Medieval French Miniatures
1960 / English / PDF
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Painting almost disappeared in early medieval France under the feudal anarchy brought by the collapse of the Carohngian dynasty. It was reborn under the Capetians, with the aid of contributions from the rest of Europe : the energetic art of Anglo-Saxon England, the half-Byzantine art of the empire of the Ottos, the classical memories of Mediterranean lands. In the Gothic period, France swept to first rank with the creation of a new, original, and integrated art in the thirteenth century—one of humanity's truly majestic accomplishments. Paris became Europe's leading intellectual and artistic center and, from then on, provided European manuscript illumination with its major driving force. Even with the waning of manuscript illumination as a major art form, the pictorial tradition developed in those early centuries left Paris, at the fifteenth century's end, one of the great centers where the art of modern times was formed.
