EARLY FLEMISH ART.

THE SCHOOL OF BRUGES.

CHAPTER I.

EARLY EFFORTS.

THE records of early art in the Netherlands are exceedingly obscure, not only because innumerable pictures have perished, but because historians preferred to dwell on the stirring political struggles of their time rather than on the relation of pictorial triumphs. Municipal freedom, successful commerce, and aristocratic splendour, are the themes on which they lavished their attention. They had leisure to describe the strife of jealous communes, the wars of foreign and native princes, the long intrigues and cruel stratagems, the vanities and ambition of contending parties. They chronicled with pride the wealth and love of show of duke or burgher, but they neglected art and its efforts; leaving to posterity to seek its traces through the obscurity of ages. Whilst the lives of eminent painters thus remained untold, the works of these men were subjected to all the vicissitudes of civil and religious warfare, and the greater part of them were consequently dost. No school of art, in truth, has flourished so little known as that of Bruges. We

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know more of the painted wonders of Assyria and of Egypt than we do of the works of the Van Eycks. The massive productions of the East have withstood the attacks of time, whilst the perishable remains of Belgian art have been destroyed by foreign armies, by revolutionists or religious fanatics. Few of the written records of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are preserved, and the galleries of Europe possess comparatively few pictures of those times. It is, therefore, a noble aim to write a history of early Flemish art; and that aim is made yet nobler by other and higher considerations. Art is one of those developments of human genius which can never be confined to one peculiar country. England should excel in it; for art has always been the produce of those qualities and means which she essentially possesses. Civic freedom and commercial wealth have always been the forerunners, if not the concomitants, of greatness in art; and those England has attained to a degree and with a perfection unknown to past history. Albeit these circumstances are insufficient, as we well know, to produce a school; perhaps by examining how such an one sprang up in a country free and commercial like our own, we may discover other ingredients and means wanting here. The Low Countries have a climate akin to our own. Their development as

a manufacturing and commercial people resembles ours. It cannot fail, therefore, to be useful, or at least interesting, to trace the rise of painting in that country which was one of its cradles, from the first rude efforts that marked its birth to the gorgeous splendour that gave it fame.

The fine arts, which had fallen so low all over Europe that even in the eleventh century scarce a trace of them remained, were slow in gaining ground in Belgium. The early manner of the Pisans and Siennese, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, found no followers in Flanders till the thirteenth; and when it did, the effort was a feeble and ill-directed one. It had the imperfection and rigidity of the oldest models without simplicity or breadth, and mingled with the old traditions the realistic tendencies of a more material art. The Saviour, depicted on the walls of the Hospital of La Biloque, at Ghent, in the act of blessing Joan of Constantinople, is a curious instance of this. The painter clothed the figure of Christ in modern garb, and dressed the Saviour's head with a hunting cap and feather. Again, when he attempted to represent St. Christopher, he marked the passage of the saint through water by rude and somewhat quaint outlines of fishes.

The figures, of colossal stature, are coloured like illuminated parchment, and much in the same manner as the Apostles in the church of St. Ursula at Cologne.' Their remarkable size causes their imperfection to be particularly visible.

A somewhat similar example of this early manner is the Tomb of Robert of Bethune, in the church of St. Martin at Yprès, one side of which was adorned with a kneeling

1 The paintings in La Biloque were discovered in 1832.

The Apostles of the church of St. Ursula at Cologne are inscribed with the date of 1224. The pictures of La Biloque are stated to have been painted in the thirteenth century. See on this subject, Messager des Sciences et des Arts de Belgique, 1832, p. 206. Messager des Sciences Historiques de Belgique, 1842, p. 204.

figure dressed in cloth of gold, embroidered with arms. It is difficult to form a correct judgment respecting this picture, on account of the modern retouching it has received; but the Tomb dates as far back as 1322, when Robert of Bethune died.'

Imperfectly preserved as are these records of early art, they are interesting as the productions of artists who immediately preceded a class recognised in the fourteenth century, and sufficiently numerous to form corporations. Patronized by the Counts of Flanders, these corporations were not confined to artists who painted pictures, but comprised all those who used the brush or pencil. Painters, illuminators, and glass-stainers, therefore, formed part of them; and art became, from the first moment of its rise in Flanders, more a secular than a religious occupation. The Netherlands, no doubt, produced in her convents men who wrote and illuminated manuscripts; but the monks who followed these pursuits copied and recopied the same subjects, and were as poor in ideas of design as feeble in their notions of colour. Progress was less rapid amongst them, because they lacked elements which were developed with far greater force by competition and emulation. The arts in Belgium were, perhaps, forced onwards in a peculiar path by the early formation of companies of masons, as they called themselves, which, coming from the borders of the Rhine, established themselves in Flanders, asserted their superiority over the old monks, who had till then monopolized the dump and level, and even brought painting under a species of subjection to architecture, which renders the school 'Kuntsblatt, No. 54, 1843.