BRITAIN AND FRANCE. l6TH TO l8TH CENTURY
laurel wreaths and cupids were so disconcertingly novel that it took
even the most progressive many years to digest them, Charles Vm,
under whom the French army had first invaded Italy, died in 1498.
No work of his reign survives in France in which Italian motifs
occur.
But his successor Louis XII called Italian workmen into the
country, and he and his court entrusted them with a good deal of
decorative architectural work. The earliest existing examples are of
about 1500, and in 1507 Diirer went to Venice a second time, now
to start embellishing his pictures and engravings with Italian orna-
ment. Again only one or two years later Quentin Matsys, the leading
artist of Antwerp, introduced Southern motifs into his works. And
in 1509 Henry VII had an agreement drawn up with an Italian
sculptor, Giulio Mazzini, called Paganino, who then worked at the
French court, to carve his tomb. The job did not materialise, but in
1512 Henry VIII found another Italian, Pietro Torrigiani, a fellow-
student of Michelangelo in Florence, to design the tomb for his
father. As Torrigiani carved it, so it now stands in Henry VTTs
Chapel in Westminster Abbey (fig. 77), a stranger in the midst of
the wonders of Gothic ingenuity that surround it. No more poignant
contrast can be imagined than that between Perpendicular panels and
these medallions surrounded by wreaths, Perpendicular piers and
these daintily ornamented pilasters, Perpendicular mouldings and the
Antique mouldings of this base and this cornice, or Perpendicular
foliage and the smiling beauty of these roses and acanthus friezes.
One should however keep in mind that, when France, England,
Spain and Germany discovered the loveliness of this style and made
a fashion of it, it was already a style of the past in Italy.1 What the
architecture of 1520 was like in Rome, has been shown. Bramante,
Raphael and their followers had discarded most of that pretty orna-
ment and turned towards a grave classic ideal. For this, time was not
ripe yet—in France for some twenty years, and in Britain for nearly
a hundred. Early Renaissance was in full blossom this side of the
Alps, when on the other side art and architecture had already passed
the summit of High Renaissance. Michelangelo's Medici Chapel and
Laurenziana with their Mannerist discords are earlier than the most
exquisite piece of Italian decoration surviving in Engknd, the stalls
of King's College Chapel, Cambridge, of 1532-36 (pi. Lxxvm).
1 An example of Spanish Early Renaissance is Egas's Hospital of the Holy Cross
at Toledo, dating from 1504-14; see fig, 75.
148