highly skilled and well organized. Tapestry was ready to assimilate any relevant contribution. It enthusiastically took unto itself the sumptuous luxury of the decadent Orient with its splendid fabrics, encrusted architecture, complex patterns, and heavy glowing colors. The simple Frankish spirit of the earlier pieces (cf. No. 2) was almost submerged by the riotously extravagant opulence of the East (cf. Nos. 17, 18). On the other hand, too, from the jewelry of Scandinavia, a remote descendant of an ancient Oriental precedent, tapestry adopted examples of heavy richness of design. And at the same time it took also from the Byzantine some of the formality, the thickness of elaborate drapery, the conventionalization of types, and the rigidity of drawing that had paralyzed the art of Byzantium, but that in tapestry enhanced the architectural character and so constituted a real addition. The tendency of the late XIVth century to an absorption in an exact naturalism which might have immediately rushed French and Flemish taste into the scientific realism of the Florentine Renaissance was checked and deflected by the example and the memory of the stiff carven form, the arrested gestures, and the fixed draperies of the mosaics and manuscript illuminations of the Eastern Empire (cf. No. 8). But aside from these general considerations, which were vital for the creation of great tapestries, there was at work a specific principle perhaps even more important. The manner of treatment which the tapestry medium itself calls for was one which was native to the mind of the time and which declared itself in a great variety of forms. [Illustration: Map Showing the Principle centers of Production of Gothic and early Renaissance TAPESTRIES drawn by Arthur Upham Pope For the San Francisco Museum of Art Retrospective Loan Exhibition of Tapestries Copyright 1922 ]