It would be impossible to review all the work of all the great Flemings. Driven by the same impulse, each gave his own personality to all he did, and the sequence is as astonishing as it is priceless. Gerard, David, Roger Van der Weyden, Quentin Metsys, Dierick Bouts, Lucas Cranach, as well as numberless unknown whose work survives their contemporary fame, all reached their several heights of attainment on their own individual lines, and their pictures still remain in Bruges and Ghent, in Brussels and Antwerp (or remain to-day, in August, 1915) to bear witness to the full and vigorous life, the wholesome and happy religious devotion, the astonishing physical beauty of Flemish environment of those last years of the fifteenth century in Europe when the fair day of mediævalism came to its golden close. Between this whole-souled art of the Middle Ages and that of the Renaissance came an intervening group that served to effect the necessary modulation from one key to quite another. Mabeuse, Van Orley, the younger Porbus, and the Breughels are the chief representatives and through them one sees the old and masculine qualities dying away, the new and alien elements from the south entering in to take possession. When this transition was effected it was in Holland that it found its opportunity, and as the Dutch provinces are outside our consideration we need not consider here the products of a school that ranged in quality from Rubens to Rembrandt, from Frans Hals to Vermeer of Delft. The succession was broken, the torch (with whatever flame that remained) was passed from the Flemings to the Dutch, and only Vandyck appeared in the line of true Flemish descent to demonstrate the possibilities that still remained in spite of Rubens (and at the hands of his own pupil) for the development of a restrained and self-respecting and beautiful art, even though the moving spirit had been dissolved and the great tradition become no more than a memory. The great period of mediæval painting (for it was this in spirit and in truth) had begun and ended in this Cor Cordium, this Flemish concentration of the Heart of Europe. It had begun with the monkish illuminations of the fourteenth century, culminated in the great century from 1395, when Hubert Van Eyck began to paint, to 1494, when Memling died, and [Illustration: MADONNA AND CHILD WITH ST. LUKE, VAN DER WEYDEN _From a photograph by Hanfstaengl_] slowly disappeared under the influence of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Spanish oppression; by the year 1600 it had ceased to exist, and the Renaissance, which had established itself in all secular and ecclesiastical matters, now took over art also for the purpose of developing its own exact expression. The five centuries of Catholic civilisation had come to an end. XII GOTHIC SCULPTURE