y work is
inseparable from their greatest pleasure."

A mediaeval artist was usually a craftsman as well. He was not content
with furnishing designs alone, and then handing them over to men
whose hands were trained to their execution, but he took his own
designs and carried them out. Thus, the designer adapted his drawing
to the demands of his material and the craftsman was necessarily in
sympathy with the design since it was his own. The result was a harmony
of intention and execution which is often lacking when two men of
differing tastes produce one object. Luebke sums up the talents of
a mediaeval artist as follows: "A painter could produce panels with
coats of arms for the military men of noble birth, and devotional
panels with an image of a saint or a conventionalized scene from
Scripture for that noble's wife. With the same brush and on a larger
panel he could produce a larger sacred picture for the convent
round the corner, and with finer pencil and more delicate touch
he could paint the vellum leaves of a missal;" and so on. If an
artistic earthenware platter was to be made, the painter turned
to his potter's wheel and to his kiln. If a filigree coronet was
wanted, he took up his tools for metal and jewelry work.

Redgrave lays down an excellent maxim for general guidance to designers
in arts other than legitimate picture making. He says: "The picture
must be independent of the material, the thought alone should govern
it; whereas in decoration the material must be one of the suggestors
of the thought, its use must govern the design." This shows the
difference between decoration and pictorial art.

One hears a great deal of the "conventional" in modern art talk. Just
what this means, few people who have the word in their vocabularies
really know. As Professor Moore defined it once, it does not apply
to an arbitrary theoretical system at all, but is instinctive. It
means obedience to the limits under which the artist works. The
really greatest art craftsmen of all have been those who have
recognized the limitations of the material which they employed. Some
of the cleverest have been beguiled by the fascination of overcoming
obstacles, into trying to make iron do the things appropriate only
to wood, or to force cast bronze into the similitude of a picture,
or to discount all the credit due to a fine piece of embroidery by
trying to make it appear like a painting. But these are the exotics;
they are the crafts