Rost]

The same Nicholas Karcher who set the standard in the d'Este works,
gave of his wonderful skill to the Florentines, and with him was
associated John Rost. These were both from Flanders, and although
trade regulations for tapestry workers did not exist in Italy, Duke
Cosimo granted each of these men a sufficient salary, a habitat, as
well as permission to work for outsiders, and in addition paid them
for all work executed for himself.

The subjects for the set of tapestries had entirely left the old
method of pious interpretation and of mediaeval allegory and revelled
in pictured tales of the Scriptures and of the gods and heroes of
mystical Parnassus and of bellicose Greece, not forgetting those
dainty exquisite impossibilities called grotesques. It was about the
time of the death of Cosimo I (1574), the founder of the Medicean
factory, that a new and unfortunate influence came into the
directorship of the designs. This was the appointment of Stradano or
Johan van der Straaten, to give his Flemish name, as dominating
artist.

He was a man without fine artistic feeling, one of those whose eye
delighted in the exaggerations of decadence rather than in the
restraint of perfect art. He was inspired, not by past perfection of
the Italians among whom he came to live, but by those of the decline,
and on this he grafted a bit of Northern philistinism. His brush was
unfortunately prolific, and at this time the fine examples of weaving
set by Rost and Karcher had been replaced by quicker methods so that
after 1600 the tapestries poured out were lamentably inferior.
Florentine tapestry had at this time much pretence, much vulgar
display in its drawing, missing the fine virtues of the time when
Cosimo I dictated its taste, the fine virtues of "grace, gaiety and
reflectiveness."

Leo X, the great Medicean pope, was elected in 1513, he who ordered
the great Raphael set of the _Acts of the Apostles_, but it was before
the establishment of important looms in Italy, so to Flanders and Van
Aelst are due the glory of first producing this series which afterward
was repeated many times, in the great looms of Europe. Leo X emulated
in the patronage of the arts his father Lorenzo, well-named
Magnificent. What Lorenzo did in Florence, Leo X endeavoured to do in
Rome; make of his time and of his city the highest expression of
culture. His record, however, is so mixed with the corruption of the
time that its golden glory is half-dim