upon which

the guilds were founded was that of a community under the direction of a master mason or a master carpenter as the case might be, the whole subordinated to the general plan which, while prescribing the position and dimensions of, for example, a capital or a frieze or the arrangement of stall work, left the artist sculptor free scope, in his own particular department, for individual expression. Not otherwise can we understand the creation of the elaborate choir work of Amiens, or of Ulm and so many others. The idea must be grasped generally, as it would be impossible to consider it here in its details. The most important thing to remember is the subordination to the general conception of the edifice both in form and colour, and that every portion, from painted window to the jouées of the stalls, played its part in the production of the harmony. Subject to this there was a general absence of specialization and particular distinction among the arts. Most men were practised in several. The system implied local government, popular interest and readiness to help in any capacity. As Ruskin says in his Seven Lamps of Architecture, the master workman must have been the person who carved the bas-reliefs in the porches, and to him all others must have been subordinate. The number of sculptors was so great that it would no more have been thought necessary to state regarding the builder that he could carve a statue than that he could measure an angle or strike a curve. At a sale of autographs at Sotheby's in the present year was one of Ruskin, to a friend, in which he declares that 'neither Gilbert Scott nor anybody else can build Gothic or Italian,' and this, because architects are not now also sculptors. 'All real work in these styles,' he continues, depends primarily on mastery of figure sculpture.' However arbitrarily conveyed, the dictum is one which cannot be too strongly insisted upon. The French sculptor Rodin, in a conversation reported

by Frederic Lawton in his Life and Work of the artist, expressed the same idea. He said: 'the aim of the Gothic artist was to fashion something that should have its full meaning and produce its full effect only in the place where it was to stand. They carved for the architecture, not for themselves.' We are aware what importance is to-day attached to the position of the conductor of an orchestra, and how greatly it differs from the time-beater of fifty years ago, how he holds supreme control of the whole, and how, as it were, through this control, he plays every instrument which composes it. This, it would seem, was the office of the medieval master builder.

The earliest regulations concerning carvings in wood are very precise. The wood was submitted to the most rigid selection by officials appointed for the purpose, in order that the quality, seasoning, and freedom from knots and shakes should be guaranteed. There are no end of regulations concerning careful and correct morticing and so on. Nothing in a figure was to be joined, except in the case of a crucifix, for which three pieces were allowed. Finally the marks of the corporation and of the sculptor were impressed.

When the fourteenth century opened, while Gothic art was still in its full splendour, the new tendencies towards a return to nature as distinguished from the conventions imposed by scholastic philosophy may be said to have more than asserted themselves. There was everywhere, in sculpture as in painting, a desire to profit by the personal observation of nature, and to deduce from this what we call realism. Under the altered circumstances which have been briefly indicated in the preceding pages it is not surprising that the condition of the artist sculptor and the artist painter should have been immeasurably raised. The first was

no longer a mere craftsman, a chipper of stone or wood working to order with ideas supplied to him—by rule

TWELFTH CENTURY IN FRANCE

of thumb, indeed, as the Greek carver of icons works to this day. Instead, he found himself in a position of relative independence. He became, in fact, a personage of considerable importance in the social scale. Great princes and nobles sought him out and attached him to their courts, not merely as their servant, but as a confidential friend. So it is that at the courts of the dukes of Burgundy, at the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth century, we find Claus Sluter and his companions part of the princely households: Sluter himself valet de chambre to Philip the Bold, in those days equivalent to a title of nobility.

We have little information concerning the condition of wood sculpture in France in the twelfth century. Examples, as elsewhere, are wanting. It is probable that, in common with monumental sculpture in stone, it preserved the ancient traditions, and was exercised principally in the southern provinces, and in such centres as Toulouse. To this region we are indebted, no doubt, for numbers of the archaic crucifix and Madonna figures, which will be noted later in their place. In Poitou, la Saintonge, Normandy, the Ile de France, Picardy, or Auvergne, the ornament was still confined for the most part to the friezes and capitals of pillars derived from Byzantine models. But in Burgundy-at Vezelay or Autun for example-the Cluniac order had reached an immense development and influence. Where the principal Cluniac monasteries were situated, statuary, though still modelled upon the conventional hieratism, had made considerable progress. It is necessary to say modelled on, for it was more adaptation with entirely French differences of features and drapery than unintelligent copying. In the Ile de France and Normandy statuary was non-existent. Poitou and Toulouse were in complete decadence. There was, of course, the mid-twelfth western doorway of Chartres with its statuary. But in most regions the