Nicolas Froment’s famous “Burning Thornbush” from Aix Cathedral (1475-6) is entirely fabulous in the middle. A soft, cloud-like, lumpy hill of rock supports a dense group of thick-stemmed trees, the tops of which unite in a kind of gigantic bird’s nest, wherein the Virgin and Child sit enthroned. But this miracle, with no measure of reality to gauge it, is framed in a deep landscape with great distances; in which white towns lie by mirroring waters, and thickly-leaved trees rise up from green hills to the bright sky, and in the foreground, beside an angel of Annunciation, sits, surrounded by his drove of wethers and his quaintly posed dog, the white-bearded shepherd with his legs crossed in the most natural posture you could conceive. In the case of almost all the paintings in the Exhibition, and chiefly of the best of them, this proposition can be repeated. The painter loyally carries out the subject commissioned, treating it faithfully according to the traditional formula; but what is not covered by the formula he shapes with sovereign freedom and an honest joyous realism which is by no means the prerogative of the Dutch and Germans, as has been so long believed, but is to be met with, according to the evidence of this Exhibition, in the same measure in the French. Sculpture might become crude in the earlier Middle Ages, but it did not cease to be fostered. Sculpture in stone or wood was the complement of building, that strongest expression of mediæval energy, ivory-carving, or the jewel of precious metal, the adornment of the altar or the state-rooms in the palace. Painting, on the other hand, after the collapse of the old world, went back to the adornment of books, and from this the great art of wall- and easel-painting was again developed only after the age of the Crusades. This, in many details, betrays its origin from miniature. For a long time it was nothing but an enlarged miniature. The works in the Exhibition show, at any rate up to the last third of the fifteenth century, all the features that distinguish the pictorial ornamentation of the manuscripts: the gold ground, the neat, nay, painful perfection, the gay, unqualified, almost glaring, colours, the equal clearness of objects in the furthest background and in the foreground, the puerile joy in innumerably repeated complicated decorations of the surface, the framing, with richly figured wreaths, ornamental borders, or picture margins. Even the standing formulæ of manuscript miniatures are repeated for centuries in the paintings, viz., the movements of all the personages at the Annunciation, Crucifixion, Entombment, and Ascension. Only towards the end of the fifteenth century does painting fully escape from the still clinging egg-shell of the miniature, and grow accustomed to a large, bold line, and a freedom of composition which finally reckons with considerations of distance, and prevails upon itself to neglect comparatively the subsidiary in favour of the essential.