In the Low Countries, perhaps more than in any other part of Europe, has the many-sided life of the people revealed itself through the various forms of artistic expression. Religion, industry, struggles for independence, the power of the guilds, the splendour of the dukes of Burgundy, the landscape, the homes, the people themselves, all are found in Belgian art. They were pictured in the delicate tracery of cloistered illuminators, carved in wood or stone in the old churches, enshrined within the wooden panels of ancient triptychs, and woven into the storied tapestries of hall and castle. They figured in the canvases of the Renaissance masters, and after the "Dark Ages" of the Spanish oppression, were revived in a new race of modern painters, who depicted the life of the young nation. The true greatness, the real charm of Belgium has lain in her art. Obviously, the two great periods of Belgian art were the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries, but it by no means follows that no other periods are worthy of our consideration; indeed, we cannot understand the school of the van Eycks without studying the three centuries preceding the fifteenth. Before the days of Hubert van Eyck there were at Bruges masters of whom he learned, and whose style can hardly be distinguished from his own. A hundred years earlier than the van Eycks was the great age of architecture, when cathedrals and mighty cloth-halls rose on Flemish plains, and sculpture, stained glass and wrought iron were all called for to decorate the wonderful structures. Still earlier, many a patient monk in his cell traced with loving care those illuminations that made the beauty of missal and breviary. The van Eycks and Memling were the lineal descendants of these artists. Toward the fourteenth century, the exquisite vignettes of the illuminators displayed marvelous grace and delicacy of execution, cleverness of design, and great brilliancy of colour. To quote from a French writer, "In the hands of the miniature painters of Bruges, gold glistens, it sparkles. Their colours, if they are not more beautiful, are as beautiful as those of nature. Their flesh tints vie with the freshness of colour of young girls, just as in their arabesques and in their frames we think we see currants and strawberries ripening and breathe the perfume of flowers." At this time, painters and illuminators were in some sense rivals. They were enrolled in separate guilds at Bruges. "The Guild of St. Luke included painters, saddlers, glass-makers and mirror-makers; that of St. John illuminators, calligraphers, binders and image-painters." Painters were allowed to use oil-colours, but illuminators were limited to water-colours. It became the aim of the former to transfer to their canvases and their wooden panels the same vividness of colouring that the latter produced upon vellum. Doubtless many artists were at work at this problem, which was finally solved by Hubert van Eyck.