It was this French and Parisian milieu which prepared the way for the appearance of the genius who founded the Flemish School, Jan Van Eyck (c. 139o-1441). He brought this school from the outset to an extraordinary degree of perfection, as much by his invention of oil painting as by his aptitude for the representation of people and all manner of things—distant horizons, the bricks and stones of buildings, rich brocades—with an accuracy and precision hitherto unknown. The altarpiece of the Mystic Lamb, with its twelve exterior compartments and its twelve interior panels, was carried out between 1420 and 1432. From that moment Flanders dominated all art north of the Alps for almost a century, and was not without an influence on Italy.
Thus the influence of the art deriving from the Van Eycks was substituted for that of the French and Franco-Flemish minia turists on the Rhine, where the Cologne school had shown, during the preceding generation, an agreeable sentimental mysticism. Further north Holland, like Germany, was won over.
During this period the disasters and miseries of the Hundred Years' War hampered the development in France of an art which had begun so well. Paris, occupied by the English troops, lost its predominance. The painters worked at Bourges, Dijon and Avignon. But at Avignon they came in contact with the Italians, more particularly with the Sienese summoned there by the Popes. At Dijon they were under the jurisdiction of the Duke of Bur gundy, who had become the enemy of the king of France, and who now included the Flemings among his subjects. From whence sprang, in the mid isth century, a new amalgamation in somewhat different proportions of French and Flemish influence.
A few really important French works have been preserved, the Aix Annunciation (c. 1440) and the Pieta of Villeneuve-les Avignon (after 1450) among those by anonymous artists, and among those by known authors, the Coronation of the Virgin by Enguerrand Charonton and the paintings and miniatures by Jean Fouquet. These justify us in saying that in the midst of her many trials France in the 15th century had not lost the secret of producing from time to time original spirits unlike those of other schools and to no great extent resembling each other.
In spite of acknowledged borrowing from Italy we surely feel in the miniatures by Fouquet that same breath of fresh air which vivifies the landscapes and familiar scenes in the Tres Riches Heures of the Duke of Berry. As for the Aix Annunciation and
the Villeneuve Pieta, they incline us to the belief that it was in France that the work of the two finest geniuses of Flanders, Van Eyck and Roger Van der Weyden, was best understood. Not perhaps in the perfection of their technique and their prodigious virtuosity in rendering the aspect of every conceivable object, but in that air of grandeur which ennobled their realism, a grandeur certainly innate in them, but perhaps strengthened by a breeze from the cathedrals of France.
There was nothing in the world then to compare with that interior with two standing figures known as the Portrait of Arnolfini and his Wife (Nat. Gall., London). We may even say that in its extraordinary accuracy and unprecedented imitation of reality it will never be surpassed. Our admiration is perhaps even greater before a simple head against a plain background, the portrait of the painter's wife. Where will anything be found in the history of art superior to the precision and life to which Van Eyck attained from the first? But Van Eyck is more than the genial precursor of the Dutch masters of realism : he is the calm theologian who composes with the logic and authority of a doctor the multiple symbols of the Altarpiece of the Lamb and who diffuses an equal and white limpidity over the images which unite the mysteries of heaven to the realities of earth.
Roger Van der Weyden (1399-1464), whose masterpiece, the Descent from the Cross, now in the Escorial, dates from a few years after the completion of the St. Bavon polyptych, is the only Fleming who truly carried on Van Eyck's great concep tion of art, and he added to it a pathos of which there is no other example in his country save, though with less power and nobility, that of Hugo Van der Goes towards the end of the century. The other Flemish artists of the 15th century shone neither through their invention nor their emotion. They quickly reached either hardness or mannerism. Memling at any rate charms us by his graceful sentimentality. But they are all marvellous craftsmen and even those least spiritually gifted force our admiration by their virtuosity, the brilliance and refinement of their colour, all the characteristics which we are far from finding amongst the French of the same period or, to the same degree, in Italy.