t well decline with the fortunes of a town, for
they were a heavy article of commerce at the time when Louis XI
attacked Arras. Trade was made across the Channel, whence came the
best wool for their manufacture; they were bought by the French
monarchs and nobility; many drifted to Genoa and Italy, to be sold by
the active merchants of the times to whoever could buy. When,
therefore, Arras was crushed, her able workmen flew to other centres
of production, principally in Flanders, notably to Bruges and
Brussels, and helped to bring these places into their high position.

[Illustration: VERDURE

French Gothic Tapestry]

[Illustration: "ECCE HOMO"

Brussels Tapestry, about 1520. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York]

Stories of kings and their magnificence breathe ever of romance, but
kings could not be magnificent were it not for the labour of the
conscientious common people, those who go daily to their task, asking
nothing better than to live their little span in humble endeavour. The
weavers, the tapissiers of that far-away time in Flanders are
intensely appealing now when their beautiful work hangs before us
to-day. They send us a friendly message down through the centuries. It
is this makes us inquire a bit into the conditions of their lives, and
so we find them scattered through the country north of France working
with single-hearted devotion toward the perfection of their art. That
they arrived there, we know by such tapestries as are left us of their
time.

Bruges was the home of a movement in art similar to that occurring in
Italy. Old traditions of painting were being thrown aside--the
revolution even attacking the painter's medium, tempera, which was
criticised, discarded and replaced by oil on the palettes. Memling,
the brothers Van Eyck, were painting things as they saw them, not as
rules prescribed. Bernard Van Orley was at work with bold originality.

It were strange if this Northern school of painters had not influenced
all art near by. It is to these men that Brussels owes the beauty of
her tapestries in that apogee of Gothic art which immediately preceded
the introduction of the Renaissance from Italy.

Cartoons or drawings for tapestries took on the rules of composition
of these talented and original men. Easily distinguishable is the
strong influence of the religious feeling, the fidelity to standards
of the church. When a rich townsman wished to express his praise or
gratitu