The emancipation from the Byzantine system is not the work of Cimabue and Giotto, or of an individual at all, but an effort of almost all the artists of Western Europe at the close of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century. The portrait of John II. (1310-64) in the Exhibition, which was painted about 1359, of course _in tempera_ on a gold ground, by Girard of Orleans, is of a marvellous realism, unchecked by the slightest restraint of any studied rule. The head in profile, turned towards the left, of the melancholy-looking man in the ’fifties with the long, well-formed nose, the scanty moustache and beard, and the long hair, gleams with warm life. Girard copied his model modestly and truly, without troubling himself about a golden profit, and he could put soul into the portrait of his king in the measure in which he himself felt the latter’s inward life. The awakening of a feeling for nature in art is generally ascribed to the Flemings, particularly to the brothers Van Eyck. That, too, is arbitrary, as a glance at the works of the old Frenchmen, who flourished contemporaneously with the Van Eycks, or even before them, teaches us. The feeling for nature was always active in the few with bright eyes and joyous consciousness of life, who dedicated themselves to art from inner impulse. The themes to which the plastic arts had for many centuries to restrict themselves were certainly as unfavourable as possible to a healthy naturalism. The only subjects the painter dared to treat were illustrations of the Old and New Testament, legends of the saints, and the symbols of faith. Scenes of heaven and hell, Biblical miracles, and personification of the dogmas of the Church could assuredly no more be painted from the model than the Holy Ghost, or transubstantiation. And yet nature herself came to her rights in this fundamental representation of the supernatural and what lay outside of nature, for she does not allow herself now to be driven out, even by the violent methods of the pitch-fork spoken of by Horace in a famous verse. Without taking particular thought about it, or with a cunning conscious of its purpose, the artists fashioned their works most foreign to actual life out of elements of reality, and achieved them by nature, truth, and life. For this reason even the earliest miniatures of the manuscripts become a trustworthy source for the history of manners. Because the art-workers of limited capacity, who wrought servilely according to the tradition of their gild, reproduced accurately all the accessories—clothes, weapons, furniture, buildings, and scenery—as they actually saw them.