PREFACE. Two great Schools of Art, illustrating the fourteenth century, rose to robust and healthy vigour; the first under the warm and genial sun of Italy, the second under the colder and more clouded atmosphere of Belgium. The latter, unduly slighted by some, unfairly elevated by others, is the subject of this volume. Inferior to the Italian in the great features of design and sentiment, it has superior claims to attention from an early tendency towards a new mode of colour. Influenced in this, as much by clime as by other causes, it brought to perfection a system which soon extended itself to all the Schools of the world, embracing in its progress the early painters of Venice, and laying the foundation of the future greatness of those masters. In tracing the progress of the painters of Bruges, from their early efforts to their decline and fall, we have not neglected to note the influences which they exercised abroad; and we have found it necessary to include amongst the pupils h |