to his potter's wheel and to his kiln. If a filigree coronet was
wanted, he took up his tools for metal and jewelry work.

Redgrave lays down an excellent maxim for general guidance to designers
in arts other than legitimate picture making. He says: "The picture
must be independent of the material, the thought alone should govern
it; whereas in decoration the material must be one of the suggestors
of the thought, its use must govern the design." This shows the
difference between decoration and pictorial art.

One hears a great deal of the "conventional" in modern art talk. Just
what this means, few people who have the word in their vocabularies
really know. As Professor Moore defined it once, it does not apply
to an arbitrary theoretical system at all, but is instinctive. It
means obedience to the limits under which the artist works. The
really greatest art craftsmen of all have been those who have
recognized the limitations of the material which they employed. Some
of the cleverest have been beguiled by the fascination of overcoming
obstacles, into trying to make iron do the things appropriate only
to wood, or to force cast bronze into the similitude of a picture,
or to discount all the credit due to a fine piece of embroidery by
trying to make it appear like a painting. But these are the exotics;
they are the craftsmen who have been led astray by a false impulse,
who respect difficulty more than appropriateness, war rather than
peace! No elaborate and tortured piece of Cellini's work can compare
with the dignified glory of the Pala d'Oro; Ghiberti's gates in
Florence, though a marvellous _tour de force_, are not so satisfying
as the great corona candelabrum of Hildesheim. As a rule, we shall
find that mediæval craftsmen were better artists than those of the
Renaissance, for with facility in the use of material, comes always