=Italian Culture.=--It produced a new era of intellectual activity and fostered a new refinement of taste and social conditions. Its earliest results are typified in the career of Francis I. No French king before his time had received so liberal an education. Under the enlightened care of his mother, Louise of Savoy, he was early trained in Latin, Italian, and Spanish, sharing the studies with his gifted sister, Margaret, afterward Queen of Navarre, a patroness of literature and herself the author of the “Heptameron,” a collection of stories, supposed to extend over seven days in the telling and modelled on the style of Boccaccio’s “Decameron.” Francis also played the rôle of patron, surrounding himself with men of letters and artists; but while he encouraged the visits of Italian artists he was no less eager to encourage native talent. His patronage of Clement Marot, the first great poet of the French Renaissance, is a case in point and, corresponding with this _amour propre_ regarding native talent notwithstanding his love for things Italian, was his employment of French architects, the services of foreign artists being used chiefly in the way of sculptural and painted decorations. By the middle of the fifteenth century the great era of church building had been exhausted. The needs of the population for places of worship were fully satisfied; the profession of architect passed from the clerics to laymen, who, so far as ecclesiastical work was concerned, were busy embellishing existing churches with altar-furnishings, screens, pulpits, fonts, tombs, and so forth, in which the novel skill of the Italian craftsman was freely used. =School of Tours.=--Thus, in consequence of Italian influence, a new school of French sculpture grew up, which centered in Tours, a city at this period specially favoured by the kings of France. The genius of this “School of Tours” was Michel Colombe, whose art represented a blend of Italian refinement and Gothic vigour; and it was precisely this mingled quality that characterised the architecture of the Early French Renaissance. It, too, was centered in Tours, and blossomed forth throughout the Province of Touraine. For it was a distinction of the French Court life of the period that it avoided cramped conditions of city environment and spread itself luxuriantly in the pleasures of country life. Accordingly, the architectural memorials of the Early French Renaissance are mainly the royal and noble châteaux that stud Touraine, especially along the banks of the rivers Loire and Cher.