ly gives to the
carving of the epoch an appearance of having been suddenly broken, or
chopped off, in parts. At Nuremberg this peculiarity is very observable;
our specimen is selected from the church at Rottweil, in the Black
Forest, which bears the date of 1340. The French (Fig. 44) is a
favourable example of the Flamboyant style, which gave freedom to the
mediaeval rigidity of the Gothic, and paved the way for the ready
adoption of the style of Francis I., which was based on that of the
Italians.

[Illustration: Fig. 43.]

[Illustration: Fig. 44.]

Figs. 45 and 47 display one peculiarity in this northern adaptation--the
introduction of busts, in high relief, in central medallions. It is
sometimes introduced so unscrupulously in the carved panelling of
Elizabethan mansions, that it has almost the effect of a row of wooden
dolls peeping through shutters. The latter of the two examples may be
received as one of the best of its kind, exhibiting the utmost
enrichment of which the style was generally capable, and as few
heterogeneous features, though here they are not entirely absent. By way
of useful contrast, we give in Fig. 48, a very pure specimen of a panel
in Italian workmanship, from a tomb of the sixteenth century, in the
church of the Ara Coeli, at Rome. The flow of line here is exceedingly
graceful; the whole of the details are characterised by a delicacy
unknown to the artists of Germany and Flanders; the torches and volutes
point unmistakably to the classic origin of the whole.

[Illustration: Fig. 45.]

[Illustration: Fig. 46.]

[Illustration: Fig. 47.]

[Illustration: Fig. 48.]

It was not natural to the Roman people ever to forget their great
art-works of antiquity; the influence of the "departed spirits" still
"ruled them from their urns," as Byron truthfully expresses it. The
artists of Greece and Rome based their compositions on the unvarying
truth of nature; and though the barbaric mind might bear sway for
awhile, it could not triumph but through ignorance. Rome is now the
great art-teacher only because it is the conservator of its ancient
relics; and they have had their influence undiminished from the days of
Raffaelle and Michael Angelo. There are many pleasing bits of design in
the antique city, that show the classic source of inspiration from which
their inventors obtained them. The boy and dolphins, forming the
pleasing domestic fountain we engrave in Fig. 51, is an evident instance
of th