Now, a word about the crowning grace in a decorated room - the living inmates.

The scheme of colour perfected under Louis XIV. was most ingenious and unlike any previously attained by art. In a room completely furnished and inhabited, the human figures must have provided the exact colophon or foreground which human figures should do; brilliant in dress and ornaments, alive with French vivacity of gesture. Brilliant as was the background of walls and furniture, the high polish which then became the fashion must have softened all the edges of coloured wood or dark, and broken up the plane surfaces themselves by the reflections of passing objects; thus in certain lights, the most strongly-tinted furniture must have receded and faded into an indefinite glow, like a nebulous atmosphere of colour about the main figures, themselves alone opaque. Sharp points of colour such as sunlit edges of brass mounts or gilt cupids would light up here and there the nebulous glow created, and form a background as soft and forgetful of hard lines as any Carlo Dolci picture - as any courtly, selfish life. In fact, it had the very texture of a picture, and many of these disjointed brazen mounts were but as last touches of a skilful brush, enunciating the corners and projecting parts of curves, and they differed on this side and that, as do freehand touches.

The chief difference between painting before and after the Renascence, is the practised softness of edges. Again, the broad shadows practised by Renascence painters, and the bold contrasts of light and shade, were attained by the curves in polished surfaces of furniture. It is impossible to believe that French culture should have been unconscious of such physical effects and their importance. It was all calculated elaborately, and daintily carried out; and such bewildering effects of cross-reflections and broken colour may be examined in any room with polished floor and polished furniture, plenty of mirrors and a richly coloured ceiling.7 How opposed to the hard - yes, and honest - effect in a mediaeval room before varnish was invented! an effect which is traceable in mediaeval pictures which Renascence admirers find so 'hard.'

Fig. 35. - Snuff-box, Louis Quinze ornament.

Not that the value of 'broken colour' has not been understood, and doubtless sought, in all the finest schools of art; marqueterie of every kind, and enamels, like raised or incised carving, all attain the effect of broken colour by one means or another; for unbroken colour is always bad colour. Oriental colour, even when plain, is always unequal, for the same reason - the sensitive eye demands it. But on consideration, the motive of high polish in seventeenth-century decoration (which however has never, to my knowledge, been pointed out before) will be found to be the softened and indefinite effect producible; the clearer delineation of figures in the foreground, by reflections caused by them, which throw them forward, while throwing the background in arrear. In painting a picture, these calculations always enter in; and the idea is worthy of French wit.