parable, and as composed at the same time. But, alas, this is the
ideal; the fact is that in the habit which weavers had of repeating
their sets when a model proved a favourite among patrons, led them
into providing variety by setting up a different border around the
drawing. As this reproducing, this copying of old cartoons was
sometimes done one or two hundred years after the original was drawn,
we find an anachronism most disagreeable to one who has an orderly
mind, who hates to see a telephone in a Venus' shell, for instance.
The whole thing is thrown out of key. It is as though your old family
portrait of the Colonial Governor was framed in "art nouveau."

The big men, the almost divine Raphael, and later Rubens, felt so
keenly the necessity of harmony between picture and frame, that they
were not above drawing their own borders, and it is evident they
delighted in the work. But Raphael's cartoons went not only to
Brussels, but elsewhere, and somehow the borders got left behind; and
thus we see his celebrated suite of _Acts of the Apostles_ with a
different entourage in the Madrid set from what it bears in Rome.

There is another matter, and this has to do with commerce more than
art. An old tapestry is of such value that mere association with it
adds to the market price of newer work. So it is that sometimes a
whole border is cut off and transferred to an inferior tapestry, and
the tapestry thus denuded is surrounded with a border woven nowadays
in some atelier of repairs, copied from an old design.

Let such desecrators beware. The border of a tapestry must appertain,
must be an integral part of the whole design for the sake of artistic
harmony.

FOOTNOTE:

[16] Frontispiece.

CHAPTER XXI

TAPESTRY MARKS

Regardless of what a man's longing for fame may have been in the
Middle Ages, he let his works pass into the world without a sign upon
them that portrayed their author. This is as true of the lesser arts
as of the greater. It was not the fashion in the days of Giotto, nor
of Raphael, to sign a painting in vermillion with a flourished
underscore. The artist was content to sink individuality in the
general good, to work for art's sake, not for personal fame.

This was true of the lesser artists who wove or directed the weaving
of the tapestries called Gothic, not only through the time of the
simple earnest primitives, but through the brilliant high development
of that style as shown at the st