JOACHIM DU BELLAY.
In the middle of the sixteenth century, when the spirit of the Renaissance was everywhere and people had begun to look back with distaste on the works of the middle age, the old Gothic manner had still one chance more in borrowing something from the rival which was about to supplant it. In this way there was produced, chiefly in France, a new and peculiar phase of taste with qualities and a charm of its own, blending the somewhat attenuated grace of Italian ornament with the general outlines of Northern design. It produced Château Gaillon—as you may still see it in the delicate engravings of Israel Silvestre, a Gothic donjon veiled faintly by a surface of delicate Italian traceries—Chenonceaux, Blois, Chambord and the church of Brou. In painting there came from Italy workmen like Maître Roux and the masters of the school of Fontainebleau, to have their later Italian voluptuousness attempered by the naïve and silvery qualities of the native style; and it was characteristic of these painters that they were most successful in painting on glass, that
