It originated nothing. It was eclectic at the outset. Compared with the
slow and suave evolution of Italian art, in whose earliest dawn its
borrowed Byzantine painting served as a stimulus and suggestion to
original views of natural material rather than as a model for imitation
and modification, the painting that sprang into existence, Minerva-like,
in full armor, at Fontainebleau under Francis I, was of the essence of
artificiality. The court of France was far more splendid than, and
equally enlightened with, that of Florence. The monarch felt his title
to Mæcenasship as justified as that of the Medici. He created,
accordingly, French painting out of hand--I mean, at all events, the
French painting that stands at the beginning of the line of the present
tradition. He summoned Leonardo, Andrea del Sarto, Rossi, Primaticcio,
and founded the famous Fontainebleau school. Of necessity it was
Italianate. It had no Giotto, Masaccio, Raphael behind it. Italian was
the best art going; French appreciation was educated and keen; its
choice between evolution and adoption was inevitable. It was very much
in the position in which American appreciation finds itself to-day. Like
our own painters, the French artists of the Renaissance found themselves
familiar with masterpieces wholly beyond their power to create, and
produced by a foreign people who had enjoyed the incomparable advantage
of arriving at their artistic apogee through natural stages of growth,
beginning with impulse and culminating in expertness.

The situation had its advantages as well as its drawbacks, certainly. It
saved French painting an immense amount of fumbling, of laborious
experimentation, of crudity, of failure. But it stamped it with an
essential artificiality from which it did not fully recover for over
two hundred years, until, insensibly, it had built up its own traditions
and gradually brought about its own inherent development. In a word,
French painting had an intellectual rather than an emotional origin. Its