The Loire valley, a region most secure from the ravages of the English war, was the region in which the French spirit was most persistent. Towards the end of the century this spirit reasserts itself in other parts of France. For a moment, in that period known as the Detente, it is exhibited in sculptures that have a breadth and simplicity not realized in sculpture since the beginning of the 14th century. At this time the realistic figures of tombs and ecclesiastical furniture, although still in contemporary cos tume, assume a tranquillity of pose and treatment that lends great dignity to their sensuous and pictorial beauty. The Detente did not at any time approach the 13th century, for its forms are at no time truly sculptural or truly monumental, but it did create many appealing and poetic figures. Of these the Vierge d'Olivet by Michele Colombe (in the Louvre) and the statues from the Tomb of Francis II. of Brittany in Nantes Cathedral are superb examples.
Germany was prolific in sculpture during the 15th century. Grace and tenderness are less frequent in her art, in which an exaggeration of movement and of emotion becomes more and more pronounced. The love of pictorialism, of agitated complex drap eries, and of dramatic attitudes that distinguishes the late Gothic of Germany have often led to a comparison with the Baroque to which it is certainly akin. An intensity of spiritual experience
oftentimes underlies the nervous and formless panels, filled with tumultuous draperies and agonized faces.
Germany developed a great variety of local schools. Of these, the School of Nuremberg is the more dramatic and robust in style, that of Wiirzburg more lyric, and that of Swabia more infused with thought. In Bavaria, where stone was used as often as wood, a greater restraint tempers the realism of the time.
German sculptors found their way into Spain in the 15th century and worked there side by side with their Flemish col leagues. The huge wooden retablos of the Spanish cathedrals, covered with sculptural relief and rich polychrome carvings, offered splendid fields for their art, which was not, of course, unmodified by the Spanish taste for sumptuous ornament or the Moorish tradition of intricate patterning and perfect finish. The great retable at Toledo Cathedral is an example, as are also the choir-stalls of Leon ; these are perhaps the most splendid en sembles of carved ornament in Europe.
Under this magnificent embroidery architecture was forgotten. Sculpture no longer existed as a monumental art. Gothic sculp ture had completed the cycle that Hellenic sculpture had followed; her sculptors end, like those of Greece, as story-tellers and orna mentalists_