gh the excellence of the weavers. It was not the worth of
the artists that brought Brussels its greatest fame, but the humbler
work of its tapissiers. Their lives, their endeavours counted more in
textile art than did the Flemish school of painting. No such weavers
existed in all the world. They were bound together as a guild, had
restrictions and regulations of their own that would shame a trades
union of to-day, and in change of politics had scant consideration
from new powers. But in the end they were the ones to bring fame to
the Brussels workshops.

In 1528 they were banded together by organisation, and from that time
on their work is easily followed and identified. It was in that year
that a law was made compelling weavers--and allowing weavers--to
incorporate into the encompassing galloon of the tapestry the Brussels
Brabant mark of two B's with a shield between. And it was about this
time and later that the celebrated family of weavers named Pannemaker
came into prominence through the talent of Wilhelm de Pannemaker, he
who accompanied the Emperor Charles V on his expedition to Tunis.

This expedition flaunts itself in the set of tapestries now in Madrid.
(Plate facing page 62.) The emperor seems, from our point of view, to
have done it all with dramatic forethought. There was his special
artist on the spot, Jan Vermeyen, to draw the superb cartoons, and
accompanying him was Wilhelm de Pannemaker, the ablest weaver of his
day, to set the loom and thrust the shuttle. Granada was the place
selected for the weaving, and the finest of wool was set aside for it,
besides lavish amounts of silk, and pounds of silver and gold. In
three years, by the help of eighty workmen, Pannemaker completed his
colossal task. Such was the master-weaver of the Sixteenth Century.

[Illustration: CONQUEST OF TUNIS BY CHARLES V (DETAIL)

Cartoon by Jan Vermeyen. Woven by Pannemaker. Royal Collection at
Madrid]

As for Pannemaker's imperial patron, John Addington Symonds
discriminatingly says of him: "Like a gale sweeping across a forest of
trees in blossom, and bearing their fertilising pollen to far distant
trees, the storm of Charles Fifth's army carried far and wide through
Europe the productive energy of the Renaissance."

CHAPTER VI

RENAISSANCE INFLUENCE

Brussels in 1515, with her workmen at the zenith of their perfection,
was given the order to weave the set of the _Acts of the Apostles_ for
the Pope