in grand procession, scattering these brilliantly colored prints among the populace. Stuck up on the low walls of his dwelling, they not only recalled his pious deeds, they brought home before his eyes in daily sight the reality of that holy living and holy dying of the Saviour and his martyrs in whose intercession and prayer his hope of salvation lay. Throughout the fifteenth and a part of the sixteenth centuries, although the intellectual life of the higher classes began to be secularized, among the common people these mediæval sentiments and customs, which gave rise to the holy prints, continued without change until the Reformation; and so the workshops of the monks and of the guilds of Augsburg, Nuremberg, Ulm, Cologne, and the Flemish cities, kept on issuing these saints' images, as they were called, long after the art had produced refined and noble works. They remained, in accordance with the true mediæval spirit, not only without the name of the craftsman, nomen vero auctoris humilitate siletur, but unmarked by any individuality, impersonal as well as anonymous; there is little to show even the difference in the time and place of their production, except that their lines in the first half of the century were more round and flowing, while in the latter half they were angular, after the manner of the Van Eycks, and that they vary in the choice and brilliancy of their colors.[1]
At the very beginning, too, wood-engraving was applied
- ↑ Four schools of coloring are reckoned: the Suabian School (Augsburg and Ulm), marked by bright colors; the Franconian (Nuremberg and Nördlingen), marked by less lively colors; the Bavarian (Friesing, Tegernsee, Kaisersheim), marked by use of pure carmine and ochre; the Lower Rhine (Cologne, and towns of Burgundy), marked by pure colors in pale tints. See Willshire, vol. i., p. 175 et seq.
