In France and Germany. 345 narrow piers ; but trie decline of mural painting was in a great measure atoned for by the growth of the art of glass-staining, which was carried to perfection in the Gothic period : the finest painted windows of France and Germany — such, for example, as those of the cathedrals of Bourges, Chartres, Eheims, and the Sainte Chapelle of Paris, in France, and those of the cathedrals of Strasburg, Cologne, and Ratisbon, in Germany — are all the work of the best Gothic period, and essentially integral parts of the buildings to which they belong. The miniature painting of the Gothic period in the north of Europe consisted principally of illustrations of the ballads of the troubadours ; and the first evidence of what can be strictly called a school of German painting is in the "Parcival" of Wolfram von Eschenbach, a poet of the thirteenth century, who speaks of the painters of Cologne and Maestricht in highly commendatory terms. The earliest school of art in Germany is that of Bohemia, which, under the patronage of the Emperor Charles IV., flourished for a short time only at Karlstein, near Prague, in the fourteenth century. Its principal artists were Theo- dorich of Prague, Nicolaus Wurmser, and Kunz, who were employed to decorate the walls of the castle and church of Karlstein. The Italian Tommaso da Modena also worked at Karlstein for Charles IV. The school of Nuremberg also attained to a high position in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Our illustration (Fig. 125) is the centre-piece of an altar-piece by one of its unknown masters. It was probably executed about 1420, although it is usually assigned to the close of the four- teenth century. In the Berlin Museum are four wings of an altar-piece of the Virgin and Saints, which are said to
