Heart of Europe by Ralph Adams Cram

The debt of Europe to the region we are considering is as great in the case of the so-called "minor arts" as it is elsewhere. Even the language preserves the record: Arras has given its name to the tapestries for which it was famous, linen woven in regular patterns is called diaper, or "linge d'Ypres," cambric is simply the product of Cambrai, gauntlet preserves the fame of Ghent for its gloves, while the lost city of Dinant was once so famous for its work in copper, brass, bronze, and gilded metal that during the Middle Ages all products of this kind were called dinanderie. Tapestry weaving is, or was, an art essentially Flemish; illumination, if shared with Italy and in a measure every land where there were monks and monasteries, reached peculiarly notable heights in Flanders, Brabant, and Champagne; the casting of bells and the forming of them into carillons is peculiarly the province of this region, while metal work, whether of gold and silver, or of bronze and copper and brass, was an art of distinction even from the time of Charlemagne.

It was he that was primarily responsible for the beginnings of many of these admirable arts. From his capital at Aix, where he had gathered all the art and learning he could glean from western Europe, went out the influences that persisted long beyond his day and that of his ill-fortuned dynasty. The Scandinavian tribes and the Celts of Gaul had always been craftsmen in metals, particularly bronze, and Charlemagne used them under the direction of his Roman and Byzantine artificers, developing an art that was neither one nor the other, but a new Christian mode of expression. When toward the close of the tenth century the young Princess Theophano came from the Bosporus as the bride of Otho II, she brought with her other artists, with a treasure of Byzantine craftsmanship in weaving, metals, enamels, and ivory carving; and a new impulse was given, so that, under the direction of a crescent Christianity, a local and racial art developed along many lines and extended itself through the whole region and into France, Normandy, England, and Germany as well. From Aix, Archbishop Willigis and Bishop Bernward carried into Germany the art of metal working as they had learned it, one to Mainz, the other to Hildesheim, where their works still remain. To Dinant, Huy, and Liége the same impulse was given that later extended through Brabant and Flanders. In France the beginnings seem to have been at the hands of St. Eloi at Limoges and Abbot Suger of St. Denis, but it was all within the area to which our attention is confined.