A Lecture on Stained Glass

BY PROFESSOR R. ANNING BELL R.A., R.W.S.
Published at The Royal College of Art Students’ Common Room, South Kensington, S.W.7; and printed by George W. Jones at The Sign of The Dolphin in Gough Square, Fleet Street, London. Copyright. All Rights Reserved.
A LECTURE ON STAINED GLASS, DELIVERED IN THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF ART STUDENTS’ COMMON ROOM, BY PROFESSOR R. ANNING BELL, R.A., R.W.S., ON TUESDAY, 31ST JANUARY, 1922.
My subject of Stained Glass is a very wide, vague, large sort of subject, and of course it is quite impossible to talk about it in any thorough way in the course of an evening. You want to write books about it. I thought it would be interesting to you, perhaps, to talk about the more recent variations and changes, the evolution in the use of glass. The fact that this modification in Stained Glass is very largely the work of artists trained in this College should interest you particularly.
Stained Glass, commonly so-called—it is a misnomer, for it is really coloured and painted glass—is one of the three great Christian decorative arts: Mosaic, Stained Glass, Fresco. They are in sequence, roughly speaking, but they overlap. First, Mosaic in the earlier ten centuries. It began about the 4th century and went on to the Renaissance, when its character changed. You then get Stained Glass, overlapping it about the 12th century; and the third great Christian art is Fresco Painting, which flourished from the 14th century onward, following a long and slow development from a very early period.
These three seem to be the main arts through which the expression of the Christian religious scheme, its story, and its emotion have been conveyed—Sculpture has found expression in all religions. They have a considerable sympathy in the fact that they all demand plain surfaces, flat or curved, and are all closely associated with architecture. Each of them also has been so important, so dominating, that it has affected the architectural treatment of the buildings which it was designed to adorn.