ns, but fifty or sixty years later, when
figures began to be more crowded, there was but little space left
unoccupied by the participants in the allegory, and this was filled by
the artifices of architecture or herbage that formed the divisions
into the various scenes. Later the designing artists decided to let
into the picture the light of distant fields and skies, and thus was
introduced the suggestion of space outside the limit of the canvas.

LATER DRAWING

After the Gothic drawing, came the avalanche of the Renaissance. That
altered all. The Italian taste took precedence, and from that time on
the cartoons of tapestries represent modern art, trailing through its
various fashions or modes of the hour. The purest Renaissance is
direct from the Italian artist, in tapestry as well as in painting,
but it is interesting to see the maladroitness of the Flemish hand
when left to draw cartoons for himself after the new manner.

After the Renaissance came exaggeration and lack of sincerity; then
the improvement of the Seventeenth Century, notably in France, and
after that the dainty fancies of the Eighteenth Century, and here we
are dealing with art so modern that it needs no elucidation. The
drawing in tapestries is a subject as fascinating as it is
inexhaustible, but, however much one may read on it, nothing equals
actual association with as many tapestries as are available, for the
eye must be trained by vision and not by intellectual process alone.

CHAPTER XIX

IDENTIFICATIONS (_Continued_)

If the amateur can have the fortune to see in the same hour a tapestry
of the early Fifteenth Century, and one a hundred years later, and
then one about 1550, from Brussels, drawn by an Italian artist, he has
before him an exposition of tapestry weaving in its golden age when it
sweeps through its greatest periods and phases to marvellous
perfection. The earliest example gives acquaintance with that almost
fabled time of the Gothic primitives in art; the second shows the
highest development of that art under the influence of civilisation,
and the third shows the obsession of the new art of the Renaissance.
It is, perhaps, superfluous to say that after the revival of classic
art the power of producing spontaneous Gothic was lost forever. From
that time on, every drawing has had certain characteristics, certain
sophistications that the artist cannot escape except in a deliberate
copy.

Modern art, we call it. In tap