The wood-engravers of France produced no great works like those of Maximilian, and no single cuts of the artistic value of those by Dürer and his contemporaries. They limited themselves almost exclusively to the illustration of books. The early printers, who had expended so much care in the adornment of their religious books, were succeeded by other printers who were hardly less animated by enthusiastic devotion to their art, as was shown by their efforts to make their works beautiful both in text and illustration. The Renaissance had now penetrated into France, and entered into the arts. Geoffrey Tory (c. 1480-1533), who had travelled in Italy, appears to have been the first to introduce a classical spirit into wood-engraving; from his time two distinct schools may be distinguished in French wood-engraving--one Germanic and archaic, the other filled by the Italian spirit. The most distinguished engravers belonged to the latter school, and their work was characterized by the curiously modified Italian taste which marked the French Renaissance. They understood design, and showed considerable power in it; they regarded the main lines and principal harmonies and contrasts of masses which are necessary to it; but they transformed its simplicity into elegance, and overlaid it with ornamentation and trifling detail which marred its effect, and gave to their works an appearance of artificiality, of over-labored refinement and mistaken scrupulousness of taste. As a rule, indeed, taste was their characteristic rather than a developed sense of beauty, and skill rather than power. Finally, they passed, by a natural progress, into a complexity and fineness of line which are unsuitable to wood-engraving; they lost the sense of unity in the abundance of detail, and were forced to give up engraving in wood and adopt engraving on copperplate, which was so much better fitted to the meaningless excess of delicacy and accumulation of ornament in which the French Renaissance ended.