=The Avoidance of Classic or Stereotyped Styles.=--Something of the forcefulness of the originality of Copenhagen may be gathered from a brief hypothetical survey of what divergent paths design might have taken even at that critical moment when it was determined to employ the underglaze colours for decorative landscape subjects. The conventional panel might have been still employed, and with it the formal scenes of gardens with cavaliers and ladies, bringing the Chinese landscape subject into Western perspective, and at the same time eschewing the vivid colours of Sèvres or Meissen. Or underglaze painting, in blue and the other _grand-feu_ colours, might have found itself in panels supplemented by overglaze enamel colours of bright tone, in floral decoration, or _œil-de-perdrix_ and other luscious patterns, and richly gilded. It might, not unnaturally, have appeared to be a safer beginning to develop the Danish conventional pattern into something more intricate in design, with geometrical borders and formal floral painting or with old Scandinavian interlaced designs of Runic character, exhibiting the newer advance of underglaze treatment. Copenhagen, with wise rejection, took none of these courses, and the Renaissance leapt into being not only with new applications of underglaze painting, but with a complete and rapidly perfected theory wherein the subject became a ceramic poem. Throwing all convention to the winds, it brought tone to underglaze painting, and within the limits of the potter's technique, the same relative atmospheric quality to the decorated vase or placque as there is on the canvas of the painter. The porcelain found itself in an incredibly short time, and rapidly passed through its initial stages. The first light had come from the East. The influx into Europe of some of the finest art work of Japan had a marked effect on design.