With the revival of classical learning which brought about the Renaissance, and the subsequent development of secular thought, art ceased to be what it had been throughout the Middle Ages--merely the handmaid of the church. No longer did the enamelers, Byzantine, Gothic, or Lombardic, work solely to adorn religious works; and ecclesiastical design broadened into secular application, a return of classical usages to a heritage of beauty and unrestraint from which, for some centuries, art had been kept by ecclesiasticism. By the twelfth century the art was well established to Cologne, Trèves, Huy, Maestricht, and Verdun, thence traveling perhaps to Paris. Limoges and the Rhenish provinces of France became prolific in champlevé enamels by the end of the twelfth century. It is to 1189 A.D. that the earliest known enamels of Limoges are ascribed. There an enormous quantity of work, good, bad, and indifferent, was turned out during the thirteenth century, an art turning to a trade thereafter, and declining to neglect in the fourteenth, and then going out of fashion altogether. However, toward the end of the fifteenth century the public in general had broken through Byzantine, Gothic, and Lombardic esthetic domination and breathed the clearer air of the Renaissance, becoming imbued with a desire for gentler, more beautiful things; and the old town of Limoges, ever awake to the commerce of demand, again started up her enameling ovens and went at the art with renewed vigor, retaining a supremacy that has handed down to us priceless treasures of the sort, exquisite and satisfying. This fine style may be said to date from 1530 to 1580 (being preceded by the early style 1475-1530), followed by a minute style, 1580-1630 preceding the decadence that dated from 1630 to the close of the manufactory in the eighteenth century. Limoges enamels immediately bring to mind the names of such great artists in enamels as the Pénicauds, Courtoys, Limousin, Raymond, Martin Didier and Jean Court, dit Vigier, and in the decline Jean Laudin. The painted enamels of the early style are executed with much white painting over purplish-brown grounds, the figures bearing strong resemblance to the Flemish type. The coloring in these examples is very beautiful. The painted enamels of the fine style exhibit the great advance achieved by draftsmen under Italian influence. The glazes are finer and the finishing process a more careful one. At this period painting in grisaille became popular. By this term is meant monochrome painting in enamel the light being worked up over a dark [Illustration: Oval Dish by Bernard Palissy, 1510-1589] [Illustration: _Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art_ Lumières by Bernard Palissy, 1540-1590] [Illustration: Limoges Enamel Covered Cup Attributed to Pierre Raymond] [Illustration: _Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art._ Champlevé Enamel Casket, French, 13th Century]