Painting

The origins of the German Schools of painting are obscure, but it is fairly certain that Cologne was the first place in which the art was soonest established to any considerable extent. Here, as in the Netherlands, we cannot find any traces of immediate Italian influences. The first painter who can be identified with any certainty is Wilhelm von Herle, called Meister Wilhelm, whose activity is not traceable earlier than about 1358.

In Venice the Byzantine style appears to have offered a more stubborn resistance to the innovators than in Tuscany, or, in fact, in any other part of Italy. Few, if any, of the allegorical subjects with which Giotto and his scholars decorated whole buildings are to be found here, and the altar pictures retain longer than anywhere else the gilt canopied compartments and divisions, and the tranquil positions of single figures.

When we consider the peculiar beauty of the architecture and ecclesiastical sculpture in France during the Middle Ages and the period of the renaissance, and of the enamels, ivories, and other small works of art, it is wrong to regret that painting was not also practised by the French as assiduously as it was in Italy. For there can be no doubt that in being confined to one channel the artistic impulses of a people cut deeper than if dissipated in various directions.

Titian occupies almost, if not quite, as important a place in the history of painting as does Shakespeare in that of literature. His fame, his popularity, the wide range as well as the immense quantity of his works, entitle him to be ranked with our poet, if only for the

Antoine Watteau was born at Valenciennes in 1684, and died near there about thirty-seven years later of consumption. Valenciennes really belonged to Flanders, and had only lately been annexed to France, so that Watteau owed something of his art to Flemish rather than to French sources.

It cannot be said that the Venetian artists of the second half of the sixteenth century equalled in their collective excellence the great masters of the first, but in single instances they are frequently entitled to rank beside them.

One of the sensations of the Exhibition of Spanish Old Masters at the Grafton Gallery in the autumn of 1913 was an altar panel, dated 1250, which was acquired by Mr Roger Fry in Paris, and catalogued as of the "Early Catalan School." In view of the fact that this picture is "certainly to be regarded as one of the very oldest of primitive pictures painted on wood in any country ...