Fig. 35 shows a very elaborate and graceful initial Y, from another manuscript of the same date, decorated by a vine-plant from which a youth is gathering grapes, while a monkey, sitting in the branches, is eating some of the fruit. The whole design is a masterpiece of decorative beauty, elaborately worked out in gold and colours. _Mural paintings._ The fine _mural paintings_ of this date are frequently identical in style and design with pages from illuminated manuscripts. This is most remarkably the case with the late twelfth century paintings on the walls and vault of the church of St Michael at Hildesheim; in which the figures, the conventional foliage and the general arrangement of the whole have evidently been copied from manuscript illuminations[165]. _Vault of St Michael's._ Fig. 36 shows a striking example of this, painted about 1186 on the vault of Saint Michael's. The whole treatment of this grandly decorative painting is precisely like that of the page of an illuminated book. [Illustration: Fig. 35. Initial Y from a German manuscript of the beginning of the thirteenth century, with a most graceful and fanciful combination of figures and foliage.] _The Fall of Man._ In the centre is the Fall of Man in a medallion frame with a conventionally treated tree on each side; all round are smaller paintings, including the great Rivers of Paradise and the Jordan, two Evangelists and their Symbols, with a series of medallion busts of Old Testament Saints linked together by scroll-work of foliage exactly like that in illuminations of contemporary date. [Illustration: Fig. 36. Paintings on the vault of the church of St Michael at Hildesheim, closely resembling in style an illuminated page in a manuscript.] The German manuscripts of the thirteenth and fourteenth century are less purely national in style. The finest illuminations of this date show in some cases a marked French influence, and, especially during the fourteenth century, a strong Italian influence was prevalent. _MS. of the XIVth century._ Fig. 37 gives a good example of this from a manuscript _Passionale_, written in 1312 for the Abbess of the Convent of St George at Prague. The figures in this manuscript resemble those in some of the Florentine illuminated manuscripts of Dante's _Divina Commedia_, executed about 1360 to 1390. The subject of the miniatures shown in fig. 37 is a romantic story of a bride who was carried off by brigands and flung into a blazing furnace, from which, by the aid of the B. V. Mary, she was rescued unhurt by the knight, her husband. _School of the Van Eycks._ In the fifteenth century an important development of Teutonic art took place under the Van Eycks and their pupils. In Flanders, especially in Bruges, Antwerp and Ghent, a very elaborate and beautiful class of illumination was produced, in some respects different in style from the Franco-Flemish school of art. _School of Memlinc._