succeed very well.

At last, during the first half of the fifteenth century, the problem
was solved in the southern Netherlands by Jan and Hubert van Eyck. The
famous Flemish brothers mixed their paint with specially prepared oils
and this allowed them to use wood and canvas or stone or anything else
as a background for their pictures.

But by this time the religious ardour of the early Middle Ages was a
thing of the past. The rich burghers of the cities were succeeding the
bishops as patrons of the arts. And as art invariably follows the full
dinner-pail, the artists now began to work for these worldly employers
and painted pictures for kings, for grand-dukes and for rich bankers.
Within a very short time, the new method of painting with oil spread
through Europe and in every country there developed a school of special
painting which showed the characteristic tastes of the people for whom
these portraits and landscapes were made.

In Spain, for example, Velasquez painted court-dwarfs and the weavers
of the royal tapestry-factories, and all sorts of persons and subjects
connected with the king and his court. But in Holland, Rembrandt and
Frans Hals and Vermeer painted the barnyard of the merchant's house,
and they painted his rather dowdy wife and his healthy but bumptious
children and the ships which had brought him his wealth. In Italy on
the other hand, where the Pope remained the largest patron of the arts,
Michelangelo and Correggio continued to paint Madonnas and Saints, while
in England, where the aristocracy was very rich and powerful and in
France where the kings had become uppermost in the state, the artists
painted distinguished gentlemen who were members of the government, and
very lovely ladies who were friends of His Majesty.

The great change in painting, which came about with the neglect of the
old church and the rise of a new class in society, was reflected in all
other forms of art. The invention of printing had made it possible for
authors to win fame and reputation by writing books for the multitudes.
In this way arose the profession of the novelist and the illustrator.
But the people who had money enough to buy the new books were not the
sort who liked to sit at home of nights, looking at the ceiling or just
sitting. They wanted to be amused. The few minstrels of the Middle Ages
were not sufficient to cover the demand for entertainment. For the first
time since the early Greek city-states of two