The book cover of the Princess Melisanda, daughter of Baldwin II., King of Jerusalem (✝1160), is preserved in the MS. Department of the British Museum; it is especially interesting as it shows the curious mixture of Byzantine, Arabian, and Western art which had been adopted by the Frankish rulers of the East, and which must have had considerable influence on French art. The upper panel is ornamented with representations of the six good actions, the principal actor being richly apparelled as a Byzantine _basileus_. These medallions are surrounded by a cord-like scroll, and the spaces are filled with struggling oriental animals, which symbolize the combat of the Virtues and Vices. On the lower leaf the medallions contain scenes from the life of King David and both panels are surrounded by a border of thoroughly oriental design. Before entering on the subject of Gothic carvings, one class of bone caskets should be mentioned which are roughly carved in imitation of the Romanesque monumental style, with rows of tall figures under round arcades. Molinier thinks they are rather archaistic than archaic, being made in Constantinople as late as the thirteenth century, from old models, and sold to contain the relics brought back from the East by the Crusaders. There are examples in the Berlin Museum, the Louvre, and the Musée Cluny; the latter contained the relics of St. Barnaby, and was the gift of Hugh, Abbot d’Estival and Bishop of Ptolemaïs in the thirteenth century. The stages of development from the Romanesque to Gothic are almost imperceptible, and it is hard to say when the lingering classical traditions received their final transformation. The same breath which awakened the life in architecture freed the sculptor from the chains of custom, and we may consider the statues on the porch at Chartres as the commencement of modern sculpture. Like the Greeks, the Gothic artists formed a type by the process of selection from individuals. The new art was at first absolutely religious and simple, but the research for grace and the ever growing naturalism, mitigated, it is true, by extreme elegance and delicacy, gradually engrossed the entire mind of the artist and ended in the exclusion of all spirituality. The ivory carvers long continued repeating the old formulæ, and it was only by the end of the thirteenth century that they commenced to copy the exquisite statues which decorated the new cathedrals in such numbers.