A Century of French Painting, 1400-1500
A Century of French Painting, 1400-1500
Phaidon / Oxford University Press | 1949 | ISBN: 0211116130 | English | 264 pages | PDF | 30 MB
Early French art is essentially Gothic art. Its great period was in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, its main manifestations architecture and sculpture, its material was stone, 'la matiere du grand moyen-age'. French painting began when Gothic art was on the wane; its early monuments are scarcer than those in almost any other country, and many of them have given rise to controversy. It is the ill fortune of this book to be concerned with painting alone, and to start at the moment when France was about to lose the undisputed artistic hegemony in Europe which she was not to regain fully until the nineteenth century.