The Renaissance was too strong a movement not to carry everything before it; but it must not be imagined that it met with no opposition. There were people in high places who clung obstinately to the old order of things and resented innovations. Gothic art was still supreme under the short rule of Mary of Burgundy; but her daughter Margaret of Austria, Regent of the Netherlands, had to face the new ideas, and found it hard to reconcile herself with them, notwithstanding her encouragement of the arts as a whole. She kept a brilliant court, and she and her husband, Philibert of Savoy, warmly encouraged genius and talent. She gathered around her more than one hundred and fifty painters, sculptors, architects and decorators in all branches of art. On the death of her husband she was inconsolable; and planned a splendid church in which his and her remains should finally rest side by side. In 1505, she intrusted the planning of the work to Jean Perréal. In an early letter, he writes to her that he is delighted to undertake the work, and will take advantage of all he has observed regarding convents in Italy, where the most beautiful in all the world are to be found. In another letter, in 1509, we read: “_Jy me suis mis après tant pour mon devoir envers nostre Majesté que pour l’amour que je vous doy, et ay revyré mes pour-traictures, au moins des choses antiques que j’ay eues ès parties d’Italie, pour faire de toutes belles fleurs ung trossé bouquet, dont j’ai monstré le jet au dict Le Maire_.”