INTRODUCTION. Xvii 



After suffering the miseries and degradation consequent on foreign 

 invasion and internal strife, the country was gradually restored to inde- 

 pendence and unity by the heroism of Joan of Arc and the astute 

 policy of the reigns of Charles VII. (1422-61) and Louis XI. (1461-83). 

 A new France then arose from her ashes with the feudal and ecclesi- 

 astical ideals of the Middle Ages greatly shaken. A successful struggle 

 against the invader had awakened a new sense of nationality and of 

 solidarity with the crown, the one mediaeval institution which emerged 

 unweakened from the anarchy. The kings set on foot a work of 

 reorganisation, by developing the central administrative, judicial, fiscal, 

 and military system at the expense of the local and feudal ones. They 

 made themselves paramount over all conflicting powers : they controlled 

 the Church and the municipalities, and deprived the nobles of their 

 independent authority, absorbing their territories and enrolling their 

 persons in the royal armies. They fostered industry and trade; and 

 the restoration of order and prosperity, which permitted the rise of 

 an influential middle class of lawyers, bankers, and manufacturers, was 

 accompanied by the growth of the capitalist principle in commerce. 

 The newly invented printing press favoured the spread of education. 

 Literary activity and classical studies revived, and the growth of 

 Humanism went hand in hand with that of individualism. 



This national history had been accompanied by a highly char- 

 acteristic architectural development, culminating, when the mediaeval 

 monarchy was at its height, in a noble austere style with simple 

 structural forms and symbolic sculpture, architectonic in its character. 

 In the ensuing era of material progress, the structural problems being 

 already solved, the builders devoted themselves to elaboration and 

 embellishment ; while losing in virility, architectural forms grew richer 

 and more graceful, sculpture more purely decorative. With the 

 national disorganisation and impoverishment during the Hundred 

 Years' War, came a moral and artistic decline. Architecture was 

 reduced to embroidery on old themes, and lost itself in ingenuities 

 of design and dexterities of execution, while sculpture fell into an ex- 

 travagant naturalism. This was the state of affairs in the second half of 

 the fifteenth century when the national revival and renewed prosperity 

 called for a new outburst of architectural activity. 



France under Louis XI. produced work of considerable magnifi- 

 cence, but the Dukes of Burgundy, the last of the great vassals to be 

 subdued, were far more liberal patrons of art than the French king. In 

 their territories, which included a large part of the present Belgium as 

 well as the eastern provinces of France, and which had to a great extent 

 escaped the devastation of the English wars, architecture had entered 

 upon a phase of exceptional splendour, in which all the characteristics 

 of contemporary Gothic, virtuosity, exuberance and naturalism, were 



