osture; at
other times windows were given by guilds, and it is very odd to see
craftsmen of various sorts at work in a cathedral window: such pictures
exist at Chartres, Bourges, Amiens, and other places.

[Illustration: FIG. 25.--THE ANNUNCIATION. _From the Mariale of Archbishop
Arnestus of Prague._]

About A.D. 1300 it began to be the custom to represent architectural
effects upon colored windows. Our cut is from a window at Konigsfelden,
and will show exactly what I mean (Fig. 26).

This style of decoration was not as effective as the earlier ones had
been, and, indeed, from about this time glass-painting became less
satisfactory than before, from the fact that it had more resemblance to
panel-painting, and so lost a part of the individuality which had belonged
to it.

[Illustration: FIG. 26.--PAINTED WINDOW AT KONIGSFELDEN.]

Wall-paintings were rare in the Gothic period, for its architecture left
no good spaces where the pictures could be placed, and so the interior
painting of the churches was almost entirely confined to borders and
decorative patterns scattered here and there and used with great effect.
In Germany and England wall-painting was more used for the decoration of
castles, halls, chambers, and chapels; but as a whole mural painting was
of little importance at this time in comparison with its earlier days.

About A.D. 1350 panel pictures began to be more numerous, and from this
time there are vague accounts of schools of painting at Prague and
Cologne, and a few remnants exist which prove that such works were
executed in France and Flanders; but I shall pass over what is often
called the Transitional Period, by which we mean the time in which new
influences were beginning to act, and hereafter I will tell our story by
giving accounts of the lives of separate painters; for from about the
middle of the thirteenth century it is possible to trace the history of
painting through the study of individual artists.

[Illustration: FIG. 27.--PORTRAIT OF CIMABUE.]

GIOVANNI CIMABUE, the first painter of whom I shall tell you, was born in
Florence in 1240. He is sometimes called the "Father of Modern Painting,"
because he was the first who restored that art to any degree of the
beauty to which it had attained before the Dark Ages. The Cimabui were a
noble family, and Giovanni was allowed to follow his own taste, and became
a painter; he was also skilled in mosaic work, and during the last years
of his life