course of the point of interest in the design.
The Gothic aim was to make warm and comfortable the austere apartment;
the Renaissance sought to produce big decorative pictures to hang in
place of frescoes; and the French idea--beginning with that same
ideal--fell at last into the production of something that should
accompany the other arts in making minutely ornate the home of man.
Therefore, the Gothic artist placed the point of interest high; the
artists of the Renaissance followed the rules of modern painting (even
to the point of becoming academic); and the last good period of the
Gobelins dropped into miniature and decoration.

COLOURS

Colours we have not yet considered, in this chapter of review for
identification's sake. They follow the same line, have the same
history, and this makes the beauty, the logic and the consistency of
our work, the work of tracing to their source the products of other
men and other times.

Colours in the early Gothic--of what do they remind one so strongly as
of the marvels of old stained glass, that rich, pure kaleidoscope
which has lived so long in the atmosphere of incense ascending from
censer and from heart. The same scale, rich and simple, unafraid of
unshaded colour, characterise both glass and tapestry.

The dyeing of colours in those days was a religion, a religion that
believed in holding fast to the forefathers' tenets. Red was known to
be a goodly colour, and blue an honest one; yellow was to conjure
with, and brown to shade; but beyond twelve or perhaps twenty colours,
the dyer never ventured. To these he gave the hours of his life, with
these he subjugated the white of Kentish wool, and gave it honest and
soft into the hand of the artist-weaver who, we must add, should have
been thankful for this brief gamut. To say the least, we of to-day are
grateful, for to this we owe the effect of cathedral glass seen in old
tapestries like that of _The Sacraments_. The Renaissance having more
sophisticated tales to tell, a higher intellectual development to
portray, demanded a longer scale of colour, so more were introduced to
paint in wool the pictures of the artists. At first we see them pure
and true, then muddy, uncertain, until a dull confusion comes, and the
hanging is depressing. When, at the last, it came that a tapestry was
but a painting in wool, with as many thousand differently united
threads as would reproduce the shading of brush-blended paint, the
whole thing