this time Brussels was
the centre of manufacture and the cartoonist had come to influence all
weavings. Just as carpenters and masons, who were the planners and
builders of our forefathers' homes, have now to submit to the
domination of the _Ecole des Beaux Arts_ graduates, so the man at the
loom came under the direction of Italian artists. And even the border
was not left to the mind of the weaver, but was carefully and
consistently planned by the artist to accompany his greater work, if
greater it was.

Raphael himself set that fashion. He was a born decorator, and in
laying out the borders of his tapestries unbridled his wonderful
invention and let it produce as many harmonies as could be crowded
into miniature. He set the fashion of dividing the border into as many
sections as symmetry would allow, dividing them so daintily that the
eye scarce notes the division, so purely is it of the intellect. In
the border for the _Acts of the Apostles_, this style of treatment is
the one he preferred. This set has no copy in America, but an almost
unrivalled example of this style of border is in the private
collection of George Blumenthal, Esq., the _Herse and Mercury_.[16]
Here picture follows picture in charming succession, in that purity
and perfection of design with which the early Renaissance delights us.
The classic note set by the subject of the hanging is never forgotten,
but on this key is played a varied harmony of line and colour. For
dainty invention, this sort of border reaches a very high expression
of art.

If Raphael set the fashion, others at least were not slow in seizing
the new idea and from that time on, until a period much later--that of
the Gobelins under Louis XV--it was the fashion to introduce great and
distracting interest into the border. Even the little galloon became a
twist of two ribbons around a repeated flower, or a small reciprocal
pattern, so covetous was design of all plain spaces.

Lesser artists than Raphael also divided the border into squares and
oblongs, and with charming effect. The sides were built up after the
same fashion, but instead of the delicate architectural divisions he
affected, partitions were made with massed fruit and flowers, vines
and trellises. The scenes were surprisingly dramatic, Flemish artists
showing a preference for such Biblical reminders as Samson with his
head being shorn in Delilah's lap, while Philistines just beyond
waited the enervating result of the