s has long been transferred to
the treasury of Notre Dame. The old Quinze-Vingts, the Chartreux, the
Cordeliers, St. Croix de la Bretonnerie, St. Catherine, the Blancs
Manteaux, the Mathurins and other masterpieces of the Gothic builders
have all disappeared.

[Footnote 59: The early glass-workers were particularly fond of their
beautiful red. "Wine of the colour of the windows of the Sainte
Chapelle," was a popular locution of the time.]

Gothic architecture was eminently a product of the Isle de France.
"France not only _led_," says Mr. Lethaby, "but _invented_. In a very
true sense what we call Gothic is Frenchness of the France which had
its centre in Paris." The thirteenth century rivals the finest period
of Greek art for purity, simplicity, nobility and accurate science of
construction. Imagination was chastened by knowledge, but not
systematised into rigid rules. Each master solved his problem in his
own way, and the result was a charm, a variety, and a fertility of
invention, never surpassed in the history of art. Early French
sculpture is a direct descendant of Greek art, which made its way into
Gaul by the Phoenician trade route, and the Merovingian Franks were
always in touch with the Eastern Mediterranean, and with the stream of
early Byzantine[60] art. French artists achieved a perfection in the
representation of the human form which anticipated by a generation the
work of the Pisani in Italy, for the early thirteenth-century statues
on the west front of Chartres Cathedral are carved with a naturalness
and grace which the Italian masters never surpassed, and the
marvellously mature and beautiful silver-gilt figure of a king, in
high relief, found in 1902 immured in an old house at Bourges and
exhibited in 1904 among the Primitifs Francais at the Louvre, was
wrought more than a century before the birth of Donatello. Some
fragments of the old sculptures that adorned St. Denis and other
twelfth and thirteenth-century churches may still be found in the
museums of Paris. The influence of the French architects, as Emile
Bertaux has demonstrated in the first volume of his _Art dans l'Italie
Meridionale_, extended far beyond the limits of France, and is clearly
traceable in the fine hunting-palace, erected for Frederic II. in the
thirteenth century, at Castello del Monte, near Andria, in Apulia. But
of the names of those who created these wonderful productions few are
known; the great masterpieces of the thirteen