Of those who scan this page there are few, if any who have not gone to pay homage to the great medieval churches of France. And surely numerous pilgrims, at Chartres of the world-famous sculptures, or other Gothic fanes of coeval raising, have found themselves asking big questions. If the French school of artists, say from the twelfth century to the fifteenth, were authors of a wealth of fine religious work, did there come from them no fair things in the sphere, after the Middle Ages had passed away, giving place to the Renaissance Period? Or must it be owned, reluctantly, that the ecclesiastical fabrics in the pointed formula, with the carven figures which adorn them, and the embellished sacred manuscripts which were wrought by men who were linked with those halls of orisons, were the ultimate rare exploit of France, in the sacerdotal realm?

In offering tribute to those very few French artists who fashioned beautiful things definable as art of the Renaissance, it is desirable to spend a moment on recalling the character of that great movement. If it is often described as the advent of a new spirit of enquiry, this description is inadequate; for the affair might also be called a deliberate harking back to the Classic or Antique styles in art. Out of the new spirit of enquiry there came in Holland, in the fourteenth century, the inauguration of the printing press, and in Flanders, at the outset of the fifteenth, the inception of oil painting.