Throughout the Loire region an astounding number of monuments rose during the last half of the XV century and the early part of the XVI. Tours was the foyer for a school of sculpture that spread to Le Mans, Angers, Nantes, Poitiers, and Bourges. From 1480 to 1512 the school of the Region-of-the-Loire, as M. Paul Vitry calls it, was at its prime. It culminated in the ducal tomb at Nantes and the entombments at Solesmes. Dijon, the leader of the first half of the XV century, benefited Tours by its realism, and the Italian artists, gathered here in the dawn of the foreign Renaissance in France, contributed certain qualities. But the art of Michel Colombo is predominatingly of the Middle Ages, and a product of Touraine, a measured, contained, and charming art, _de pur esprit français_. Colombe simplified the draperies of the Franco-Flamand school and eschewed the Dijon roughness. His grace is never petty, however, nor his idealism conventional. As the XVI century opened he made, in his Tours studio, the statues for the ducal tomb at Nantes. In 1509 his nephew, Guillaume Regnault, sculptured the recumbent images of the children of Anne of Brittany and Charles VIII for the sarcophagus, now in the cathedral of Tours, the base of which was covered with arabesques by Jerome of Fiesole. Colombo's contemporary, Jehan Fouquet, a son of Tours, delighted in painting the regional types. He decorated the walls of Notre-Dame-la-Riche, but his work is lost, though some of the dazzling Renaissance windows of that late-Gothic church of Tours have survived. A certain Jean Clouet emigrated from Brussels to Tours in those days, and his son and grandson, born by the Loire, are two of the French _primitifs_ whose work the traveler does not care to miss in any gallery that can boast their Holbein-like canvases. During the Revolution, plans were afoot to destroy the cathedral of Tours, but two artists of the city (so loyal through centuries to art interests) risked their lives to save their noble Gothic church. THE CATHEDRAL OF LYONS.[158] What Christian does not approach with veneration this city that was in France the cradle of the true religion, and where amid persecutions and tortures rose for the first time the Cross of Christ? Who does not tread with veneration the soil impregnated with the blood of so many martyrs and forever consecrated by the glories of a see that justly claims the title Primate of Gaul?--CHARLES DE MONTALEMBERT, visiting Lyons in 1831.