expressed a desire for familiarity with the saints and with the human drama and tragedy of the Christian story that was unprecedented in the Middle Ages. Religious sensibility was now conditioned by the cult of the Virgin, by the collections of saints' lives in the Golden Legend, by mystery or miracle plays, and by an art of domestic realism that was both a symptom and a cause of changes in outlook. The highly realistic panelpainting and illumination of these northern artists perfectly expressed the sentiments of their noble and bourgeois patrons. Representational realism and religious symbolism merged, and the theory that naturalism in art betrayed a lack of interest in religion is untenable. Art of this quality reinforced and illustrated doctrinal truths and stimulated devotional practices. We may with some confidence reject Huizinga's idea that familiarity with the sacred led inevitably to its profanation.

In France the exile of the dauphin Charles and his court to Bourges in 1418 meant that the arts were henceforth to be concentrated in the Loire valley. Jean Fouquet was the greatest of a group of painters who were working for the Valois court at the town of Tours by 1450. Fouquet also gave his patrons what they wanted. And for some of them this was clearly something newer and less traditional than that provided by the workshops of Paris or Rouen. The first evidence of Italian, or Italianate, influence upon northern European painting during this period is in the work of Fouquet. His patrons were primarily royal financial officers such as U +00C9tienne Chevalier, Simon de Varye, or Laurent Girard, or legal civil servants such as Guillaume Jouvenel des Ursins. Perhaps these relatively 'new' men, recently ennobled for their services to the Valois crown, were expressing their arriviste nature by preferring Fouquet's gilded, quasi-Italian products to the more conventional styles of his contemporaries. Whatever the case, Italianate decorative motifs are not found in other northern painting, certainly not in the Burgundian Netherlands, until a much later date. Even in France it was Charles VIII's Italian campaigns after 1494 which introduced the styles of the later Renaissance to French patrons. German painting during the period also owed little to developments across the Alps. At Cologne a vigorous school of

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