BOOK II.
CHAPTER XI.
THE DESIGN OF EARLY GLASS.
Design in glass developed itself on lines almost parallel to the progress of technique. Each, of course, affected the other—how and why it is now proposed to show.
It is not intended at present to say more than is absolutely necessary about “Style,” in the historic sense—that is reserved for a chapter by itself—but, as it is convenient to refer to a period of design by its name, it will be as well at this stage briefly to enumerate the historic “Periods.”
Glass follows, inevitably, the style of architecture of the period. Accordingly it is divided broadly into Gothic and Renaissance. Gothic, in its turn, is divided by Rickman (who first attempted to discriminate between the styles of architecture in England) into three periods. Winston, who did for English glass what Rickman did for English architecture, adopts his classification as follows:—Early Gothic—to about 1280. Decorated Gothic—to about 1380. Perpendicular Gothic—to about 1530.
Renaissance art has been classified in Italy according to the century, and in France has been named after the reigning sovereign—François Premier, Henri Deux, and so on. In England also we make use of the terms Tudor, Elizabethan, Jacobean, and the like. No one, however, has attempted to draw subtle distinctions between the periods of Renaissance glass, for the obvious reason that the best of it was done within a comparatively short period, and the rest is not of much account. It is enough, therefore, to mark off two divisions of Renaissance glass. The first (which overlaps the latest Gothic) may be called Sixteenth Century, or by the Italian name Cinque-Cento, or simply Renaissance; whilst the second, which includes seventeenth century and later work, is sufficiently described as Late glass.
The development of style in other countries was not quite parallel with its march on this side of the water. The French were always in advance of us, whether in Gothic or Renaissance; the Germans lagged behind, at all events in Gothic; but the pace is equal enough for us to group windows generally into three Gothic and two Renaissance periods—Early, Middle, and Late Gothic; Early and Late Renaissance. If we do that it will concern us less, that Early German work is more Romanesque than Gothic, that Late French work is not Perpendicular but Flamboyant, and so on.
The accepted classification is determined mainly by the character of the architectural or ornamental detail of the design. Such architectural or other detail—that of costume, for example—is of the very greatest use as a clue to the date of glass. That is a question of archæology; but it is not so much the dates that artists or workmen have to do with as with the course of craftsmanship, the development of art. It is convenient for us to mark here and there a point where art or workmanship has clearly reached a new stage; it gives us breathing time, a starting-point on some fresh voyage of discovery; but such points need be few. The less we bother ourselves by arbitrary subdivisions of style the better; and Winston himself allows that his divisions are arbitrary.
58. Poitiers.
The student need not very seriously concern himself about dates or names. People are much too anxious to get a term for everything, and when they can use the term glibly they fancy they know all about the thing. It is no doubt easier to commit to memory a few names and a few dates than to know anything about a craft; but the one accomplishment will not do in place of the other. A very little real knowledge of art or practical workmanship will lead you to suspect, what is the truth, that there is a good deal of fee-fi-fo-fum about the jargon of styles. It is handy to talk of old work as belonging to this or that broadly marked historic period; and it is well worth the while of any one interested in the course of art to master the characteristics of style. The student should master them as a matter of course; but he must not take the consideration of period for more than it is worth. Really we give far too much attention to these fashions of bygone days—fashions, it must be allowed, on a more or less colossal scale, compared to ours, but still only fashions.
It is proposed then to allude here only so far to the styles as may be necessary to explain the progress of design, and especially the design of stained glass windows.
59. Poitiers East Window. (Compare with [24].)
In dividing Gothic into Early, Middle, and Late Gothic, corresponding roughly with the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, it is not forgotten that there is an earlier Gothic of the twelfth and perhaps eleventh centuries, more or less reminiscent of the Romanesque period preceding it; but English glass begins, to all intents and purposes, with the thirteenth century, and even in France there is not a very great quantity of characteristically earlier glass. What there is differs from thirteenth century work mainly in the Romanesque character of the figure drawing and ornamental detail, in its deliberately simple composition, and in the spontaneity of its design. The glazier was still feeling his way. Any composition to be found in a Byzantine ivory-carving, enamel, illuminated manuscript, or what not, might just as well occur in glass. The more familiar types of early Gothic window design had not yet settled down into orthodoxy. The lines on which the oldest windows extant were set out are in the main those of the thirteenth century also. They were more or less suggested by the shape of the window opening, which, it will be seen, had always had a good deal to say as to the direction glass design should take.
60. Poitiers, North Transept.
The window openings in Romanesque or Norman-French churches were single lights, round or pointed arched, rather broad in proportion to their width. Stained glass, it has been explained, has to be held in its place by copper wires, soldered to the leadwork, and attached to iron bars let into the masonry for that purpose. In the case of a very narrow lancet, such bars would naturally be placed at convenient intervals across the opening. But for the most part windows were the reverse of narrow, and the horizontal bars had to be supplemented by vertical stanchions, so that the window space was divided into rectangular divisions. As a matter of construction the glass was made in panels, corresponding to these, and attached to them. It is not surprising, therefore, that these divisions should often have been accepted as part of the design, or that the design of the glass should to some extent have followed them. On [page 113] is the skeleton of the upper part of a twelfth century window. The strong black lines in the diagram show the bars, the finer ones indicate the main divisions of the design of the glass. It will be seen that the four strips into which the upright bars divide the window are not equal, but that the outer divisions are narrower than the inner, so as to accommodate themselves to the width of the border. Naturally that was determined always by the proportion of the window; such borders measured often one-sixth part, or more, of the entire width. The way in which the central circular shape in the glass breaks across in front of the border is an instance of the spontaneity and unexpectedness of design characteristic of the earliest existing work; later one series of forms would repeat themselves without interruption throughout the length of the window. When, as [above], the centre of a window is occupied by a great crucifix, or, as [below], other such irregularity occurs, it is safe to conclude that the glass, if not prior to the thirteenth century, belongs to its first years. It is characteristic of the very early date of the glass that the bars in the diagrams given do not go out of their way to follow the outline of the circles, vesicas, quatrefoils, and other shapes, but on occasion cut relentlessly across them.
The filling out of such a skeleton as those given would in many respects be much the same in the eleventh, twelfth, or thirteenth century; and in each case it would be in direct pursuance of the traditions of Early Christian design. You may see in Byzantine ivories and enamels precisely the kind of thing that was done in glass; and in the Romanesque Michaelis Kirche at Hildesheim, is a painted roof, the design of which might have been carried out, just as it is, in a giant window.
61 and 62. Border, Angers.
The main divisions of the centre part of such a window would each contain its little “subject” or glass picture; the border and the interstices between the pictures would be occupied with foliated ornament; only, the earlier the work, the more pronounced would be the Romanesque character, alike of the ornament and the figure work. The broad borders from Angers, [above], and the narrower one from Le Mans ([page 327]) differ materially from the accepted thirteenth century type ([page 117]). Witness how in the Angers glass the stalks of the foliage frame little panels in the border, and how in the Le Mans work the stalks take the form of straps, patterned with painted ornament. This elaboration of the stalks with painted zig-zag, pearlwork, and so on, is precisely the kind of thing one sees in Byzantine carving and inlay. The very early spandril from Angers, [below], if not markedly Romanesque in character is yet not of the distinctively Early Gothic type.
63. Angers.
The shape of each medallion would be emphasised by a series of coloured lines or fillets framing it. In quite early work the broader of these would be broken up into blocks of alternating colour; they would be patterned probably (which in the thirteenth century they would probably not be), and altogether the effect of the ornament would be more jewelled. One of these broken and patterned margins is shown in the vesica-shaped framing to the figure on [page 37]—belonging, by the way, to the window given in skeleton on [page 114].
The difference between twelfth and thirteenth century pictures is in the lingering of Byzantine traditions of design in the earlier work, and in the strictly simple disposition of the figures en silhouette against the background, as well as in the way the drapery is wrapped closely round them, so that the figure always explains itself. There is an expression and a “go” about some of the earliest figures for which we look in vain later in the thirteenth century. The figures of the Apostles from the Ascension at Le Mans on [page 33] are altogether more alive than the thirteenth century bishops, for example, on [page 276], who seem by comparison tame and altogether respectable. A certain exaggeration there is, no doubt, about the action of these earliest figures, a certain brutality of rendering, as there is also a certain barbaric quality in the ornament, and, indeed, in the whole effect; but of its superlative richness there is no manner of doubt. One is even led to speculate, when one compares it with later work, whether a certain barbaric character of design does not go to that unrivalled brilliancy. In the absolute glory of rich colour the very earliest glass has never been equalled. The advance of glass painting was at the cost of this, perhaps barbaric, quality.
64. EARLY ORNAMENT, SALISBURY.
In the earliest windows the subjects were not invariably enclosed in medallions; sometimes the square lines of the bars would be accepted as division enough; these would be framed with lines of colour, and the design of the portion of the window within the border would consist (as occasionally at Chartres) of a series of square subjects, each with its marginal lines, ranged one above the other. For the most part, however, the design of the earliest richly coloured windows extant took the shape of little pictures in panels or medallions. Another favourite scheme was to delineate the Tree of Jesse. The upper portion of such a window is given on [page 117]; but further consideration of Jesse windows is reserved for a separate chapter.
65. S. Remi, Reims.
From the earliest period, no doubt, clerestory or other lights were often occupied each with a separate figure standing upright; but such of these as may remain in their places are not readily distinguishable from thirteenth century work; and the undoubtedly earlier figures—such, for example, as those in S. Remi at Reims—have been re-set in framework more or less old, but so as not to tell us anything very authentic about the setting out of the original windows. Again at Augsburg, where the figures in the clerestory are said to be the oldest in Germany (to belong, in fact, to about the year 1000), the windows are bordered with modern glazing in white. At Reims we have very rudely drawn figures in rich colour against a deep background, standing with splayed feet upon little rounds or half rings of colour, representing the earth, their names inscribed in bold lettering, which forms a band of yellow behind their heads. At Augsburg the figures, equally rude in drawing, equally splay-footed, are in white and colour upon a white ground. They stand upon little hemispheres of Byzantine ornament, and their names are writ large in black letters upon the white glass around their heads. Presumably they were framed in a border of pattern work similar to that surrounding the medallion windows. The ornamental work in the windows at S. Remi may not always have formed part of the same window with the figure work—it does not go very happily with it now—but it is probably of about the same date; and it illustrates, together with some similar work at S. Denis, near Paris (so “thoroughly restored” as to have lost its historic value), a kind of pattern work peculiar to the earliest glass.
As a rule, early glass divides itself naturally into two classes: work in rich colour, which is what we have hitherto been discussing, and work in “grisaille,” as it is called; that is to say, in which the glass is chiefly white, or whitish, relieved only here and there by a line or a jewel of colour.
Occasionally, as at Auxerre, Reims, and Poitiers, rich figure work is found set in grisaille or framed by it; and in some fragments from Châlons, now at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs at Paris, coloured figures are found on a white ground.
You find also in France rich colour-work surrounded by white glass—the work of a period when the powers that were became possessed of the idea that they must lighten the interior of their churches, and accordingly removed so much of the coloured glass as seemed good to their ignorance, and replaced it with plain glazing. But, as a rule, and apart from the tinkering of the latter-day ecclesiastic, rich colour and grisaille were kept apart in early mediæval churches; that is to say, a coloured window has not enough white in it perceptibly to affect the depth and richness of its colour, nor a grisaille window enough colour to disturb the general impression of white light. At Reims and S. Denis, however, you find ornament in which white and colour are so evenly balanced that they belong to neither category. The amount of colour introduced into grisaille was never at any time a fixed quantity; one has to allow something for the predilection of the artist; but here the amount of colour makes itself so distinctly felt that the term grisaille no longer serves to express it.
The design of these patterns was of a rather mechanical type ([pages 35], [118], [120]) and not in any case very interesting; but it would have been difficult under any circumstances to produce a very satisfactory effect by so equally balancing white and colour. The designer falls between two stools. The well-known gryphon medallions at S. Denis seem at first to promise something rather amusing in design, but there is no variety in them:—and no wonder! the greater number of them prove to be new, and they have all been rearranged by Viollet le Duc. That is as much as to say, some of the gryphons are of Abbot Suger’s time, but the design of the window is Viollet le Duc’s. White and colour are again too evenly mixed in the heavy-looking English glass at Lincoln shown on [page 121], but that is of the thirteenth century.
It need hardly be said that the earlier the work, the simpler was the character of the painting, the more deliberately was pigment reserved for painting out the light, the more strictly was the shading in lines. But the painted detail was often small; glass was used in small pieces; subjects themselves were ordinarily small in scale. The largeness of effect was due first to the actual simplicity of the main lines of the design, and then to breadth of colour, a breadth of colour all the more remarkable seeing the small pieces of glass of which the broad surfaces were of necessity made up.
Of course, too, the earlier the work the more the design was influenced by the technique of glazing, the more clearly it can be seen how the glazier designed (as was explained on [page 44]) in lead lines, and only made use of paint to fill them out.
66. S. Remi, Reims.
In twelfth century glass the white was greenish and rather horny in texture; ruby was sometimes streaky, and often tawny or inclined to orange; blue varied from deep indigo to pale grey, occasionally it was of the colour of turquoise; yellow, dark or pale, was usually brassy; green ranged from bluish to pale apple, and from dull to emerald. These colours, with a rich brownish-purple, the lighter shades of which served always as flesh tint, made up the glazier’s palette. Happily there was considerable inequality of colour in the material. It deepened, for example, towards the selvage of the sheet where it was thickest; it had streaks and bubbles in it; no two batches ever came out of the pot quite alike; and altogether the rudely made pot-metal was chemically most imperfect and artistically all that glass should be.
67. Lincoln.
It would be rash in the extreme to formulate any theory as to early schemes of colour; probably the glazier’s main thought was to get somehow a deep, rich, solemn effect of colour. He secured this very often by not confusing his tints, and by allowing a single colour so to predominate that the window impressed you at once as bluish or greenish or reddish in tone. He was on the whole happiest when he kept his colour cool; but he produced also red windows which are never to be forgotten.
In the cathedral at Poitiers, where many of the beautiful medallion windows belong to the very early part of the thirteenth century, the scheme is usually to adopt a blue background, alike for the medallions and for the spaces between, relying upon a broad band of ruby, edged with white pearling, to mark the medallion shapes, which it effectively does; but these are not the most beautiful windows in the church. One recognises their date rather by the individuality and spontaneity of the design than by any distinctly Romanesque character in the detail. It should be mentioned, also, that at Poitiers, even in windows which seem not so emphatically to belong to the very beginning of the century, the early practice of using only straight upright and cross bars is adhered to. There may be something of local conservatism in that.
68. Bars in Early Medallion Windows.
CHAPTER XII.
MEDALLION WINDOWS.
In the thirteenth century the practice of the earlier glaziers stiffened into something like a tradition, and design took almost inevitably the form of (1) the Medallion window, (2) the Single Figure window, (3) Ornamental Grisaille.
The full-blown thirteenth century Medallion window differed from what had gone before in that it was more orthodox. The designer begins as before by marking off a broad border to his glass, defined on the inner side by an iron bar, and proceeds to fill the space within the border with medallion shapes. But he now adapts the medallions more regularly to the spaces between the bars. At most two alternating shapes occur throughout the length of the light, without break or interruption, such as occurs in earlier work, and as a rule they keep strictly within the lines of the border. In all the nine examples here given, taken at random from Chartres, Bourges, Canterbury, and elsewhere, only in one case does a medallion cut boldly across the border in the head of the light. The slight overlapping of the quatrefoils in one case is not really an overlapping of the border but only of the marginal lines to it, not shown in the diagram [above], but clearly enough explained on [page 132], which shows the completion of a corner of the window, less its side border. In the window with large circular medallions divided into four, there is no upright bar to define the border, faintly indicated by a dotted line.
69. Bars in Early Medallion Windows.
It will be seen from these diagrams, which illustrate at once the main divisions of the glass and the position of the ironwork, what a change came over the construction of windows in the thirteenth century. The window is no longer ruled off by upright and horizontal bars into panels into which the design is fitted; it is the bars which are made to follow the main lines of the design, and to emphasise the forms of the medallions. The rare exceptions to this rule (as at Bourges, [overleaf]) may generally be taken to betray either the beginning or the end of the period; but at Poitiers they seem to have passed through the early period without ever arriving at shaped bars. The early glazier, it was said, first blocked out his design according to his leading; here he begins with the bars. The iron framework forms, itself, in many of these windows, a quite satisfactory pattern, and one which proudly asserts itself in the finished window. The designs of the period are not of course all equally ingenious. Sometimes, in order to strengthen a circle or quatrefoil of great size, the glazier, instead of breaking up the shape ornamentally as was the rule, merely supports it by cross bars; not only that, but he accepts the awkward shapes given by them as separate picture spaces. Of this comes one of two evils: either he frames his little pictures with sufficient border lines to keep them distinct, and so draws attention to the shapes, an attention they do not deserve; or he has to accept the bars, with perhaps a fillet of colour, as sufficient frame, which they are not, and his pictures run together, to the bewilderment of whoever would decipher them.
70. Spandrils of Medallion Window, Bourges.
It is matter for regret that the French did not accept the full shape of even the largest medallion, and fill it with one bold subject; over and over again one feels that the subjects in medallion windows are not only too small to be readable, but so small that the figures are out of scale with the ornamental detail. The scale of the church has, of course, to be taken into account; but the French churches are big enough to warrant figures thrice the size of those which ordinarily occur in medallions. In our narrower “Early English” lancet windows the medallions naturally came small.
To divide a window into eccentric divisions (halves or quarters of circles, quatrefoils, and the like) and then to take these awkward shapes as separate picture frames, is an archaic method of design much in need of excuse. The more reasonable thing to do would have been to make use of such incomplete forms only in some secondary position, and as framework for ornament, or at least quite subsidiary figures.
71. The Dream of Charlemagne, Chartres.
Apart from shapes which are really only segments of medallions, the only awkward medallion shapes occurring in Early glass are those which are broader than they are high, such as occur, for example, at Soissons. These have always the uncomfortable appearance of having been crushed.
How the iron skeleton of a medallion window is filled out with leaded glass; how the border and the medallion shapes are strengthened by bands of colour; how the medallions themselves are occupied with little figure subjects, and how the interspaces are filled in with ornament, is indicated [opposite] and on [pages 132], [325].
By way of variation upon the monotony of design, the designer will sometimes reverse the order of things. At Bourges, for example, you will find the centre of a light devoted to insignificant and uninteresting ornament, whilst the figure subjects are edged out into half quatrefoils at the sides of the window; and, again, at Chartres and Le Mans you may occasionally see the pictures similarly ousted from their natural position by rather mechanical ornament. One can sympathise with an artist’s impatience with the too, too regular distribution of the stereotyped medallion window. There is undoubtedly a monotony about it which the designer is tempted to get rid of at any price; but consistency is a heavy price to pay for the slight relief afforded by the treatment just described.
This striving after strangeness results not only in very ugly picture shapes—no one would deliberately design such a shape as that which frames the picture of the Dream of Charlemagne ([overleaf])—but it produces a very uncomfortable impression of perversity. It is quite conceivable that ornament may be better worth looking at than some pictures; but a picture refuses to occupy the subordinate position; it will not do as a frame to ornament. There is no occasion to illustrate very fully the design of Early figure medallions; they are often of very great interest, historical, legendary and human, but there is little variation in the system of design. The picture is of the simplest, perhaps the baldest, kind. The figures, as before stated, are clearly defined against a strong background, usually blue or ruby; a strip or two of coloured glass represents the earth upon which they stand; a turret or a gable tells you that the scene is in a city; a foliated sprig or two indicate that it is out of doors, a forest, perhaps; a waving band of grey ornament upon the blue tells you that the blue background stands for sky, for this is a cloud upon it. The extremely ornamental form which conventional trees may assume is shown in Mr. T. M. Rooke’s sketch from a medallion at Bourges, [opposite]. In the medallions from Chartres ([page 325]) are instances of simpler and less interesting tree forms, and in the upper part of the larger of the two, a bank of conventional cloudwork. Explanatory inscriptions are sometimes introduced into the background, as in the dream of Charlemagne ([above]), or in the margin of the medallions, as in the Canterbury window on [page 132], fulfilling in either case an ornamental as well as an elucidatory function.
72. Detail from an Early Medallion.
In the Canterbury glass it will be seen the figures are more crowded than in the French work illustrated. This is not a peculiarity of English glass, but a mark of period; as a rule the clump or compact group of personages proclaims a later date than figures isolated against the background. There is no surer sign of very early work than the obvious display of the figures against the background, light against dark or dark against light. Another indication of the date of the Canterbury figures is that their draperies do not cling quite so closely about them as in figures ([page 33]) in which the Byzantine tradition is more plainly to be traced.
73. Canterbury.
There is no mistaking a medallion window, the type is fixed: within a border of foliated ornament a series of circles, quatrefoils, or other medallion shapes, for the most part occupied by figure subjects on a rather minute scale, and between these ornament again.
74. Beverley Minster.
The border might be wider or narrower, according to the proportion of the window, though a wide border was rather characteristic of quite early glass. A twelfth century border (Angers) will sometimes measure more than a quarter of the entire width of the window. The borders from Canterbury, Beverley, Auxerre, and Chartres ([overleaf]) are of the thirteenth. A border of sufficient dimensions will sometimes include medallion shapes as on [pages 115], [325], and even occasionally little subject medallions at intervals, or it may be half-circles, each containing a little figure; but such interruption of the running border is rare. In so far as it counts against monotony it is to the good.
75. Auxerre.
76. Chartres.
In narrower windows, such as more frequently occur in this country, where, as the Gothic style of architecture supplanted the Norman, lancet lights took a characteristically tall and slender shape, the border was reduced to less imposing proportions, as for example at Beverley;—there was no room for a wide frame to the medallions, nor any fear, it may be added, that these should be so large as to require breaking up into segments, as in much French glass, or at Canterbury: there the window openings, as was to be expected of a French architect, are more characteristically Norman than English in proportion. In a very narrow light in the one-time cathedral at Carcassonne the medallions break in front of a not very wide border; but then this, though a medallion window, belongs probably by date to the Second Gothic period.
77. S. Kunibert, Cologne.
Medallions themselves may be simple or fantastic in shape. They may be devoted each to a single picture, or subdivided into a series of four or five; they may be closely packed, and supported by segments of other medallions, also devoted to figure work, or they may be separated by considerable intervals of ornament. The character of that ornament takes two distinct forms.
In the examples given ([pages 132], [325]) it takes the form of foliated scrollwork, very much of a piece with the ornament in the borders, except that there is more scope for its growth. In actual detail it varies, according to its date and whereabouts, from something very much like Romanesque strapwork to the more or less trefoiled foliage typical of Early Gothic ornament, whether French or English. Further examples of the last are shown in the borders from Auxerre and Chartres ([page 328]). The one from Chartres illustrates the transition from the Romanesque; it is intermediate between the two. The borders from S. Kunibert’s, Cologne, are quite Romanesque in character, though they are of the thirteenth century; but then it has to be remembered that the Romanesque style of architecture was flourishing on the Rhine long after the Gothic style had developed itself in France and England. Many of the details from Canterbury—which, by-the-bye, are almost identical with contemporary French ornament—show a lingering influence of the pre-Gothic period, but the scroll occupying the spandril on [page 132] is pronouncedly of Early Gothic type. Of much the same character is the detail from Salisbury on [page 117], which forms no part of a medallion window, but more likely of a tree of Jesse.
It was in this ornamental kind of design that the thirteenth century glaziers were most conspicuously successful. One no longer feels here, as one does with regard to their figure work, that they mean much better than their powers enable them to do. And it is with scrollery of this kind, either growing free or springing from the margin of the medallion, that the Early English designers occupied the intervals between the medallions in their windows. In France it became the commoner practice to substitute for it a diaper of geometric pattern. Other expedients were occasionally adopted. There is a window at S. Denis in which there is foliated scrollwork on a background of geometric diaper, although this last is so much “restored” that, for all one can tell, Viollet le Duc may be entirely responsible for it.
78. French Mosaic Diapers.
79. Canterbury.
At Soissons is a window in which the interspaces between the medallions are filled with deep blue, broken only here and there by a spot of ruby; at Poitiers also the ornament in spandrils is often just a quatrefoil or so, barely foliated, if at all; at Bourges there is an instance of spandrils ([page 125]) occupied by bare curling stalks and rosette-like flowers; at Poitiers the bands which frame the medallions have a way of interlacing, not in the simple fashion shown in the example from Canterbury [below], but so as to form a kind of pattern in the spandrils in front of the geometric filling; and there are other variations on the accustomed medallion tunes; but as a rule the ornament consists either of the usual Early Gothic foliation, closely akin to that in the borders, such as is shown on [pages 129], [130], [328], [330], or of geometric pattern, such as is here given. The rarity of the mosaic diaper in this country may be gathered from the fact that in the whole series of Early medallion windows at Canterbury it is found only once, its frequency in France from the fact that in the choir alone of Bourges Cathedral it occurs in no less than twenty-two instances; again at Chartres, out of twenty-seven great windows, not more than four have scrollwork; at Poitiers, on the other hand, there is little geometric diaper, but the ornament is of the simplest, and barely foliated. This device of geometric diaper-filling was possibly inspired by the idea of utilising the small chips of precious glass, which, with the then method of working, must have accumulated in great quantity. In any case, it must have been encouraged by that consideration, if not actually suggested by it. Apart from economy, which is a condition of craftsmanlike work, there does seem a sort of artistic logic in the use of merely geometric design for quite subordinate filling, to act as a foil to figure work; but there was no occasion to put the mosaic of fragments quite so regularly, not to say mechanically, together, as was the custom to do.
80. French Mosaic Diapers.
That is shown in a rather unusual instance in a window of the Lower Church at Assisi; there occurs there a diaper of circles with blue interstices, where the circles, though all alike painted with a star pattern, vary in colour in a seemingly accidental way, and are red, yellow, green, brown, just as it took the fancy of the glazier.
81. DETAIL OF MEDALLION WINDOW, CANTERBURY.
It follows inevitably from the small scale on which these patterns are set out, and from the radiation of the coloured light, that unless very great discretion is exercised the rays get mixed, with a result which is often the reverse of pleasing. And the worst of it was that the French glaziers particularly affectioned a combination of red and blue most difficult to manage. A very favourite pattern consisted of cross bands of ruby (as [above]), enclosing squares or diamonds of blue, with dots of white at the intersection of the ruby bands, which persists always in running to purple.
82. French Mosaic Diaper.
Instances of this unpleasant cast of colour are of continual occurrence, but they are never otherwise than crude and plummy in effect. The rather unusual combination of red and green mosaic diaper occurs, however, pretty frequently at Carcassonne. The diapers illustrated indicate the variety of geometric pattern to be found at Bourges, Chartres, Le Mans, and Notre Dame at Paris, and elsewhere. In proportion as there is in them a preponderance of blue and ruby the effect is that of an aggressive purple. The safest plan seems to be in associating with the blue plenty of green, or with the ruby plenty of yellow glass; or a similar result may be obtained by the choice of a deep neutral blue and of an orange shade of red, taking care always that the two contrasting colours shall not be of anything like equal strength.
At the best these diapers compare very unfavourably with scrollwork. They are, in the nature of things, more monotonous and less interesting than a growth of foliage; they are apt also to run to gaudy colour, which by its mass overpowers the pictures set in it. Compare, in any French church, the windows in which there is geometric mosaic and those in which there is scrollwork; and, though they may be all of the same period, and presumably the work of the same men, you will almost certainly have to marvel how artists who at one moment hold you spellbound by the magic of their colour can in the next disturb your eyesight with a glare of purple produced by the parody of a Scotch plaid. Many of these diapers are very minute in scale; the smaller the scale on which they are designed the greater the certainty of the colours running together.
83. S. Peter delivered from Prison, Lyons.
It is to the very small scale of the figures, also, that the confusion of effect in medallion subjects, in spite of their comparatively flat treatment, is to be attributed. At Bourges, at Canterbury, everywhere, the medallion subjects are on far too minute a scale to be made out by mortals of ordinary patience, or, to speak accurately, impatience. Often, even in windows which come close enough to the eye for study, it is only the more conventionally familiar pictures which explain themselves readily; and those you recognise almost by anticipation. You have no difficulty in deciphering the Nativity, the Crucifixion, the Ascension, and so on, because you expect to find them. A certain muddle of effect must be accepted as characteristic of medallion windows.
It is not to be wondered at, that, considering the difficulty of making out the ordinary medallion subjects in the lower windows, where they are usually found, some other scheme of composition should have been adopted for clerestory windows where those would have been more than ever unintelligible. Accordingly, in that position, the single figure treatment was adopted, and carried further than in the preceding century. The figure was now, not for the first time, but more invariably, enclosed in something like an architectural niche—a practice borrowed from the sculptor, who habitually protected the carved figures enriching the portals of great churches by a projecting canopy, giving them at the same time a pedestal or base of some kind to stand upon.
In glass there was clearly no occasion for such architectural shelter or support; but the pretended niche and base offered a means of occupying the whole length of the space within the border, which, without some additional ornament, would often have been too long in proportion to the figure, the mere band of inscription under its feet not being enough to fill out the length. These very rudimentary canopies, specimens of which are given here, are usually very insignificant. It takes sometimes an expert to realise that the broken colour about the head of the saint ([page 46]) stands for architecture. The forms, when you come to look at them closely, may be ugly as well as childish, but they go for so little that it seems hardly worth while to take exception to them. It is only as indication of a practice (later to be carried to absurd excess) of making shift with sham architecture for the ornamental setting necessary to bring the figure into relation and into proportion with the window it is to occupy, that the device of thus enshrining a figure as yet deserves attention. As the beginning of canopy work in glass it marks a very eventful departure in design. All that need here be said about the Early Gothic canopy is that it would have been easy to have devised decorative forms at once more frankly ornamental, more interesting in themselves, and more beautiful, not to say less suggestive of a child’s building with a box of bricks.
84. Lyons.
Sometimes, as at Chartres and elsewhere, the base of the canopy would itself take the form of a little subordinate niche enclosing a figure in small of the Donor, or perhaps only of his shield of arms. Sometimes it would take the form of a panel of inscription, boldly leaded in yellow letters upon blue or ruby.
An alternative idea was to represent the Saints, or other holy personages, sitting. The figure on [page 135] belongs actually to the beginning of the fourteenth century; but, except for a slightly more naturalistic character in the drawing of the drapery, it might almost have belonged to the same period as the standing figure on [page 46]. In longer lights two saints are often figured, sitting one above the other. This may be seen in the clerestory at Canterbury; but the effect is usually less satisfactory than that of the single figure on a larger scale. The standing position is also much better suited to the foreshortened view which one necessarily gets of clerestory windows. A curious variation upon the ordinary theme occurs in four of the huge lancets in the south transept at Chartres, where the Major Prophets are represented each bearing on his shoulders an Evangelist. The same idea recurs at Notre Dame, Paris, under the south rose. That is all very well in idea—iconographically it is only right that the Old Testament should uphold the New—but reduced to picture it is absurd, especially as the Evangelists are drawn to a smaller scale than the Prophets, and irresistibly suggest boys having a ride upon their fathers’ shoulders. Dignity of effect there can be none. Not now for the first time, seemingly, is art sacrificed to what we call the literary idea.
It shakes one’s faith somewhat in the sincerity of the early mediæval artist to find that in the serried ranks of Kings, Prophets, Bishops, and other holy men, keeping guard over the church in the clerestory lights, one figure often does duty for a variety of personages, the colour only, and perhaps the face, being changed. At Reims there are as many as six in a row, all precisely of the same pattern, though the fraud may not be detected until one examines them from the triforium gallery. At Lyons, again, it looks as if the same thing occurred; but one cannot get near enough to them to be quite certain. None the less they are fine in colour. Thirteenth century glass was capable of great things in the way of colour; and the rows of Kings and Prophets looking down upon you from the clerestory of a great church like Bourges, archaic though the drawing be, are truly solemn and imposing.
CHAPTER XIII.
EARLY GRISAILLE.
85. S. Serge, Angers.
86. S. Serge, Angers.
With grisaille glass begins a new chapter in the history of glass painting, and a most important one—not only because of the beautiful work which was done from the first in white, but also because coloured glass grew, so to speak, always towards the light.
87. S. Jean-aux-Bois.
The first coloured windows were intense in colour, rich, and even heavy. The note they struck was deep, solemn, suited to the church and to the times. Neither priest nor parishioner was afraid to sacrifice a certain amount of light. It was the business of a window to shut in those that worshipped from the outer world, and wrap them in mysterious and beautiful gloom. With other days, however, came other ideals. As time went on, and men emerged from the dark ages, the problem of the glazier was how more and more to lighten his glass; until at last white glass predominated, and the question was how to introduce colour into it. Meanwhile the thirteenth century glaziers resorted, where they wanted light, to the use of windows in grisaille, in absolute contrast to the rich picture-glass in the same church.
The model for grisaille design was readily found in the earlier pattern work in plain glazing.
88. S. Jean-aux-Bois.
This last never quite went out of use. But already in the thirteenth century, and probably in the twelfth, it began to be supplemented, for the most part, by painting. The exceptionally graceful work at S. Serge, Angers, for example, on this page and the last, is probably not very much later than the year 1200. You can see at a glance how this is only a carrying further of the unpainted work in the same church ([page 27]) attributed to the thirteenth century. There may be found indeed amidst the plain glazing scraps of painted work; but they never happen to fit, and have pretty certainly found their way into the window in course of repairs. The unpainted window seems to be of greener and more silvery glass than the painted, to which perhaps the cross-hatching gives a rather horny look.
89. Soissons.
The one way of painting grisaille in the thirteenth century was to trace the design (which of course followed the traditional lines) boldly upon the white glass, and then to cross-hatch the ground, more or less delicately according to the scale of the work and its distance from the eye, as here shown. By this means the pattern was made to stand out clear and light against the background, which had now the value of a tint, only a much more brilliant one than could have been got by a film or wash of colour. Very occasionally a feature, such as the group of four crowns which form the centre of the circle, [above], might be emphasised by filling in the ground about them in solid pigment; but that was never done to any large extent. The rule was always to cross-hatch the ground.
90. Early Detail.
With the introduction of colour into grisaille comes always the question as to how much or how little of it there shall be. There is a good deal of Early French work, which, on the face of it, was designed first as a sort of strapwork of interlacing bands in plain glazing, and then further enriched with painted work, not growing from it, except by way of exception. This is seen in the example here given. The painter indulged in slight modifications of detail as he went on. He had a model which he copied more or less throughout the window; but he allowed himself the liberty of playing variations, and he even departed from it at times. By this means he adapted himself to the glass, which did not always take just the same lines, and at the same time he amused himself, and us, more than if he had multiplied one pattern with monotonous precision. His painting was strong enough to keep the leads in countenance; that is to say, his main outlines would be as thick (see [opposite]) as lead lines.
91. Soissons.
92. Reims.
93. Lincoln.
Patterns such as those on [pages 138], [139], and [below], from Soissons, Reims, S. Jean-aux-Bois, would make good glazed windows apart from the painting on them. Indeed, the painting is there comparatively insignificant in design. In the Soissons work, in particular, it consists of little more than cross-hatching upon the background, to throw up the interlacing of the glazed bands; for, with the exception of just a touch of colour in the one opposite, these designs are executed entirely in white glass. The geometric glazing shapes so completely convey the design, that the painted detail might almost be an after-thought.
94. Water Perry, Oxon.
In much of the earliest grisaille there is absolutely no colour but the greenish hue belonging to what we are agreed to call white glass, and the effect of it is invariably so satisfactory as to show that colour is by no means indispensable. And, at all events in France, the colour was at first very sparingly used, except in those twelfth century patterns ([pages 35], [118], [120]) which cannot fairly be called grisaille. In the window on [page 137] the colour is, practically speaking, enclosed in small spaces ingeniously contrived between the interlacing bands of white; in that on [page 138] it is introduced in half rings, which form part of the marginal line, and in spots or jewels; but in either case there is little of it, and it is most judiciously introduced. The interlacing of bands of plain white upon a ground of cross-hatching, itself enriched with scrollwork clear upon it, is characteristically French. Similar bands of white occur, though not interlacing, in the comparatively clumsy panel from Lincoln ([above]), but the more usual English way was to make the bands of white broader, and to paint a pattern upon them, as in the lancet from Water Perry, Oxfordshire ([opposite]), or in the much more satisfactory light from Lincoln ([overleaf]), leaving only a margin of clear glass next the cross-hatched background. A similar kind of thing occurs in the church of S. Pierre at Chartres ([below]). A yet more usual plan with us was to make the strapwork in colour, as at Salisbury. In the patterns on this page the straps do not interlace. In that on [page 143] they not only interlace one with the other, but the painted ornament, which now takes the form of more elaborate scrollwork than heretofore, is intertwined with them. This is an extremely good example of Early English grisaille. Altogether Salisbury Cathedral is rich in white glass windows of this period ([pages 143], [148], [329], [332]).
95. Lincoln.
96. S. Pierre, Chartres.
The grisaille in the clerestory at Bourges is similar to the Salisbury work, but it is not possible to get near enough to it to make careful comparison. The scrollwork on [page 143] may be profitably compared with the very unusual white window at S. Jean-aux-Bois ([overleaf]). There the design consists altogether of scrolls in white upon a cross-hatched ground. It is as if the designer had set out to glaze up a pattern in white upon a white ground, cross-hatched. But it is obvious that, as there is no change of colour, it was no longer necessary always to cut the ornament out of a separate piece of glass from the ground. We find consequently that, wherever it is convenient, a painted line is used to save leading. That, it has been already explained ([page 24]), was a practice from the first; and it was resorted to more and more. It came in very conveniently in the French windows, in which the design consisted largely of white strapwork. It was adopted in the example from Châlons [here given], though it does not appear in the sketch, any more than it does in the glass until you examine it very carefully. However, in the sketches from the great clerestory window from Reims Cathedral ([overleaf]), and in the smaller one from S. Jean-aux-Bois ([facing it]), the economy of glazing is easy to perceive; whilst in that from Coutances ([page 147]) the glazier is already so sparing of his leads that they no longer always follow or define the main lines of the pattern.
97. GRISAILLE, SALISBURY CATHEDRAL.
J. Akerman, Photo-lith, London.
98. Châlons.
In a remarkable window in the choir of Chartres Cathedral ([page 150]) the design includes interlacing bands both of white and colour, the coloured ones flanked with strips of white; but the white bands are not glazed separately. They are throughout included in the same piece of glass as the cross-hatching, which defines them. This ingenious and very graceful pattern window is still of the thirteenth century, though clearly of much later date than, for example, the windows of S. Jean-aux-Bois, which might indeed almost belong to the twelfth.
99. Clerestory, Reims.
In several of the Salisbury windows ([pages 148], [386]) thin straps of colour are bounded on the outer side by broader bands of white painted with pattern. And here it should be noticed the bands no longer interlace at all; on the contrary, the ornamental forms are superposed one upon the other. This is very markedly the case on [page 148]. In the centre of the light is a series of circular discs, and at the sides of these a row of zigzags, which, as it were, disappear behind them, whilst at the edges of the window, again, is an array of segments of smaller circles losing themselves behind these. In such cases, it will be seen, the broad white bands fulfil the very useful purpose of keeping the coloured lines apart, and separating one series of shapes from the other. In this window, as in the narrow light on [page 386], where the vesica shape is occupied once more with flowing scrollwork, and as in all but one of the windows on that page, the background of cross-hatching is for the first time omitted, and the pencilled pattern is by so much the less effective. As a rule, patterns traced in mere outline like this belong to a later date; but these windows are certainly of the thirteenth century. It is seldom safe to say that this or that practice belonged exclusively to any one period. The white glass on [page 335], almost entirely without paint, might have been executed in the twelfth century, but its border indicates more likely the latter part of the thirteenth. Quite the simplest form of glazing was to lead the glass together in squares or diamonds. These “quarries,” as they are called (from the French carré) are associated sometimes with rosettes and bands of other pattern work, as at Lincoln ([pages 284], [287]); but more ordinarily the ornamental part of the window is made up entirely of them. “Quarry” is a term to be remembered. It plays in the next century an important part in the design of windows.
100. S. Jean-aux-Bois.
101. Coutances.
The best-known grisaille windows in England are the famous group of long lancets, ending the north transept of York Minster, which are known by the name of the Five Sisters. You remember the legend about them. The “inimitable Boz” relates it at length in “Nicholas Nickleby”; but it is nonsense, all the same. The story tells how in the reign of Henry the Fourth five maiden ladies worked the designs in embroidery, and sent them abroad to be carried out in glass. But, as it happens, they belong to the latter part of the thirteenth century; they are unmistakably English work; and, what is more, no woman, maiden, wife, or widow, ever had, or could have had, a hand in their design. Their authorship is written on the face of them. Every line in their composition shows them to be the work of a strong man, and a practical glazier, who worked according to the traditions that had come down to him. A designer recognises in it a man who knew his trade, and knew it thoroughly. The notion that any glazier ever worked from an embroidered design is too absurd. As well might the needlewoman go to the glazier to design her stitchery. But such is the popular ignorance of workmanship, and of its intimate connection with design, that no doubt the vergers will go on repeating their apocryphal tale as long as vergers continue to fill the office of personal conductors.
102. GRISAILLE, SALISBURY CATHEDRAL.
J. Akerman, Photo-lith, London.
The Five Sisters are rather looser and freer in design than the Salisbury glass, and have broad borders of white. In detail they are certainly not superior to that, nor in general design, so far as one can make it out at all; but, from their very size and position, they produce a much more imposing effect. Whoever is not impressed by the Five Sisters is not likely ever to be moved by grisaille. They form one huge fivefold screen of silvery glass. The patterns are only with great difficulty to be deciphered. It is with these as with many others of the most fascinating windows in grisaille; the glass is corroded on the surface, black with the dirt and lichen of ages, cracked and crossed with leads introduced by the repairing glazier, until the design is about as intelligible as would be a conglomeration of huge spiders’ webs. But, for all that, nay, partly because of it, it is a thing of absolute beauty, as beautiful as a spider’s web, beaded with dewdrops, glistening in the sun on a frosty winter’s morning. It is a dream of silvery light: who cares for details of design? But it is all this, because it was designed, because it was planned by a glazier for glazing, and has all that gives glass its charm.
103. Chartres Cathedral.
Stained glass, like the men who design it, has always the defects of its qualities. It is the first business of those who work in it to see that it has at least the qualities of its defects.
CHAPTER XIV.
WINDOWS OF MANY LIGHTS.
The merry life of the medallion window was a short one. It reigned during the Early Gothic period supreme; but after the end of the thirteenth century it soon went quite out of fashion, and with it the practice of shaping the bars to suit the pattern of the window—a practice, it will have been noticed, not followed in grisaille windows, though it might very well have been.
With the change which came over the spirit of later thirteenth century architecture some new departure in the design of glass became inevitable. The windows spoken of till now were all single lights, broader or narrower, as the case might be, but each so far off from the other that it had to be complete in itself, and might just as well be designed with no more than general reference to its neighbours. But in time it began to be felt in France that the broad Norman window was too broad, and so they divided it into two by a central shaft, or mullion as it is called, of stone. In England equally it began to be felt that the long narrow lancet lights were too much in the nature of isolated piercings in the bare wall, and so the builder brought them closer and closer together, until they also were divided by narrow mullions.
104. Decorated Medallion Window, German.
In this way, and in answer especially to the growing demand for more light in churches, and consequently for more windows, it became the custom to group them. Eventually the window group resolved itself into a single window of several, sometimes of many, lights, divided only by narrow stone mullions. Or, to account for it in another way, windows of considerable size coming into vogue, it became necessary, for constructional no less than for artistic reasons, to subdivide them by mullions into two or more lights. The arched window head was broken up into smaller fancifully shaped “tracery” lights, as they are called; and so we arrive at the typical “Decorated” Gothic window.
105. Freiburg.
The height of these windows being naturally in proportion to their width, the separate lights into which they were divided were apt to be exceedingly long. To have treated them after the Early medallion manner, each with its broad border, would have been to draw attention to this, and even to exaggerate their length. The problem now to be solved in glass was, how best to counteract the effect of insecurity likely to result from the thinness of the upright lines of the stone and the narrowness of the openings between them. It is not meant to say that the medallion window expired without a spasm. For a while Decorated windows were treated very much after the fashion of the earlier medallion windows. The medallions were necessarily smaller, and usually long in proportion to their width, although they extended now to the edge of the stonework, the narrowish border to the lights passing, as it were, behind them. This is very amply illustrated in the windows in the choir clerestory at Tours. Occasionally there is no border but a line of white and colour, and the whole interval between the elongated hexagonal or octagonal panels is given up to mosaic diaper. The medallions naturally range themselves in horizontal order throughout the three or four lights of the window, giving just the indication of a horizontal line across them. By way of exception, the subject of the Last Supper extends through all three lights of the East window, the tablecloth forming a conspicuous band of light across it. This glass at Tours is deep and rich throughout, as intense sometimes as in earlier work, though warmer in colour, owing to the greater amount of yellow glass employed. That was not to last long.
It lingered longest in Germany. There is a curious two-light window in Cologne Cathedral, with queer rectangular medallions, of considerable interest, which is probably not very early in date. A not very common type of Decorated medallion window is illustrated [above]. The cutting across the border by medallion or other subjects, is a common thing in fourteenth century glass ([below] and [opposite]), just because such encroachment is obviously a most useful device in dealing with narrow spaces. It occurs in some medallion windows (also of the fourteenth century) at the church of Santa Croce, at Florence.
106. DETAILS OF DEC. GERMAN GLASS.
But this was not enough. The Germans went a step further, and carried the medallions boldly across two lights, treating them as a single medallion window with a stone mullion instead of an iron bar up the centre. There is an instance of this at S. Sebald’s Church, Nuremberg, and another, more curious than beautiful to see, at Strassburg. They went further still, and carried the medallions across a three-light window. There is one such at Augsburg, where the medallions almost fill the window, extending to the extreme edge of the outer lights. Indeed, a broad outer border of angels surrounding the great circles is cut short by the side walls. This is at least a means of getting rid of the littleness resulting sometimes from the small medallion treatment, and it is in fact most effective. The broad, sweeping, circular lines also have the appearance of holding the lights together and strengthening them.
107. Typical Decorated Canopy.
This was a thing most needful to be done in Decorated glass. It was needed sometimes already in Early work. At Clermont-Ferrand the narrow lancets at the end of the South transept are filled, except for a thin white beaded border, with diaper work in rich colour, interrupted at intervals by big rosettes of white, which form two bands of light across the series, and make them seem one group.
The deliberate use of horizontal lines (or features giving such lines) in glass, was clearly the most effective way of counteracting the too upright tendency of the masonry, or rather of preventing it from appearing unduly drawn out; and it became the custom. Even in a comparatively small Decorated window, for example, the figures would usually form a band across it, distinguished from the ornamental shrinework above and below it by a marked difference in colour. In a taller window there would be two, or possibly three, such bands of figures, in marked contrast to their framing. In Germany very often one big frame would cross the window, or the figure subjects would be separated—as at Strassburg, for example—by bands of arcading, out of which peeped little saints each with a descriptive label in his hand.
108. S. Urbain, Troyes.
A typical English canopy of the period is given on [this page]. It was commonly enclosed, as here shown, within a border, wide enough to be some sort of acknowledgment of the subdivision of the window, but not wide enough to prevent the colour of the canopy from forming a distinct band across the window. The predominance of a powerful, rather brassy, yellow in the canopy work, and a contrast in colour between its background and that of the figures, carried the eye without fail across the window. A notable exception to the usual brassiness of the Decorated canopy occurs at Toulouse, where a number of high-pitched gables of the ordinary design, stronger in colour than usual, have crockets and finials of a fresh bright green.
109. New College, Oxford.
The Decorated canopy, with its high-pitched gable and tall flying buttresses, its hard lines, and its brassy colour was a characteristic, but never a very beautiful feature in design; and it grew to quite absurd proportions. It was in Germany that it was carried to greatest excess, extending to a height three or four times that of the figure and more; but with us also it was commonly tall enough altogether to dwarf the poor little figure it pretended to protect. Even when it was not preposterously tall, its detail was usually out of all proportion to the figure. Your fourteenth century draughtsman would have no hesitation in making the finial of his canopy bigger than the head (nimbus and all) of the saint under it. Clumsiness of this kind is so much the rule, and disproportion is so characteristic of the middle of the fourteenth century, that, but for some distinctly good ornamental glass of the period, one might dismiss it as merely transitional, and not worthy of a chapter to itself in the history of glass design.
110. Executioner of S. John the Baptist, 14th Century.
Our distinctions of style, as was said, are at the best arbitrary. We may devise a classification which shall serve to distinguish one marked type from another, but it is quite impossible to draw any hard-and-fast line between the later examples of one kind and the earlier of another one. We may choose to divide Gothic art into three classes, as we may subdivide the spectrum into so many positive colours, but the indeterminate shades by which they gradate each into the other defy classification or description.
Certainly the best figure work of the middle period is that which might quite fairly be claimed as belonging, on the one hand, to the end of the Early, or on the other to the beginning of the Late, Gothic period. In the figures from Troyes, for example ([page 47] and [opposite]), the Early tradition lingers; in those from New College (also [opposite]) the characteristics of Late work begin to appear. In the figure of the headsman on this page there is certainly no sense of proportion. In all the wealth of Decorated figure-and-canopy work at York Minster there is nothing to rank for a moment with the best Early or Perpendicular glass. Nor in France, though there is Decorated work in most of the great churches, is there anything conspicuously fine. Even at S. Ouen, at Rouen, there is nothing particularly worthy of note. It is true that the period of the English occupation and the troubles which followed it was not the time when we should expect the arts to flourish there.
111. Decorated Borders.
A most characteristic thing in glass of this intermediate period was the way in which colour and grisaille were associated. It has been already told how, before then, white and colour had been used together in the same light—at Auxerre, for example, where, within a broad border of colour, you find an inner frame of grisaille, enclosing a central figure panel of colour. Quite at the beginning of the fourteenth century, if not already at the end of the thirteenth, you find, as at S. Radegonde, Poitiers, upon a ground of grisaille, coloured medallion subjects, or more happily still, little figures, as it were, inlaid, breaking the white surface very pleasantly with patches of unevenly but judiciously dispersed colour—the whole enclosed in a coloured border. But in the fourteenth century the more even combination of white and colour was quite a common thing. Naturally it was introduced in the form of the horizontal bands already mentioned. And indeed it is in windows into which grisaille enters that this band-wise distribution of design is most apparent, and most typical. The designer very commonly conceived his window as in grisaille, crossed by a band or bands of colour, binding the lights together. That may be seen in the chapter-house at York, where you have several series of little subjects, more or less in the shape of medallions, forming so many belts of colour across the five-light grisaille windows, which belts the eye insensibly follows right round the building.
That is the theory of design. Its practical construction may be better described otherwise. The iron horizontal bars, to the use of which the glaziers had by this time come back, divide the lights each into a series of panels, which panels are filled at York alternately with coloured subjects and ornamental grisaille. Elsewhere perhaps two panels are filled with colour to one of grisaille, or three to one, or vice versâ. In any case these alternate panels of white and colour, occurring always on the same level throughout the lights composing the window (and often through all the windows along the aisle of a church), range themselves in pronounced horizontal strips or bands.
112. GRISAILLE AND FIGURE.
This acceptance of the bars as a starting-point in design, and this deliberate counterchange of light and dark, may appear to indicate a very rough-and-ready scheme of design. But any brutality there might be in it is done away with by the introduction of a sufficient amount of white into the coloured bands and of a certain modicum of colour in the bands of white. And that was habitually the plan adopted. Into the subjects it was easy to introduce just as much white as seemed necessary. A little white might be there already in the flesh, which was no longer always represented in flesh-coloured glass but more and more commonly in white. The usual border at the sides of the grisaille—now reduced to quite modest proportions—perhaps a simple leaf border, as on [pages 44], [158], perhaps a still simpler “block” border, as [above], served to frame the white, at the same time that it was an acknowledgment once more of the fact that each light forms a separate division of the window. In most cases the introduction of a little colour into the grisaille panel, very often in the form of a rosette, went further to prevent any possible appearance of disconnection between the figures and their ornamental setting. As a matter of fact, so little obvious is the plan of such windows in the actual glass that it often takes one some time to perceive it.
113. Evreux.
In the nave at York Minster the grisaille is crossed by two bands of coloured figure work. Elsewhere it is crossed by one; but where the figures have canopies, as they often have, that makes again a horizontal subdivision in the coloured portion of the glass. Sometimes the topmost pinnacles of the coloured canopies will extend into the grisaille above, breaking the harshness of the dividing line; but it is seldom that it appears harsh in the glass. The fact seems to be that the upward tendency of the long lights is so marked, and the mullions make such a break in any cross line, that there is no fear of horizontal forms pronouncing themselves too strongly; the difficulty is rather to make them marked enough. Architects came eventually to feel the want of some more sternly horizontal feature than the glazier could contrive, when they introduced the stone transom, which was a feature of the later Gothic period.
When it was a question of glazing a broad single light of earlier construction, the fourteenth century artist designed his glass accordingly. Not that he then adopted the thirteenth century manner—it never entered his mind to work in any other style than that which was current in his day; the affectation of bygone styles is a comparatively modern heresy—but he adapted his design equally to help, if not to correct, the shape of the window opening. Accustomed as he was to narrower lights, the broad window of an earlier age appeared to him unduly broad, and his first thought was to make it look narrower. This he did by dividing it into vertical (instead of horizontal) strips of white and colour. That is shown in the window from Troyes ([page 159]), in which the centre strip of the window, occupied by figures and canopies in colour, is flanked by broad strips of grisaille, and that again by a coloured border. There, as usual, you find some white in the figure work and some colour in the grisaille, always the surest way of making the window look one.
The judicious treatment of a belated lancet window like this goes to show that it was of set purpose that the tall lights of a Decorated window were bound together by ties of coloured glass. So long as windows were built in many lights, that plan of holding them together was never abandoned. There is a very notable instance of this at Berne, where the four long lights of a Late Gothic window are crossed by lines of canopy work, taking not horizontal but arched lines (a device common enough in German glass), effectually counteracting the lean and lanky look of the window. Still markedly horizontal lines of subdivision in glass design are more characteristic of the second Gothic period than of any other.
CHAPTER XV.
MIDDLE GOTHIC GLASS.
Towards the fourteenth century, it seems, a wave of realism swept over Gothic art. So much is this so that a relatively speaking naturalistic form of ornamental detail is the most marked feature of the Decorated period, giving it its name, and, indeed, its claim to be a style.
114. Norbury, Derbyshire.
115. S. Pierre, Chartres.
No great stress has been laid in the foregoing chapters upon this new departure in naturalism, because it did not so very vitally affect design. When it is said that glass followed always the fashion of architecture, that is as much as to say that, as the sculptors took to natural instead of conventional foliage, so did the glass painters; and there is not much more to tell. To trace the development of naturalistic design would lead us far astray. Enough to say that, by the naturalistic turn of its ornamental foliage you may recognise the period called “Decorated.” How far that naturalism of Decorated detail may be to the good is a question there is no need here to dispute. It was a new departure. The new work lacked something of the simple dignity and self-restraint which marked the earlier, and it had not yet the style and character which came in the next century of more consistently workmanlike treatment. In so far it was a kind of prelude to Perpendicular work. This is not to deny that excellent work was done in the Decorated period, especially perhaps in glass, where naturalism, at its crudest, is less offensive than in wood or stone. But there is no getting over the fact that the period was intermediate; and Decorated glass is in a state of transition (1) between the archaism of the early and the accomplishment of the later Gothic; (2) between the conventional ornament which merely suggests nature and natural foliage conventionally treated; (3) between strong rich colour and delicate silvery glass. The transition of style is nowhere more plainly to be traced than in the grisaille of the period. At first the character of fourteenth century grisaille did not greatly differ from earlier work, except in the form of the painted detail. That from S. Urbain, Troyes, on [page 333], is a typical instance of Early French Transition foliage, in which the scroll is only less strong and vigorous than before. Precisely the same kind of detail is shown again in the lower of the two instances, likewise from Troyes, [opposite]; but already natural leaves begin to mingle with it; whilst in the illustration above it, though the mosaic border is characteristically early, the foliage in grisaille is deliberately naturalistic. The grisaille at Troyes, by the way, often reminds one of that at York Minster. It is mainly by the naturalistic character of the ivy scroll, or perhaps it would be nearer the mark to say of the leaves upon it, that the design from Norbury, Derbyshire ([page 162]), betrays its later date, by that and the absence of cross-hatching on the background. The glazing of the window is still thoroughly mosaic.
116. DEC. GRISAILLE, S. URBAIN, TROYES.
J. Akerman, Photo-lith, London.
117. Chartres.
118. Evreux.
119. Rouen Cathedral.
There is a different indication of transition in the little panel from S. Pierre at Chartres, almost entirely in white glass, on [page 163]. The foliated ornament is here still early in character; but, it will be seen, there is no longer any pretence of leading up the bands of clear glass in separate strips. They are only bounded on one side by a lead line. That is so again in the three designs from Chartres Cathedral [above], where, further, the background is clear of paint; and in those from Evreux, on [pages 165], [284]. There the background is cross-hatched; but in one case the foliage is naturalistic.
The coloured strapwork in the grisaille from the Lady Chapel of Rouen Cathedral on [page 165] is frankly mosaic; but the foliated ends of the straps, gathered together into a central quatrefoil in a quite unusual fashion, indicates the new spirit. The white glass is there painted with trailing foliage in outline upon a clear ground, not shown in the sketch, which is merely a diagram of the glazing. The grisaille from Stanton S. John, Oxford, here given, still hesitates rather between two opinions. The foliage is naturalistic, but the background is cross-hatched; the broad diagonal bands, patterned with paint, are glazed in colour; the rings of white are not separately leaded. That sort of thing has occurred, as already pointed out, before; but it was not till the fourteenth century, or thereabouts, that the strapwork of white lines, forming so characteristic a feature in Decorated grisaille, are systematically indicated by painted outlines and not glazed in if it could be helped.
120. Stanton S. John, Oxford.
You have only to examine the crossing of the white lines in any of these last-mentioned patterns to see that, now that they are not separately glazed, they do not really interlace as before. It is out of the question that they should.
It is easy enough to glaze up bands so that they shall interlace; but, when some of the drawing lines are lead and some paint, it occurs continually that you want a leaded line to pass behind a line of clear glass—which, of course, is a physical impossibility. It follows that the pretended interlacing comes to grief. The pattern is confused (it is worse when there is no hatched background) by the occurrence of leads, stronger than the painted lines, which, so far from playing any part in the design, occur just at the points where they most interfere with it.
121. Châlons.
That this did not deter them, that they made a shift with interlacing which does not truly interlace, marks a falling off in what may be called the conscientiousness of the Gothic designers. French and English Decorated grisaille, effective as it often is in the window, is distinctly less satisfactory in design than the common run of earlier work. Its charm is never in its detail.
The patterns may be ingenious and not without grace, but they are never altogether admirable, any more than are the figures.
122. Châlons.
What you most enjoy in it is the distribution of white and colour; and you enjoy it most when you do not too curiously examine into the detail of the design, when you are satisfied to enjoy the colour, and do not look for form, which after all is of less account in glass.
So far as effect only is concerned, quarry work, the mere glazing in squares, answers in many places (such, for example, as the clerestories of narrow churches, where you could not possibly enjoy any detail of design that might be there) all the purpose of grisaille; and it was commonly resorted to. But the painting upon such quarries counts for very little; it is far too small and fine in detail to have any effect further than to tone the glass a little, which would have been unnecessary if the glass employed had been less clear. In fact, delicate paint on distant clerestory glass is much ado about very little; and one cannot help thinking that plain glazing would there have answered all the purpose of the most delicately painted pattern work. The fourteenth century glaziers seldom complicated their quarry work by the introduction of bands or straps of colour between the quarries, or by the introduction of colour other than such as might occur in rosettes or shields and so on, planted upon them, rather than worked into the design. Occasionally, however, as at Châlons-sur-Marne, you come upon an ornamental window ([page 167]) in which quarries are separated by bands of clear white, a certain amount of colour being introduced in the form of yellow quarries substituted at regular intervals for the white. On the [same page] is another coloured diaper window designed on quarry lines, also at Châlons. In that quarries of white and yellow are separated by a trellis of blue. Something of the sort is to be seen also at S. Radegonde, Poitiers.
123. Regensburg.
In these cases the painting, as will be seen, is strong enough to hold its own at a considerable distance from the eye, but the effect is not very happy. When, by the way, it was said that delicate painting on distant quarries was lost, it was not meant to imply that strong painting on quarries would be a happy solution of the difficulty. As a matter of experience, it is seldom satisfactory. On the other hand, the common expedient of leading up the coloured backgrounds to figure work in small squares of ruby, green, and so on, was generally the means of securing good broken colour.
124. Munich Museum.
It can hardly be said that geometric pattern windows in strong colour are ever very successful. The Germans, who, it should be remembered, call their second Gothic period the “Geometric,” often attempted it, but without conspicuous success.
125. 14th Century German.
In Germany it was customary to use geometric diaper work long after it had gone out of use in France. In fact, it is there more likely a sign of the second period. The crosslines in the diaper from Regensburg ([opposite]) would have been in lead, not paint, if the work had been executed in the thirteenth century; again, the diaper below it would not at that period have been painted in the likeness of oak-leaves. Diaper of this kind was not used merely to fill up between medallions, but as background, for example, to canopy work. Frequently it was very small in scale, as well as elaborate in pattern. It can hardly be said that it was always worth the pains spent upon it—often it was not; but the Germans avoided, as a rule, the dangerous red and blue combination, and preferred, as did also the Italians, less stereotyped arrangements of green and yellow, or of red and green, or of red and green and yellow; if they ventured upon red and blue, it was with a difference very much to their credit. For example, they would enclose diamonds of ruby in bands of purple-brown, with just a point of blue at the interstices; again, they would make a diaper of purple, purple-brown, and grey; and in many another way show that they deliberately aimed at colour in such work—whereas many of the Early diapers suggest that the glazier was thinking more of pattern. An instance of heraldic diaper is given on [page 169].
126. Freiburg.
In Italy also you find sometimes, as at Florence and Assisi, medallion windows with mosaic diaper between, or mosaic diaper used as background to figures which certainly cannot be described as Early.
127. Freiburg.
The Germans differed from the rest of us in their frank use of geometric pattern. We habitually disguised it more or less, clothing it most likely with foliation; they used it quite nakedly, and were not ashamed. Instances of this innocent use of geometric form are here given. At Freiburg are quite a number of windows entirely of geometric pattern work. There is a good deal of white glass in them, but they count rather for colour than for grisaille. It would not be quite unfair to say they fall between the two stools. These designs are much more pleasing in the glass than in black and white (where they have rather too much the appearance of floor-cloth), but they are by no means the happiest work of the Germans of that day. Where they were really most successful, more successful than their contemporaries, was in foliated or floral pattern windows, and those of a kind also standing dangerously near midway between colour and grisaille. The method of execution employed in them was to a large extent strictly mosaic; but there is quite a refreshing variety and novelty, as well as very considerable ingenuity, in their design.
128. From Regensburg, Munich Museum.
129. Ivy—Munich Museum.
The window from Regensburg on [page 389] sets out very much as if it were going to be a grisaille window; but it has, in the first place, more colour than is usual in grisaille, and, in the second, it will be seen that the little triangular ground spaces next the border are filled with pot-metal. The contrast of the set pattern and the four coloured leaves crossing each circle with the flowing undergrowth of grisaille is unusual, and so is the cunning alternation of cross-hatching and plain white ground. The designs from Munich Museum on [pages 171 to 174] have nothing in common with grisaille. The design consists of natural foliage chiefly in white, growing tree-like upon a coloured ground up the centre of the light. In the one the stem is waved, in the other it takes a spiral form, in the third it is more naturalistic. But nature is not very consistently followed. What appears like a vine on [page 171] has husks or flowers which it is not easy to recognise; and the ivy here is endowed with tendrils. The border of convolvulus leaves and the hop scroll, [opposite], are unmistakable, though there is some inconsistency between the naturalness of the leaves and the stiffness of their growth. The ivy pattern differs from the others inasmuch as the leaves show light against the yellow ground, whilst the green stem and stalks tell dark upon it, and there is a band of red within the outer border which holds the rather spiky leaves together. The most interesting window of this kind illustrated is that on [page 174], in which the stem is ingeniously twisted into quatrefoil medallion shapes, so as to allow a change in the colour of the ground, and the leaves are designed to go beyond the filling and form a pattern upon the border. The rose is a hackneyed theme enough, but this at least is a new way of working it out. Fourteenth century German windows are altogether more varied in design than contemporary French or English work. The glass is not so much all of one pattern. There are more surprises in it. The Germans treated grisaille in a way very much their own. At the risk of a certain coarseness of execution, they would paint out the background to their natural foliage in solid pigment, or in brown just hatched with lines scratched through to the clear glass. That is very effectively done, for example, at the Church of S. Thomas at Strassburg. It is not contended that this is at all a better plan than that practised in France or England: it is on the whole less happy; but there are positions in which it is more to the purpose; and it has at least the merit of being different; it suggests something better than it accomplishes, and it is a timely reminder that the best methods we know of cannot be accepted as final.
130. GERMAN ORNAMENTAL GLASS.
Again at Regensburg there is some distant ornamental work, so simple in execution that it is little more than glazing in colours; in fact just what distant work should be—effective in its place without any waste of labour.
131. 14th Century Glass.
A word or two remains to be said about borders. The narrower decorated light implied, as was said, a narrower border. It was, as a rule, only when a wide Early window had to be glazed that there was room for a broad one. In that case it showed of course the new naturalism, with perhaps the added interest of animal life, as [here illustrated]; but there lingers in German borders such as this and the one on [page 338], something of early tradition. It looks as if it would not be difficult to accept glazing lines like these and fill them in with painted detail à la Romanesque. In one of the windows in York Minster there is a border of alternate leaves and monkeys, both much of a size, which broadens out at the base, affording space for the representation of a hunt, men, dogs, grass and all complete.
132. 14th Century German.
There was another reason for the adoption of a narrower border. Not only were windows narrower now, but their arched heads were cusped, which made it exceedingly difficult to carry any but the narrowest possible border round them satisfactorily. It will be seen how awkwardly the border fits (or does not fit) the window head on [page 155]. Even the simplest border had to be very much distorted in order to make it follow the line of the masonry; and, in any case, it gave a very ugly shape within the border, and one again difficult to fill. Already, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, the designer found it convenient to run his border straight up into the cusped head of the light and let the stonework cut it abruptly short; that occurs at Carcassonne. Sometimes, as at Tewkesbury, the inconvenient border is allowed to end just above the springing line of the arch, against a pinnacle of the canopy, beyond which point there is only a line or two of white or colour, by way of frame or finish to the background. An unusual but quite satisfactory way of getting over the difficulty of carrying the border round the window head is, to accept the springing line of the arch as the end of the central design, and to make the foliated border spread and fill the entire window head above. Some quarry lights in the triforium at Evreux are effectively treated in that manner.
133. 14th Century German.
Types of ordinary Decorated borders, English, French, and German, are shown in this and the preceding chapter. The leafage springs from one side or the other or from a central stem, or from either side of a waving stem, or from two stems intertwined ([page 158]). Sometimes the ground on one side is of a different colour from that on the other; in any case the glazing is usually simple. One of the leaf borders at Rouen Cathedral includes a series of little green birds; another, an oak pattern, is inhabited at intervals by squirrels and wild men of the woods. Rather interesting variations upon the ordinary type of border are given on this and the preceding pages. The broader one [above] is of distinctly unusual character, inasmuch as it has no background except the painting out, and the colour of the leafage varies quasi-accidentally.
134. Strassburg.
The use of the rosette borders on [pages 171], [172] is sufficiently accounted for by the desire to get contrast to the foliated filling, but it occurs at all periods more or less. So does the "block border"; but for all that it is almost as characteristic of Decorated work as the leaf border. It is seen in its simplest form on [page 144]. On [page 389] it is associated with foliage and rosettes. A typical form of it is where the blocks are charged with heraldic devices, which may serve to indicate the date, or to confuse one. In the design from Evreux on [page 160] there occur, for example, the Fleurs-de-Lys of France alternating with the Castle of Castille. These particular charges occur frequently in the windows of the S. Chapelle at Paris, and in the lights from that source now in the South Kensington Museum; and they go perhaps to show that Blanche of Castille (who married Louis VIII.) gave them to the chapel, or that they were in her memory. She died in 1252. It is most improbable that the Evreux glass should belong to so early a date as that. Were it so, the occurrence of this kind of thing in such early work would only go to show that heraldic devices are as old as heraldry, and that when the glazier had a narrow light to fill he treated it as a narrow light, with a border in proportion to its width: he certainly did that at the S. Chapelle. The fact remains that this particular form of “block” border marks, as a rule, the approach of the fourteenth century.
135. 14th Century German.
It may be as well to remind the reader that dates and periods are only mentioned in order to save circumlocution. When the thirteenth century is mentioned, it is not meant to convey the year 1201, nor yet 1299, but the century in its prime. And, what is more, it is not meant to say that the work ascribed to that period was quite certainly and indisputably done after the year 1200 or before the year 1300, but only that it bears the mark of the century—which, from the present point of view, is the important thing. The precise and certain year in which this or that device was by exception for the first time employed, or until which by chance a practically obsolete practice survived, is interesting (if it can be ascertained) only as a question of archæology. Anyway, a workman would rather believe the evidence of his eyes, which he can trust, than of documents, which, even if authentic, may not be trustworthy, and which are perhaps open to misinterpretation.
Typically Decorated glass, apart from the ornamental windows just referred to, is the least interesting of Gothic. There is in it a straying from Early tradition without reaching the later freedom and attainment. In colour it has neither the strength of the Early work nor the delicacy of the Late. It marks some progress in technique, but little in design, and none in taste.
CHAPTER XVI.
LATE GOTHIC WINDOWS.
The subdivision of art into periods is in reality the veriest makeshift. To be on quite safe ground we should have, as a matter of fact, to reduce our periods to not more than half their supposed duration, and to class all the rest of the time as belonging to intervals of transition.
The truth is, it is always a period of transition. The stream moves perpetually on; there are only moments in its course when it seems to move more slowly, and we have time to fix its characteristics. It follows that, if we divide our periods according to time, we have to include within them work of very various character; and if we divide them according to style, our dates get hopelessly confused.
136. Pedestal, Wells.
Some sort of classification is necessary in order to emphasise changes which actually took place only by degrees, and are perceptible only to the expert. But no sooner do we begin to classify, than we find so many exceptions, that we are inclined almost to wonder if they do not form the rule. All that has been said, therefore, and may yet be said, about the periods of design, must be taken with more than a grain of suspicion. For example, what shall be said about the great East window at Gloucester Cathedral, which Winston instances as a typical example of Decorated glass? Doubtless the technique is that of soon after the middle of the fourteenth century, and the detail of the canopies, when you come to examine them, is more nearly Decorated than anything else; but the first impression of the glass is quite that of Perpendicular work. This may come partly of the circumstances that the masonry of the window follows already distinctly Perpendicular lines; but it comes much more from the colour of the glass and its distribution. It is not merely that blue and ruby backgrounds are carried straight up through the long lengths of each alternate light, or that the blue is lighter and greyer than in Decorated glass, but that the figures, and especially the canopies, are for the first time, practically speaking, altogether in white, only very slightly relieved with yellow stain. The student who accepted this as typical Decorated work, would be quite at sea when he came to Perpendicular glass, in which this paler colour, this preponderance of white, and especially this framing of the figures in white canopy work, is a most distinctive, if not the most distinctive, feature. After all, the window is Perpendicular; and, though the glass in it may have many characteristics of Decorated work, it cannot well be said that the glass is Decorated, true though it be that glass did, as a rule, follow rather in the wake of architectural progress.
Many windows are almost equally difficult to classify. In the Decorated glass at Wells there are both earlier and later features. The heads glazed in pinkish glass, with eyes and beards leaded up in white, strike an Early note, whilst the broadly treated bases or pedestals of certain canopies in the Lady Chapel, one of which is here shown (the canopies themselves are strictly Decorated), prelude the coming style.
137. CANOPY, NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD.
These bases remind one of those in the ante-chapel at New College, Oxford, dating from the last quarter of the fourteenth century, which, though it is not difficult to trace in them the lingering influence of Decorated tradition, must undoubtedly be put down as early examples of the later style. In these fine windows (upon which the tourist turns his back whilst he admires the poor attempt of Sir Joshua Reynolds in the West window) there is not yet the accomplishment of full-fledged Perpendicular work. The figures, though full of fine feeling, are not well drawn, and the painting is not delicate; but the design of the glass, its setting out, the balance and arrangement of colour, the tone of the windows, and the breadth of effect, are admirable; and it is precisely in these respects that it proclaims itself of the later school of Gothic. Indeed, we may assume that it was in order to include such work as this that the line was drawn at the year 1380. To class it with Decorated glass would have been too absurd. Compare the New College canopy on [page 180] with the Decorated canopy on [page 155] and the more orthodox Perpendicular canopies [below] and on [pages 185], [340], and there is no possible hesitation as to which it most resembles. The only thing in which it shows any leaning towards Decorated work is in the very occasional introduction of pot-metal colour; and the main thing in which it differs from later Perpendicular design is that its shafts are round instead of square, and that it is more solidly built up, larger, more nobly conceived.
A parallel French instance is at the S. Chapelle at Riom, in which canopies, having at first sight all the appearance of typically Late Gothic work, prove to have details which one would rather describe as Decorated. The German canopy work at Shrewsbury ([pages 183], [186]) is not very far removed from Decorated. The later Perpendicular canopies run to finikin pinnacles.
138. Typical Perpendicular Canopy.
The New College canopies have none of the brassy yellow colour characteristic of Decorated work, but are absolutely silvery in effect. The gradual dilution, as one may say, of the deep, rich, Early colour is noticeable throughout the fourteenth century. Towards its close the glass painter halts no longer between two opinions, between light and colour. He has quite made up his mind in favour of white glass. He has come pretty generally to conceive his window as a field of white, into which to introduce a certain amount of rich colour, not often a very large amount. As a rule, perhaps not more than one-fourth of the area of a fifteenth century window was colour; for, in addition to the white of the canopy, there was commonly a fair amount of white in the draperies, and the flesh was now always represented by white. The typical Perpendicular window, then, is filled with shrinework in white, enclosing figures, or figure subjects, into which white enters largely (the flesh and some of the drapery, often a good deal, is sure to be white), upon a background of colour. Not much of this coloured background, most often in blue or ruby, and sometimes deep in colour, was ordinarily shown, so fully was the space occupied by figure work. Sometimes there would be represented, behind the figure, a screen of white, so that only the head and shoulders would stand revealed against dark colour. Sometimes this screen would be in colour, contrasting with the background, richly diapered in imitation of damask ([page 342]). Sometimes the background would be white, leaded perhaps in quarries; but in any case the prevalent scheme of design was to frame up pictures, more or less in colour, in architectural canopy work of white and stain. Yellow stain, it should be said, was freely used in connection with all this white; and its invariable association therewith is one of the marked characteristics of Later Gothic glass; but as a rule the yellow was not only delicate in tint but delicately introduced, so that it did not much disturb the effect of white. There were significant passages of yellow in it, but the effect of the mass was cool and silvery.
In canopies yellow stain was used as gold might be in stonework, which the canopies imitated; crockets and pinnacles would be tipped with yellow, as with gilding (see [opposite]), and the reveal of the arch, shown in false perspective above the figure, would be similarly stained, so as to soften the transition from the dark colour of the background to the white of the canopy mass.
139. FIGURE AND CANOPY, S. MARY’S, SHREWSBURY.
J. Akerman, Photo-lith, London.
One comes upon windows, probably of about the beginning of the end of the fourteenth century, in which the colour scheme is practically limited to red, white, and blue, the yellow being, comparatively speaking, lost in the white. Again, one finds windows in which the colours are much lighter than in earlier glass. But as a rule the lighter colours now introduced (the glazier’s palette was by this time quite extensive) were used to support, and not to the exclusion of, the richer and deeper colour, which is the glory of glass, seldom to be dispensed with even in grisaille. You may do without colour altogether, but pale colours always have a poor effect.
140. German Late Gothic Canopy.
141. All Souls’ College, Oxford.
The typical Perpendicular canopies illustrated and already referred to are quite favourable specimens of the kind of thing in vogue throughout the fifteenth century. In France much the same forms were adopted ([page 342]). Some exceptionally delicate figure-and-canopy windows (or parts of them) are to be found in the cathedral at Toulouse—the figure in colour, or in white and colour, against a background of white, richly diapered with damask pattern, which quite sufficiently distinguishes it from the architecture only just touched with yellow. An instance of later German work is given [below]. The German designer indulged temperamentally in the interpenetration of shafting and other vagaries of the kind, which we find in German stone carving. Sometimes in German work, and occasionally also in French, Late Gothic canopies were all in yellow, framing the picture, as it were, in gold. As a rule, however, they were, as with us, silvery in tone, and framed the coloured glass in a way most absolutely satisfactory, so far as effect is concerned.
In itself, however, this canopy work is rarely of any great interest; occasionally, as already in the preceding century, the designer has enniched in the shafts little figures of saints or angels (there is just the indication of such introduction of little statuettes in the very simple and restrained example of canopy work from Cologne, on [page 191]), redeeming it from dulness; but as a rule it is trite and commonplace to a degree. The white, as frame, is perfect. It is none the more so that it simulates misplaced stonework. What a strange thing it is in the history of ornament that the natural bias of the designer seems to be so irresistibly towards imitation! The man’s first thought seems to be to make the thing he is doing look like something it is not. Why, having designed openings in the wall of his building, he should proceed forthwith to fill them up with something in poor imitation of masonry, is a mystery. Economy had then, perhaps, as now, more to do with it than art, for it is a very cheap expedient.
Not only in the matter of colour, but in that of proportion, the later Gothic canopies were a great improvement upon what had gone before. They were distributed still very much upon the horizontal principle so noticeable in Decorated work; but by this time the architect had come to the tardy conclusion that the long lights of his window wanted holding together, and he tied them together, if they were of any length, by means of transoms, in which case the glass-worker had to deal with lights of manageable length. The light from All Souls’ College, [here given], is an example of a very usual Perpendicular arrangement. About one half its entire length is occupied by a figure enshrined, as it were, in an architectural niche. The base of the canopy is about equal in height to the width of the light. The shafts are broad enough to emphasise the independence of the light. The pinnacles of the canopy extend into the window head. A point or two of background colour, as though one could see through, are ingeniously introduced into the canopy and its base. It would be difficult to better such an arrangement of white and colour, except that one feels the urgent want of a margin of white, to separate the coloured background from the masonry round the window head.
142. TWO WINDOWS, S. MARY’S, SHREWSBURY.
143. Fairford.
The idea is, no doubt, that the shrinework should appear to stand in the opening, and the figure be sheltered under that. The illusion aimed at, it is scarcely necessary to say, is not produced, and in any case would not have been worth producing. On the contrary, the desirable thing to be done was, to acknowledge the window opening, which, except for this pretence, the colour of the design effectually does.
144. The Queen of Sheba before Solomon, Fairford.
A frequent and equally typical arrangement was, where the light was long enough, to make the base itself take the form of a low canopy over a more or less square-proportioned subject, possibly a scene in the life of the Saint pourtrayed above. This gave opportunity of introducing figures on two different scales, without in any way endangering the significance of the more important figure, which, by its size and breadth of colour, asserted itself at a distance from which the smaller subject appeared only a mass of broken colour. The proportions and outline of such a subject are indicated by the Nativity on [page 54], the jagged line at the top of the picture marking the inner line of the canopy work. In German work very commonly the base canopy encloses, as, for example, at Cologne Cathedral, a panel of heraldic blazonry.
The height of the canopy was, with us, more or less in accordance with the length of the window; but sometimes more space was allowed for the figure than at All Souls’, and the vacant space about the head of the saint was occupied with a label in white and stain bearing an inscription. There are some admirable figure-and-canopy windows of this description on the north side of the choir of York Minster, which seem to have inspired a great deal of our modern mock-Perpendicular figure-and-canopy glass. The label occurs, on a background of white architecture, behind the Prophets from Fairford on [pages 187], [391]. A more important example of it occurs round the figure of Edward the Confessor, from S. Mary’s, Ross ([opposite]), and again in the group from the same source on [page 339]. Extremely clever ornamental use is made of the label—a typically Perpendicular form of enrichment—in the German glass on [page 186]. The extraordinary breadth of the phylacteries held by the Prophets in the early fifteenth century windows in the S. Chapelle at Riom, gives them quite a character of their own, and an admirable one.
At Great Malvern we find the lights above the transom of a window occupied each by a figure and its canopy, whilst the lower lights contain each three tiers of small subjects, separated only by bands of inscription. In the four-light window at Malvern illustrating the Days of Creation, each light contains three little subjects, one of which is given on [page 252]. Sometimes, as in the windows from Fairford on [pages 188], [372], subjects under a canopy are drawn to a scale as large as the size of the window will allow.
In some shape or another the canopy almost invariably appears in connection with figure work; it is the rarest thing to find, in place of the familiar shafting, a border, such as that [opposite].
145. KING EDWARD, S. MARY’S, ROSS.
Of the gradual improvement in drawing in the fifteenth century work it is not necessary to say much. It belongs to the period rather than to glass painting, and it is shown in the examples illustrated. It is of no particular country, though our English work was possibly more constrained than contemporary continental work. Particularly characteristic of English work was the delicate tracing of the faces, which were pencilled, in fine lines, the treatment altogether rather flat, and this at a period when foreign glass was much more solidly modelled. It is not possible, on the scale of illustration determined by a book of this size, to illustrate this English peculiarity as clearly as one would wish, but it will be apparent to the seeing eye even here. It is within the bounds of possibility that the Fairford glass may have been executed in England; if so, Flemish or German painters certainly had a hand in it. To compare it with the neighbouring Perpendicular glass at Cirencester, with its delicate tracing and fine stain (in which matter the Fairford glass does not by any means excel), is to see how very different it is from typical English work. Whether we look at the detail of the canopies, or the drawing of the drapery, or the painting of the glass, we see little to connect this with English work, though it falls at once into its place as excellent Late Gothic glass. In the windows of the nave of Cologne Cathedral, a figure from one of which is [here given], German Gothic glass reaches its limit. There is already a trace, if only in the broad shaft of the canopy, of Renaissance influence in the design. In others of these windows there are no single figures. Entire lights are filled with biblical or legendary scenes, one above the other, under dwarf canopies, which do not very clearly define the horizontal divisions of the window; for all that, the horizontal divisions are for the most part there. Except where the canopies are so insignificant as not to count, a Perpendicular window presents, as a rule, a screen of silvery-white, on which the pictures form so many panels of more or less jewelled colour.
146. York Minster.
The enormous East window at York Minster, which belongs to the very early years of the fifteenth century, contains, apart from its tracery, no less than a hundred and seventeen subjects in its twenty-seven lights; but the canopies dividing them are so narrow that they scarcely answer the purpose of frames to the separate subjects. The design is inextricably confused, and the subjects are very difficult to read; but the effect is still as of a mass of jewels caught in a network of white. In fact, the progress towards light is such that, whereas in the last century the problem was how to get more and more white glass into a coloured window, it seems now more often to be how to get colour into a white one.
147. Cologne Cathedral.
White and stain enter so largely into Late Gothic glass that there remains little to be said about grisaille. The glass of the period is, for the most part, in grisaille and colour, the difference between it and earlier grisaille being, that it consists so largely of figure-and-canopy work. Windows, however, do occur all in white or all in white and stain. Figures, for example, in white and stain, occur, as in the South transept at York, on a ground of delicately painted quarries. Again, a common arrangement is that of figures in white and colour against a background of quarry work, a band of inscription separating the pavement upon which they stand from quarries below them. Such figures form a belt across many moderate-sized windows in parish churches. Mere quarry lights also occur, with a border in which perhaps some colour occurs. But the subject of quarries and quarry windows is reserved for consideration in a [chapter] by itself.
It must not be supposed that the drift of Later Gothic in the direction of white glass was uninterrupted. That was by no means so. At certain places, and at certain periods, and especially by certain artists, there seems to have been a reaction against this tendency, if ever there was any yielding to it. For example, notwithstanding all that has been said about the lighter tone of Decorated glass, some of the very finest fourteenth century German work, at S. Sebald’s Church, Nuremberg, is as intensely and beautifully rich as anything in Early work. There rows of small subjects are framed in little canopies as deep in colour as the pictures, and white glass is conspicuous by its absence. The nearest approach to it is an opaque-looking horn colour, and that is used only very sparingly. Possibly, however, it is not quite fair to call these windows rich, for the upper part of them is light. So light is it, and so little has it to do with the stained glass, that one scarcely accepts it as part of the window, and therefore speaks of it as if it ended with the colour.
The unfortunate plan has been adopted here, as in the cathedral at Munich and elsewhere in Germany, of filling only about half the window, from the sill upwards, with strong stained glass. This ends abruptly at an arbitrary and very unsatisfactory canopy arch, which, in a way, frames it; and above it the window is filled with plain white rounds. At Freiburg there is yet a further band of plain rounds next the sill of the windows. The object of this is, doubtless, to get light into the church; but the effect is as if the builders had run short of coloured glass, and had only finished off the window temporarily. As a means of combining white and colour this German shift is not, of course, to be compared to the plan current elsewhere of distributing them in alternating bands. It does not attempt to combine them, but cuts the window deliberately in two. Not until you have shaded off from your eyes the distracting rays of white light, can you properly appreciate or enjoy the coloured glass.
148. THE PRODIGAL SON, TROYES.
But, if these windows must be considered, as in a sense they must be, as conforming to the demand for more light, there are others in which strong colour is carried consistently through, not only in the fourteenth but in the fifteenth century. (It is irritating and annoying to have to hark back in this way to periods supposed to have been long since left behind, but any arbitrary line of division between the styles must, as it were, cut off points which project from one into the other, sometimes very far indeed across the boundary line; and hence the absolute necessity, at times, of seeming to retrace our steps, if we would really trace the progress of design.) There are shown [opposite] four lights out of a large window in the clerestory of the cathedral at Troyes, in which the history of the Prodigal Son is pictured in little upright subjects, framed in canopies of quite modest proportions and of colour which in no wise keeps them separate from the richly coloured figures underneath. One of them, for example, is of green, very much the colour of an emerald, on an inky-purple ground. The result is a very rich window, full of quaintly dramatic interest when you come to examine it; but there are no broadly marked divisions of colour in the glass to affect the architecture of the building one way or the other, nor does it tell its tale very plainly. It is more easily read on [page 194] than from the floor of the church.
In the windows so far discussed the figure subjects, however small and however close together, have always been marked off one from the other, slightly as it might be, at first by the marginal lines round the early subject medallions, and then by canopies. It is shown in another fifteenth century window from Troyes ([opposite]) how even that amount of framework was now sometimes abandoned.
Progress in glass design, it was said, was in the direction of light and of picture. Moved by the double impulse, the designer of the Later Gothic period framed his coloured pictures in white. But where he happened not to care so much about light, or had not to consider it, he omitted even the narrow shaft of white or colour (which, so long as he used a canopy, usually divided the picture from the stonework) and left it to the mullions to separate them vertically. Horizontally he divided them slightly by a band of ornament, as at Troyes, of about the width of the mullions, or more frequently, and more plainly, by lines of inscription on white or yellow bands. If the subjects were arranged across the window in tiers alternately on ruby and blue grounds, that, of course, separated each somewhat from the one next above and below it, but it banded those on the same level together. This helped the architectural effect, but confused the story-telling.
If the pictures were arranged, throughout the width as well as the length of the window, alternately in panels on red and blue grounds, that kept the pictures rather more apart, but made the distribution of the colour all-overish. That mere change of ground could not keep pictures effectively separate will be clear when it is seen ([opposite]) how little of the background extends to the mullion. The greater part of the figures come quite up to the stonework, and the subjects consequently run together. It is difficult to realise, except by experience, how little the stonework can be depended upon to frame stained glass. It seems when you see it all upon paper that the mullions, with their strongly marked mouldings, must effectually frame the glass between them. They do nothing of the kind. They go for so much shadow: what you see is the glass. This the glass painters realised at length, and took to carrying their pictures across them. And it has to be confessed that so long as they schemed them cleverly the interference of the mullion was not much felt.
149. THE STORY OF TOBIT, TROYES.
The distinction drawn so far between “single figures” and “subjects” has answered its obvious purpose; but that also is, in a manner, arbitrary. Figures standing separately, each in a light by itself, form very often a series—such as the four Evangelists, the twelve Apostles, the Prophets, the Doctors of the Church, or a succession of kings, bishops, or other ecclesiastics. More than that, they form perhaps a group. When we discover that facing the figure of the Virgin Mary is that of the Angel Gabriel, we see at once that, though each figure occupies a separate light of the window, and each stands in its own separate niche, we have in reality here a subject extending through two lights—the Annunciation. So in a four-light window—if in one light stands the Virgin with the Infant Christ, and in the others a series of richly garbed figures with crowns and gifts in their hands, it is clear that this represents the Adoration of the Magi—a subject in four lights; and the canopies over them may be taken to be one canopy with four niches. A yet more familiar instance of continuity between the single figures in the lights of a window occurs where the central light contains the Christ upon the cross, and in the sidelights stand the Virgin and S. John. We have in such cases the beginning of the subject extending through several lights. It is only a short step from the Annunciation, or the Adoration, or the Crucifixion described, to the same subject, under one canopy, extending boldly across the window, with shafts only to frame the picture at its sides. That is what was done—especially in Germany. It occurs already in Early Decorated glass, where the upper part of a big geometric window is sometimes occupied by brassy pinnacle work, which asserts itself, perhaps, upon a ground of mosaic diaper, in the most unpleasant way. In the white glass of a later period the effect was happier.
At first the designer did not, as a rule, aspire to carry his subjects right across a big window. Accepting the transom as a natural division, he would perhaps divide a four-light window vertically into two, so as to get four subjects, each under a canopy extending across two lights; or, in a five-light window, he would probably separate these by other narrow subjects in the central lights. Divisions of this kind often occur already in the stonework of the window, the lights being architecturally divided by stronger mullions into groups. In that case all the glass painter does is to emphasise the grouping of the lights schemed by the architect. Where the architect has not provided for such grouping he does it, perhaps, for himself. It enables him to design his figures on a larger scale, and to get a much broader effect in his glass than he could do so long as he kept each picture rigorously within the limits of a single light. Consideration for his picture had probably more to do with his reticence than respect for its architectural framework; and so soon as ever he realised how little even a strong mullion would really interfere with his work, he made no scruple to take all the space he wanted for his purpose. Infinite variety of composition is the result. The upper half of the window is perhaps devoted to a single subject, or to two important pictures, whilst below the transom the lights are broken up into quite little pictures; or in place of these smaller pictures may be found little panels of heraldry, as occurs often in Flemish work. These or the smaller pictures may be continued in the sidelights of a broad window, flanking, and in a way framing, a large central picture. Sometimes, as in the nave of Cologne Cathedral, the upper half of the window may contain one imposing composition; below that may be a series of important single figures, each provided with its separate canopy; and below that again, at the base of the window, may be a series, or several series, of small heraldic panels.
150. Fairford.
The canopy extending across a broad window ([page 200]) may be so schemed that there is obvious recognition of the lights into which it is divided, or it may sprawl across the window space with as little regard to intervening mullions as possible. There is now, in short, full scope for the fancy of the artist, were he never so fanciful; and it would be a hopeless task to try and catalogue the lines on which the design of a large window might now be set out.
We do not in the fifteenth century arrive yet at the most remarkable achievements in glass painting. But you have only to compare such pictures as those on [pages 194], [196], with that on [page 127] to see what a complete revolution has come over the spirit of design. It is not only that the draughtsman has learnt to draw, and the painter to paint; they work on quite a different system. It was explained ([page 44]) how in early days the glazier conceived his design as mosaic, how he first thought it out in lead lines, and only relied on paint to help him out in details which glazing could not give him. Now, it is easy to see that the painter begins at the other end. He thinks out his picture as a painting, and relies upon glazing only for the colour which he cannot get without it.
In the beginning, it was said, the glazier might often have fixed his lead lines, and trusted to his ingenuity to fill them in with painted detail. Now, it would seem, the painter might almost have sketched his picture, and then bethought him how to glaze it. But that is not yet really so. He did not even conceive his design as a picture and then translate it into glass. His work runs so smoothly it cannot be translation. The ingenuity with which he leads up little bits of colour in the midst of white, is no mere feat of engineering; it is spontaneous. It is clear that he had the thought of glazing in his mind all along—that he designed for it, in fact. The difference between the thirteenth century and the fifteenth century designer is, that one thinks first of glazing, is primarily a glazier, the other thinks first of painting, is primarily a painter.
151. RENAISSANCE WINDOW, TROYES CATHEDRAL.
CHAPTER XVII.
SIXTEENTH CENTURY WINDOWS.
The customary line between Gothic and Renaissance glass is drawn at about A.D. 1530. That is to say, that there are to be found examples, presumably of that date, which are still undoubtedly Gothic in character. But he would be a bold man, even for an archæologist, who dared to say precisely when the Gothic era came to an end.
Quite early in the sixteenth century the new Italian movement began to make itself felt in France, Germany, Flanders; in due course it spread to this country. Eventually it supplanted the older style; but it was only by degrees that it insinuated itself into the affections of cis-alpine craftsmen. And in stained glass, even more plainly than in wood or stone carving, is seen how gradually the new style was assimilated by the mediæval craftsmen—more quickly, of course, by the younger generation than the older—so that, concurrently with design in the quasi-Italian manner, Gothic work was still being done. Much of the earlier Renaissance work shows lingering Gothic influence. In the first quarter of the sixteenth century a great deal of glass was designed and executed by men hesitating between the old love and the new, only partially emancipated from mediæval tradition, or only imperfectly versed in the foreign style.
There is a window at S. Nizier, at Troyes, for example, in which the details are Renaissance, but the feeling is quite Gothic. The subjects are even explained by elaborate yellow scrolls or labels inscribed in black, very much after the manner of those which form such a feature in the German Gothic work at Shrewsbury ([page 186]). Renaissance forms are traced with a hand which betrays long training in the more rigid mediæval school; and Gothic and Italian details are put together in the same composition with a naïveté which is sometimes quite charming.
You can see that the designer of the window on [page 203] was not untouched by Renaissance influence. Possibly he thought the hybrid ornament in his canopy was quite up to date.
In the glass in the nave of Cologne Cathedral the suspicion aroused by the side columns of the otherwise quite Gothic canopy on [page 191] is confirmed by definitely Renaissance forms in the ornament in the window head. Again, at the Church of S. Peter, at Cologne, is a sort of pointed canopy with ornament which looks at first like Gothic crockets, but on nearer view it is just Italian arabesque in white and stain. Apart from architectural accessories and detail of costume or ornament, to justify the attribution of the work to this or that period, it is very often difficult to give a name to early Renaissance work; the only safe refuge is in the convenient word transitional.
But for the nimbus in perspective, and the shield of arms and its little amorino supporter, it would have seemed safe to describe the “Charge to S. Peter” from S. Vincent at Rouen on [page 207] as “Gothic.”
In French glass a lingering Gothic element is noticeable at a period when Italian forms had firmly established themselves in contemporary plastic art; but, then, glass painting was not an Italian art; and, whilst wood carvers and sculptors were imported from Italy, and directly influenced the Frenchmen working with them, glass painting remained in the hands of native artists.
Before very long the Renaissance did, of course, assert itself, in glass painting as in all art, and we arrive at windows absolutely different from anything that was done in the Middle Ages. The change was in some places much more rapid than in others. Wherever there was a strong man his influence would make for or against it. But meanwhile much intermediate work was done, belonging more or less to the new school, whilst retaining very much of the character of Gothic glass.
That Gothic character was something well worth keeping; for it is the character which belongs inherently to the material.
152. St. Mary’s, Shrewsbury.
The Gothic glass painters did, in fact, so thoroughly develop the resources of the material, that a Renaissance window treated really like glass inevitably suggests the lingering of Gothic tradition. This is no slight praise of Gothic work; and, by implication, it tells against the later Renaissance glass painters, whose triumphs were in a direction somewhat apart from their craft. The great windows at Brussels, for example ([page 71]), illustrate a new departure. They seem to have nothing in common with mediæval art. On the other hand, one traces the descent of such masterpieces of translucent glass painting as are to be found at Arezzo ([page 397]), through those same intermediate efforts, directly to Gothic sources.
To trace the steps by which the new encroached upon the old, as one may do, for example, at Rouen, is almost to come to the conclusion that the short but brilliant period of Renaissance glass painting is really the after-fruit of Gothic tradition, fertilised only by the great flood of Renaissance feeling which swept over sixteenth century art. Nowhere is this more clearly argued than in the windows at Auch, completed, according to all accounts, as early as 1513. A strain of Gothic is betrayed by the cusping which here and there fringes a semicircular canopy arch; but no less mistakably mediæval is the technique throughout, and equally so the setting out of the windows. For the somewhat imposing canopies are not, for once, devised as frames to correspondingly important pictures; but are simply shrines adorned with figures each confined to its separate light: it is only the small subsidiary predella or other such pictures which extend beyond the mullions. No doubt there is doctrinal intention in the juxtaposition of Prophets, Sibyls, and the rest—one of whom may even be supposed to be addressing the other—but to all intents and purposes decorative, they are just a row of standing figures, as distinct one from the other as the usual series of figures under quite separate canopies. It is only the canopy which connects them. This kind of composition (which is seen again at Troyes, [page 200]) would never have occurred to a man altogether cut off from Gothic tradition.
153. Chapel of the Bourbons, Lyons.
It is worth remarking that, even when Gothic and Renaissance canopies alternate at Auch in a single window, or where Gothic niches are built, as it were, into or on to larger Renaissance structures, there is no appearance of incongruity. Truth to tell, the Gothic is not so purely Gothic, nor the Renaissance so purely Renaissance, as that they should clash one with the other. Both are seen through the temperament of the artist. He mixed them in his mind; and the result is quite one, his style in short.
154. S. Godard, Rouen.
Early Renaissance glass submitted itself, one can hardly say duly, but almost as readily as late Gothic design, to the restraint of Gothic mullions. The windows in which, as it happens, some of the best Early French Renaissance work is found (and it is in France that the best is to be found) are often smaller than the great Perpendicular windows referred to, and do not lend themselves to such elaborate subdivision. But the lines on which they are subdivided are very much as heretofore. The canopy still extends through several lights, and covers a single subject. Only now it is Renaissance in design. That does not mean to say merely that round arched architecture takes the place of pointed. The round arch occurs indeed, as in the windows in the Chapel of the Bourbons, in Lyons Cathedral (on [pages 204] and [349]), supplemented by amorini and festoons of fruit. But more often the canopy takes the form of a frieze of Renaissance ornament, painted in white and stain, as at S. Godard, Rouen ([opposite]), or glazed in white on colour, as in the cathedral of the same city ([pages 75], [350]), supported at each end by a pilaster. Not seldom it resolves itself into arabesque only very remotely connected with architecture at all. Indeed, if it simulate anything, it is goldsmith’s work rather than masonry. Executed, as at Rouen ([pages 75], [206]), in brilliant yellow on a dark coloured ground, it has very much the appearance and value of beaten gold. That, rather than sculpture, must have been in the mind of the designer. One form of imitation is not much better than another; but here, at all events, there is nothing which in the least competes with the surrounding architecture; and it will scarcely be denied by any one who takes the least interest in ornament, that design of this kind is vastly more amusing than the dull array of misplaced pinnacles which often did duty for ornamental detail in Gothic shrinework. A German version of a canopy which ceases almost to be a canopy and becomes more like arabesque, is given on [page 350]. That is supported by columns (the caps are shown in the illustration) rather out of keeping with the ornament they support, which makes very little pretence of being architectural. The canopies on [pages 204], [350], are supported only on little brackets at each side, and have no shafts at all. This marks a new departure. The picture has now no frame at its sides, only the stone mullion.
155. S. Patrice, Rouen.
It was explained, in reference to glazing, what confusion of detail resulted from the use of leads of which some were intended to form part of the design and some not. Similar confusion is inevitable when certain of the mullions are meant to be accepted as frame to the picture and others to be ignored. The perhaps not very conspicuous canopy is often the only hint as to which of the stone divisions you are to accept as such, and which not. Even that was not always there to serve as a guide. Already, as early as 1525, the date given to the window illustrating the life of S. Peter ([page 207]), the canopy was sometimes annulled, and the window given over entirely to picture, either one complete subject or a series of smaller ones. The window dedicated to S. Peter contains in its four lights eight equal subjects, a plan adopted in several others of the windows at S. Vincent, Rouen. In a series of unframed subjects, such as these, there is much less danger of confusion should some one prominent figure recur throughout always in the same costume. That is the case here, and again at Châlons, where the figure of Our Lord, robed in purple, is conspicuous throughout: the mind grasps at a glance that this is not one picture but a series.
156. SUBJECT, S. VINCENT, ROUEN, 1525.
A change of period is indicated by the departure from the disc-shaped nimbus. On [pages 207], [210], [234], [397], the nimbus is shown in perspective; an attempt is even made to make it hover above the head, an effect not possible to produce in leaded glass; even at Arezzo it is not achieved. Neither is the use of a mere ring of light, whether in flat or in perspective, a happy substitution for the Gothic colour disc, as may be seen, for example, at Cologne. The idea of the nimbus only keeps within the border line which separates the sublime from the ridiculous, so long as the thing is frankly accepted as a symbol, not as an effect. But, were it otherwise, the use of the strongly marked disc of colour about the head of prominent personages has an enormous value as a means of distinguishing them from the background or from surrounding figures. Its decorative importance is no less than its symbolic. Very especially is this so in glass; and the glass painter who wantonly departs from its use, reduces it to a mere ring (which does not separate it at all from the background) or poises it in the air, is beginning to wander from the way, narrow if you please, which leads to success in glass. This is said with some reluctance in face of the all but perfect little panel from S. Bonnet, at Bourges, on [page 210]. It is true that there the nimbus of the boy saint, though in perspective, does by its dark tone separate the head from the light ground, as the face is separated from the darker drapery of his teacher; and, in so far, little of definition is sacrificed; but, after all, admirably as the design is schemed, the oval nimbus is not a whit less conventional than the round disc of mediæval times, and it does lack something of distinction and dignity which that conveyed. The date inscribed (1544) serves to remind us that we are nearing the middle of the century, at which period glass painting may safely be said to have reached its zenith and to be nearing the verge of decline.
It will have been seen in the examples lately instanced how story is gradually more and more naturally set forth in glass. There is now no vestige of flat treatment left. Even the standing figure ([page 191]) stands forth from his niche, and though he may be backed by a curtain of damask, there is shown above that a background of receding architecture. So in the S. Bernard windows at Shrewsbury ([pages 56], [203]) there is architectural distance shown in perspective, and again in the subjects from Fairford, whether it be the portcullised gate of Jerusalem that is represented ([page 251]), or the very inadequate palace of King Solomon ([page 188]), or the Garden of Eden, in which the scene of the Temptation is primitively pourtrayed ([page 372]), there is some attempt to render the scene. Even in the fifteenth century work at Troyes ([page 194]) the Prodigal is not merely shown among the swine, joining them in a dinner of gigantic acorns, but he leans against an oak tree, and in the distance is a little forest of trees. In Renaissance glass the scene is much more naturally rendered, and forms almost invariably an important part of the composition. Witness the palace of Herod ([page 74]) when Salome dances before him, which is a great advance upon the Gothic throne-room of King Solomon ([page 188]).
157. SUBJECT, S. BONNET, BOURGES.
The scene takes one of three forms: either it is architectural, or it is landscape, or it is of architecture and landscape combined. A very favourite plan of the French was to show distant architecture (glazed in deep purple) through which were seen glimpses of grey sky, and perhaps a peep of landscape; and it resulted invariably in a beautiful effect of colour. In fact, a scheme of colour which recurs again and again at Rouen, and in other French glass of the first part of the sixteenth century, consists in the introduction of figures in rich colour and white upon a background where white, green, purple, and pale blue predominate to such an extent as to give quite a distinctive character to the glass. The more distant landscape was painted very delicately upon the pale grey-blue glass which served for sky, as shown on [page 255], and in the same way architecture was also painted upon it. In the view through the arches above the screen in a window at Montmorency ([page 213]), both trees and buildings are represented in that way upon pale grey glass, the green of the trees and hills stained upon it. Sometimes the distance is painted upon white, as at King’s College, Cambridge; but in France the pale grey-blue background is so usual as to be quite characteristic of the period. All this is a long way from the mere diaper of clouds which in the early fifteenth century sometimes took the place of damask pattern upon the blue which formed a background to the Crucifixion, or other scene out of doors. It is now no longer a case of symbolising, but of representing, the sky, and it is wonderful what atmospheric quality is obtained by the judicious use of pale blue painted with the requisite delicacy. The beauty of this kind of work, especially on a small scale, is beyond dispute. Together with the rendering of the flesh, it implies consummate skill in painting. The painter comes quite to the front; but he justifies himself inasmuch as he is able to hold the place. He does what his Gothic predecessors could not have done, and does it perfectly. Could the Gothic artist have painted like this, he also might have been tempted so far in the pictorial direction as to have sacrificed some of the sterner qualities of his design.
The architectural environment of the figures on [page 213] fulfils somewhat the function of the Perpendicular canopy; it forms a kind of setting of white for the colour; but, in the first place, it does not pretend to frame them at the side, and, in the second, the attempt at actual perspective necessitates an amount of shading upon the white glass which detracts at once from its purity and from its value as setting to the colour. The idea is there that you see through the window into space; and, though that effect is never obtained, it is wonderful how far some of the glass painters later in the century went towards illusion. A certain false air of truth was sometimes given to the would-be deception by an acknowledgment of the window-shape—that is, by making the foremost arch or arches follow the shape of the window head, and form, as it were, a canopy losing itself in perspective. Architecture proper to the subject, or not too inappropriate to it, is sometimes schemed so far to accommodate itself to the window-shape as to form, with the white pavement, a more or less canopy-like setting for the figures. It may be a sort of proscenium, the sides of which recede into the picture, and form what may be called the scenery. At King’s College, Cambridge, Esau is seen bargaining away his birthright at a table where stands the coveted pottage, in the midst of spacious halls going back into distant vistas, seen through a sort of canopy next the actual stonework. That concession to the framework of the window does mend matters somewhat. The base of the picture [opposite], for example, is much more satisfactory than it would have been had it not acknowledged the window-sill; but the architecture in the top part of the lights is not a frame to the picture at all, nor yet a finish to the glass: it is part of the picture, which thus, you may say, occupies the window as a picture its canvas. In reality that is not quite so. There is some acknowledgment, though inadequate, of the spring of the arch by a horizontal cornice parallel with the bar; and the arcading, though interrupted by the mullion and by the marble columns, steadies the design; and altogether the architecture is planned with ingenuity, though without frank enough acceptance of the window-shape. One would be more tolerant to such misguided freedom of design were it not for the kind of thing it led to. It must be admitted that both French and Flemings, until they began to force their perspective, and to paint shadow heavily, did very beautiful and effective work in this way.
A multitude of figures, as, for example, in the Judgment of Solomon at S. Gervais, Paris, more or less in rich colour, could be held together by distant architecture and foreground pavement largely consisting of white glass, in a way which left little to be desired, except fuller acknowledgment of the stonework. But it took a master of design to do it, and one with a fine sense of breadth and architectural fitness.
When such architecture was kept so light as to have the full value of white, and when the figures against it were also to a large extent in white, and the colour was introduced only in little patches and jewels skilfully designed to form, here the sleeves of a white-robed figure, there a headdress, there again the glimpse of an underskirt, and so on—all ingeniously designed for the express purpose of introducing rich colour, the whole shot through with golden stain—the effect is sometimes very beautiful.
158. SAINTS, CH. OF S. MARTIN, MONTMORENCY.
Admirable Flemish work, Renaissance in detail, but carrying on the traditions of Gothic art, is to be found in plenty at Liège, both in the cathedral (1530 to 1557) and at S. Martin. This is excellent in drawing and composition, most highly finished in painting, fine in colour, and silvery as to its white glass, which last is splendidly stained. In the same city there is beautiful work also at S. Jacques, with admirable treatment of the canopy on a large scale. It differs from French work inasmuch as it is Flemish, just as the glass at the church of Brou differs in that there is a characteristic Burgundian flavour about it; but those are details of locality, which do not especially affect the course of glass painting, and which it would be out of place here to discuss.
In England we are not rich in Renaissance glass. The best we have is Flemish, from Herkenrode, now in the cathedral at Lichfield. The greater part of this is collected in seven windows of the Lady Chapel—no need to explain which; the miserable shields of arms in the remaining two convict themselves of modernity. In the tracery, too, there is some old glass, but it is lost in the glare of new glazing adjacent. Otherwise this glass is not much hurt by restoration. Four of the windows are treated much alike; that is, they have each three subjects, extending each across the three lights of which they are composed, some with enclosing canopy, and some without. A fifth three-light window is broken up into six tiers of subjects, each of which appears at first sight as if it were confined to the limits of a single light, but there is in fact connection between the figures; for example, of three figures the central one proves to be the Patron Saint of the Donor, himself occupying one of the sidelights, and his wife the other. If the Saint is seated the Donors stand. If he is represented standing they kneel before him. The two larger six-light windows at Lichfield are divided each into four; that is to say, the four quarters of the window have each a separate subject which extends laterally through three lights, and in depth occupies with its canopy about half the entire height of the window.
The Lichfield glass has very much the character of that at Liège. So has the Flemish glass now at the east end of S. George’s, Hanover Square, a church famous for its fashionable weddings. This is some of the best glass in London, well worthy the attention of the guests pending the arrival of the bride. The design, however, is calculated to mystify the student, until he becomes aware that the lights form part of a “Tree of Jesse,” adapted, not very intelligently, to their present position, and marred by hideous restoration, such as the patch of excruciating blue in the robe of the Virgin. The vine, executed in stain upon white, with grapes in pot-metal purples, is not nearly strong enough to support the figures; this may be in part due to the decay of the paint, which has proceeded apace.
Again, at Chantilly ([page 218]) may be seen how lead lines quarrel with delicate painting. The more delicate the painting, the greater the danger of that—a danger seldom altogether overcome.
159. S. GEORGE’S, HANOVER SQUARE, LONDON.
The most important series of Renaissance windows in this country is in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. “Indentures” still remain to tell us that these were contracted for in 1516 and 1526. Apart from some strikingly English-looking figures in white and stain upon quarry backgrounds in a side chapel, and other remains of similar character, and from a very beautiful window almost opposite the door by which one enters—differing in type, in scale, in colour, altogether from the other windows—the glass throughout the huge chapel was obviously planned at the time of the first contract, and there is a certain symmetry of arrangement throughout which bespeaks the period of transition. The windows consist each of two tiers of five lights. A five-light window offers some difficulty to the designer if he desire (as in the sixteenth century he naturally did) to introduce subjects extending across more than one light. A subject in two lights does not symmetrically balance with a subject in three. He might carry his subject right across the window, but that might give him very likely a larger space to fill than he wanted; and besides, the time was hardly come for him to think of that. He might carry it across the central group of three; but that would leave him a single light on each side to dispose of. Remains the idea of a subject in two lights at each side of the window, and a central composition occupying only one light. That was not a very usual plan, although it was adopted, at Fairford for example, where the side subjects in two lights under a canopy are effectually separated by a central subject which has none. At King’s the sidelights have no canopies further than such as may be accepted as part of the architecture proper to the subject, schemed more or less to frame the picture (as in the case of the window at Montmorency, [page 213]); it is only in the centre lights that the figures (two in each light, one above the other) are enclosed in canopy work. These figures (described as “messengers”), with elaborately flowing scrolls about them inscribed with texts of Scripture, are many of them quite Gothic in character, even though they have Renaissance canopies over them. The designs of these mostly do duty many times over, as if this merely decorative or descriptive work were not of much account; and the same figure occurs, here well painted, there ill done, or painted perhaps in a late, loose way, quite out of keeping with the drawing: there is no sort of sequence in them. The notion of these intermediate figures, at once distinguishing the subjects one from the other, and throwing light upon their meaning, is good. But in effect it fails of its object, thanks to the independent spirit of the later painters, who thought more of their pictures than of architectural restraint.
160. THE STORY OF PSYCHE, CHANTILLY.
“Photo-Tint” by James Akerman, London, W. C.
The subjects on each side of the window are very large in scale, very pictorially and very freely treated, very finely designed at times, and very splendid in effect; but they are most unequal, and they are all more or less of a tangle. Their confusion is the greater inasmuch as there is no attempt to balance one picture with another. A landscape background on one side of the window answers to an architectural background on the other. On one side the interest of the subject is towards the top of the lights, on the other to the bottom, and so on. Either subject or both may be so merged with the “messengers” that a casual observer would hardly be aware of the existence of such personages.
All this makes it difficult to trace the subject; and yet the windows are in a certain pictorial way the more effective. In fact the unity of the window has been preserved: the white landscape on one side, and the white architecture on the other, make equally a setting for the colour, and form, with the “messengers” and their little canopies, one framing, not several frames. Right or wrong, the artist has done what he meant to do, and done it oftentimes very cleverly, though not with uniform success. The inequality spoken of is not only in workmanship but in design. Some of these pictures have characteristics, such as the needless evasion of leading, which one associates rather with quite the end of the century than with anything like the date of the second contract: possibly the execution of the work extended over a longer period of time than is generally supposed. However that may be, the windows generally, remarkable as they are, are not markedly enough of a period to serve as an object lesson in glass design. They are neither quite late enough to illustrate the decline of art, nor workmanlike enough to show the culmination of sixteenth century design—painter-like and pictorial, but in which the designer knew how to make the most of the glass in which it was to be wrought.
That is best seen in some of the French and Flemish work above referred to, in the work, for example, at Ecouen and Montmorency, so fully illustrated in Monsieur Magne’s most admirable monograph. The figure, for example, of William of Montmorency ([page 66]), the father of the great Anne, might serve for a votive picture of the period; but it is designed, nevertheless, as only a man careful of the conditions under which glass painting was done could design. Careful of conditions! That is just what the designers of the King’s College glass were not, or not enough. And so begins the end.
CHAPTER XVIII.
LATER RENAISSANCE WINDOWS.
The magnificent windows of Van Orley at S. Gudule, Brussels, mark in a sense the summit of design, as well as of painting, in stained glass. But it is design of a kind not strictly proper to the material, for which reason the discussion of his work, though it was done well within the first half of the sixteenth century, has been reserved by way of introduction to the period which it inaugurated, the period when the glass painter not merely put painting first of all, but sacrificed to it qualities peculiar to glass.
The heavy painting of this work and much that followed it has already been discussed. But something of that was perhaps implied in the very ideal of the painter; the execution only follows out the scheme of the design. The scope as well as the power of the designer is better illustrated in the two great transept windows, than in those of the chapel of the Holy Sacrament. Even in the very inadequate rendering of the one of them on [page 71] may be seen how large and dignified the man’s conception was. The effect is gorgeous; but it is produced as simply, for all the unsurpassed elaboration of ornamental detail, as a Goth could wish. An unsophisticated designer of the thirteenth century could scarcely have gone more directly to work. He would not have grouped his figures with such art, but he would have separated each from the other and from the ground in much such a straightforward way. Yet the motif of the design, the idea of making figures and architecture stand as it were in strong and round relief against the light, went far to bring about excessive use of paint; and the design is therefore in a measure at fault, as was the later Netherlandish work, founded upon it, of which it may be taken as the nobler type.
It is a far cry from the slender Perpendicular canopy to this triumphal arch. The architecture is here no frame to the picture, but the backbone of the picture itself, and it is disposed in the most masterly way. It takes the place of a magnificent high altar. Sometimes in compositions of this kind the altar-like canopy enshrines a rich picture, just as veritable stonework might frame a painted altar-piece, whilst in the foreground kneel the Donors. In this case Charles the Fifth and his wife Isabella and their attendant saints are the picture, the object of their adoration, the Almighty, being relegated to one of the side arches. Similarly in a three-light window (of much more glassy character, however) at Montmorency, Guy de Laval has the central position, and the crucifix before which he kneels is put on one side. This is rather characteristic of the period. In the sixteenth century windows were erected, not so much to the glory of God, as to the glorification of the Donor, who claimed a foremost, if not the very central, place for himself.
The donor was no doubt always, as to this day, an important person in connection with the putting up of a stained glass window. But in early days he was content to efface himself, or if he appeared upon the scene at all it was in miniature, modestly presenting the little image of his gift in a lower corner of the window. In the fourteenth century he is still content with the space of a small panel, bearing his effigy or his arms, at the base of the window. Even in the fifteenth he is content at times to be represented by his patron saint, as in the beautiful window in the chapel of Jacques Cœur, at Bourges. In the sixteenth he is very much in evidence. No scruple of modesty, or suspicion of unworthiness, restrains him from putting in an appearance in the midst of the most serious and sacred scenes, very much sometimes to the confusion of the story. Eventually the donor, his wife, and perhaps his family, with their patron saints, who literally back them up in their obtrusiveness, claim, if they do not absorb, all our attention, and the sacred subject takes quite a back place. In the foreground of the scene of the Last Judgment which occupies the great west window at S. Gudule, Brussels, kneels the donor, with attendant angels, on a scale much larger than the rest of the world, competing in fact in importance with the figure of Our Lord in Majesty above.
However, the vain-glory of princes and seigneurs resulted in the production of works of such consummate art that, as artists, we can but be grateful to them. In the presence of the splendid achievement of Van Orley, who shall say that the artist does not justify himself? Nothing equal to it in its way was ever done.
161. The Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican, Gouda.
It may not be according to the strict rules of the game: it is not; but that it is magnificent, no fair-minded artist can deny. Our just cause of quarrel is, not with that, but with what that led to, what that became in less competent hands. It is the price we pay for strong men that they induce weak ones to follow them in a direction where they are bound to fail. Van Orley’s triumphant answer to any carping of ours would be, to point to the great west window of the cathedral, designed on earlier and more orthodox lines,and say: “Compare!” We have no right to limit art to what small folk can do.
The further development of the Netherlandish canopy is shown in the Gouda glass [above]. Here is still considerable skill in the way in which the window is set out, and the patches of colour are introduced (for example, in the two figures leaning on the balcony and the wreath of leaves and fruit above them) amidst the predominant white,—if only the white glass had been whiter in effect. But there is altogether too much of this architectural work, even though it is used, in the pictured parable at least, to dramatic purpose. The notion of the Pharisee gesticulating away in the far distance, whilst the Publican modestly fills the foreground, is cleverly conceived and skilfully carried out; but the picture is overpowered by its ponderous frame.
162. Gouda, 1596.
It is in the wonderful series of late sixteenth century windows at Gouda, in Holland, that the fullest and furthest development of pictorial design is shown. The period of their execution extends from 1555 to 1603; and, as they are admittedly the finest works of their day, they may be taken to represent the best work of the latter half of the sixteenth century. They are, in fact, typical of the period, only at its best; it is not often that work of that date was designed with such power or painted with such skill. The diagrams given [here] and on [pages 79], [244], [258], do no manner of justice to the glass; but they will help the reader better to understand what is said concerning it. They indicate at least the lines on which these daring designers planned their huge windows, the main lines which pictorial design on a large scale is destined henceforth to take.
In the clerestory of S. Eustache, Paris, are some large two-light windows which somewhat recall the Gouda work; but the design is rather original. One vast architectural composition in white, not very heavily painted, fills the window, against which stand a series of giant Apostles in colour, one in each light, occupying about one-third of the height of the window. This much recognition of the separate openings is something to be thankful for towards the middle of the seventeenth century.
163. S. Sebald’s, Nuremberg.
A striking feature, we have seen, about the later Renaissance canopy as shown at Gouda, and already at Brussels, is its vast dimensions. It no longer frames the picture: it is a prominent, sometimes the most prominent, feature in its design.
Even earlier than that the canopy was already sometimes of very considerable extent. At S. Sebald’s, Nuremberg, there is a great altar-like canopy ending in a pediment about two-thirds of the way up the window, with plain white glass above, in which the shafting at the side takes up practically the entire width of the two outer lights, as here shown in the diagram of a portion of the glass. Yet this window is as early as the year 1515, and before the period when masses of deep shadow were represented by paint. Accordingly the canopy in this instance is glazed in pot-metal of steely grey-blue, which, with the little figures, mainly in steely grey armour against a white ground, and the heraldic shields at the side, mainly in red and white, all very slightly shaded, has a singularly fresh, bright, and delicate effect.
Another instance of preponderating architectural work occurs also at Nuremberg in the choir of the church of S. Lorenz, and though it belongs to the beginning of the seventeenth century, that too is leaded up much as it might have been in the fifteenth. But the great clumsy column, [opposite], with its clumsier figure of Fame, against a ruby background extending right up to the stonework of the window, is not a satisfactory filling to the outer light of a big window.
The last thing to expect of late Renaissance work is modesty in the use of architectural accessories, whether in the form of frame or background. Frame and background they are not; they claim to be all or nothing. Just as ornamental design was gradually pushed out of use by figure work, so the picture was in time overpowered by its frame. And the frame was in the end such that, when it came to be discarded, it was not much loss.
164. S. Lorenz, Nuremberg.
In the latter half of the sixteenth century and thenceforward design continued to travel in the direction of what was meant for a sort of realism. If the more or less altar-like canopy was retained, it was meant to appear as if it stood bodily under the arch of the window; if it was abandoned, you were supposed to see more or less through the window, perhaps into distant country, perhaps into receding aisles of the church.
It formed part of the canopy scheme, that the structure should end before it reached the top of the window, so that you could see beyond it into space. The designers would have been only too happy if they could have done away with the glass above that. If they had had big sheets of plate glass, they would certainly have used them to produce the effect of out of doors—there was already a plein air school in the eighteenth century—as they had not, they were obliged to accept the inevitable, and lead up their white glass; but they went as far as they could to doing away with its effect, using thin, transparent material, which was not meant to appear as though it formed part of the composition. Occasionally they would use pale blue glass, or tint it in a blue enamel, further to suggest the sky beyond. This ([page 222]) would commonly be glazed in squares. The pure white glass also was often glazed in square or, as at Brussels, diamond quarries ([page 71]).
Subjects themselves, it has been explained, came to be glazed as much as possible in rectangular panes; but it marks, it may here be mentioned, a decline of design, as well as of technique, when these came to interfere in any way, as they did, with the drawing. Having made up his mind that his design is to be glazed in rigid square lines, the artist should logically have designed accordingly. He had only to mark off the glazing lines on his cartoon, and scheme his composition so that it was not hurt by them. Towards the seventeenth century the plain glass, the extra part beyond the canopy or beyond the picture, would often be glazed in some simple pattern. That, you might imagine, stood for the window behind the picture or the monument. At the church of S. Jacques, Antwerp, above a picture of the Circumcision, is a canopy leaded in squares and painted to look like falsehood, beyond which clear glass is glazed in a pattern.
Occasionally an attempt is made to merge the picture into the plain glazing above, as at S. Paul’s, Antwerp, where the yellow sky, against which is shown the distant city, and so on, is glazed in squares, which further off become gradually white, and then at their interstices have smaller diamond-shaped pieces of glass let in.
Where a subject glazed in quarries is represented against a background of plain glazing of more elaborate design, there is difficulty in joining the two, except by means of a strong lead outline to the figures, or whatever may come next to the plain glass, which outline the seventeenth century designer was anxious before all things to avoid. Accordingly, as the plain pattern work approached the margin of the painted work, he replaced the leads by paint, which sham leads, of course, could be made to disappear as seemed good to him. But these little games of his, to judge by results, were hardly worth the candle.
It will be seen how, in the French glass on [page 200], the canopy came to be backed and surrounded by unpainted glass, quarries in that case. There the canopy sufficiently occupies the window space not to strike one unpleasantly; but that is sixteenth century work; later, and especially in Flanders, canopies are represented, as in the cathedral at Antwerp (1615), adrift, as it were, in a sea of plain glazing. Even when the glass has some quality of glass the effect of that is not happy. When the glass is thin and transparent it is disastrous.
At S. Jacques, Antwerp, again, coats of arms hover unsupported in mid-air, the mere lines of the glazing being quite inadequate to their apparent support. It is different, of course, where the heraldic device, as [opposite], is itself little more than plain glazing. That is a very mild form of art; but, in its way, it is satisfactory enough.
Perhaps least fortunate of all in effect are the landscapes at S. Jacques, which float, without even a canopy to frame them, in an atmosphere of leaded glass. Antwerp is rich in glass, much of it very cleverly executed, which would serve very well to illustrate how not to design a window.
165. Gouda, 1688.
The place of the canopy was supplied sometimes, especially in later Netherlandish work, by the cartouche so dear to the Dutch. It fulfilled very much the office of the canopy, framing the design; and, had it been kept white, it would have framed it well, affording circular and other shapes which form a welcome variation upon the usual arched opening. But it was not white at all; very much the reverse. Indeed the idea of the Dutch cartouche, with its interpenetration of parts, and curling and projecting straps and bolts, tempts the painter to a heavy method of painting, destructive of the very quality of white. The device depends for its effect far too much upon force of shadow to be of any great use in white glass. The comparatively early cartouche in the lower half of the window at Gouda, given on [page 223], is of the simplest kind, and has none of that too-seductive bolt work; but it is dull and heavy in effect, being painted in heavy brown, with the idea of giving atmospheric effect to the picture supposed to be seen through it.
166. Plain Glazing, S. Gervais, Paris
A great cartouche is often used as a kind of base to a canopy extending across the whole width of a wide window, or the base of the canopy may include a very important cartouche, occupied in either case by a long inscription. Here again the oblong patch of white or yellow may have value, in proportion as it is allowed to preserve the quality of glass. There is, however, something poor and mean about large areas of small lettering, and it is a pity to see the opportunity which bold inscriptions give quite thrown away. Moreover, the inscriptions are invariably too long. The framers of inscriptions do not realise the multitude of readers they scare away by the volume of their wording. The design of a window at S. Jacques, Antwerp, consists merely of an inscription label, with a helmet above and mantling in black and white (the black, of course, paint) set in plain glazing.
Up to the very last whole windows were glazed very often in plain patterns, usually all in clear white glass. A couple of designs, into which a little colour is introduced, are given [below] and [opposite]. In spite of the increased facility for cutting glass, afforded from the beginning of the century by the use of the diamond, patterns were seldom very elaborate; but, by way of illustrating what can be done by means of the diamond, there is shown [overleaf] quite a conjuring feat of glazing. The thick black lines in the drawing represent the leads; the white spaces enclosed are plain white glass, rather poor in quality; the thinner lines stand for cracks, possibly not, or not all of them, of the glazier’s doing, for it would be almost impossible to handle such work without breaking it. It is well-nigh incredible that each of these fleurs-de-lys should have been cut out of a single piece of glass, the marginal band to it out of a second, and so with the background spaces. Glaziers may be inclined to question the possibility of such a tour de force, even in poor thin glass. Certainly one would not have thought it possible; but there it is, in the museum at Angers, close to the eye, where you can see and examine it. This is glazing with a vengeance. It is not the sort of thing that any one would undertake, except as a trial piece, to show his skill; but if ever a glazier deserved his diploma of mastership here is the man.
167. Plain Glazing, Lisieux.
168. A Tour de Force in Glazing, Angers Museum.
The composition of some of the windows belonging to the first half of the seventeenth century at Troyes does not follow the general tendency of the period. The better part of this, if not the greater, is attributed to Linard Gontier (1606-1648). But the design of these windows, and the style of them, is so varied, and sometimes so little of the period, that one is disposed to think, either that he was a painter only and did not design them at all, or that he borrowed his designs freely from Italian and other sources. The panel on [page 400], the Virgin girt with clouds and cherubs, distinctly recalls the work of the Della Robbia School; and again the figures [opposite] remind one of late sixteenth century paintings. An unusual thing, however, about some of these windows is the way they are set out. The disposition of the design of the three-light window from S. Martin ès Vignes is as simple and severe as though it had been Gothic. The glazing, too, is not in squares, but follows the design. Except for the rather robustious drawing of the figures, and the futile kind of detail which does duty for canopy work, the glass might belong to the first half of the sixteenth century.
169. Three Lights, S. Martin-ès-Vignes, Troyes.
Again, in the subject of the marriage of SS. Joachim and Anna on [page 234], it is rather by the types of feature and the cast of draperies, than by the composition, that the date of the work proclaims itself. It is proclaimed, of course, unmistakably by the use of enamel, not only in the warm-coloured flesh, but throughout, to support, and sometimes to supply the place of, pot-metal glass. Nevertheless, the effect of much of this glass is brilliant to a degree almost unprecedented in the first half of the seventeenth century. The painter had skill enough to get the maximum of modelling with the minimum of paint. He could afford, therefore, to use paint sparingly, leaving plenty of glass clear, and seldom sacrificing its translucency, as was done in the group of donors on [page 81], whose black mantles are rendered in solid paint. Those heavily painted figures recall a couple of Donors in a window at Antwerp (1626), equally black robed, against a nearly black screen, all in paint: they would have made a capital votive picture; but they are about as unlike glass as anything one can conceive.
Exceptionally good seventeenth century work is to be found also at Auch. It seems that it was proposed (towards 1650) to complete the windows in a way worthy of the splendid beginning in the choir; but the art was not forthcoming; and the Chapter of that day was wise enough to fall back upon comparatively unimportant quarry windows, with borders and tracery in white and stain and blue enamel, which is at least brilliant in colour, and pleasing in effect. That may be said also of the Western Rose. In the Roses of the transepts, the artist goes further, and produces, by means of arabesque in white and stain, upon a ground mainly of blue and ruby, occasionally varied by green, each light defined by a simple border of white and stain, a couple of flamboyant Rose windows with glass which would do credit to the period of the stonework. They might well (at the distance they are placed from the eye) be taken at first sight for Early Renaissance work. In fact they are really mosaic glass—so rare a thing by this time that the windows are probably of their kind unique.
Even at its best enamelled glass is less effective than the earlier work. In proportion as the place of pot-metal is supplied by enamel, the colour is inevitably diluted, and at times it is quite thin. Indeed, it is pretty well proved, by the work of men who are masters in their way, that, in painted as distinguished from mosaic glass, the choice lies between weak colour and opacity. At Auch and at Troyes we have weak but still often pure and brilliant colour.
170. St. Martin ès Vignes, Troyes.
The opposite defect of opacity reaches probably its greatest depth in the four great Rubens-like windows at S. Gudule in the chapel of Our Lady immediately opposite that of the Holy Sacrament, where Van Orley’s windows are. The design is there absolutely regardless of any consideration of glass or architecture. Each window is treated as a vast oil picture, without so much as a frame. Here is no vista of distant architecture, nor any such relief of lighter colour as you find at Gouda. Force of colour is sought by masses of deep shadow, into which the figures merge. This shadow being obtained by paint, and the glazing being in the now usual squares, there are literally yards of painted quarries, which, except when the sun is at its fiercest, are all but black. And withal the effect is not rich as compared with even the common Gothic glass, though it is not without a certain picturesqueness when perchance the sun struggles through. A painter might find it an admirable background to his picture; no architect would choose it for his building. Three of these windows were designed, it seems, by a pupil of Rubens, Van Thulden, who worked under him at the Luxembourg, and they have all the character of his work—except that the colour is dull.
At New College, Oxford, are some smaller windows with figures, also recalling the manner of the master, and said to be by pupils of his. They, too, are dull and heavy in effect. The canopies over the figures are terrible caricatures of the Gothic shrines in the ante-chapel. Better seventeenth century glass is to be found at Oxford in the work of the Van Lingen, a family of Dutchmen settled in England, who executed windows in Wadham and Balliol Colleges and elsewhere. Some of these are rich in colour. Apart from the rather interesting use of enamel made in them, they are not of great value; but they show as well as more important examples the kind of thing which did duty for design.
The windows in Lincoln’s Inn Chapel, London, illustrate not unfairly the dreary level of dulness as to colour and design to which seventeenth century glass declined. That it could fall still lower was shown, for example, by Peckitt, of York, who is responsible for the glass on the north side of New College Chapel, Oxford, facing the work of the Dutchmen. These date from 1765 to 1774.
The history of eighteenth century windows may, if one may plagiarise a famous bull, be put into the fewest possible words: there were none—worth looking at. To find pleasure even in Sir Joshua’s design at New College, you must consider it as anything but glass.
CHAPTER XIX.
PICTURE-WINDOWS.
The course of glass design was picture-ward. Picture design, however, did not stand still, and hence arises some confusion in the use of the word “pictorial.” It is time to try and clear that up. Stained glass, it may be truly said, has been from the very first pictorial. The earliest glass, therefore, and the latest, the best and the worst, may alike be termed pictorial. The difference is in the conception as to what constituted a picture, say, in the thirteenth century and the seventeenth. It all depends upon the kind of picture attempted.
Archaic art aims already at nature. We probably do not give the early painter credit enough for his intention of rendering natural things naturally. In part at least the stiffness of his design comes from lack of skill, and often where we find him quaint he meant no doubt to be perfectly serious and matter-of-fact. But it was not alone incompetence that held his hand. He was restrained always by a decorative purpose in his work. Here again he was not conscious of sacrificing to any higher rule of art; he bothered himself as little about that as a bee about the way it shall fashion its cell; he worked in the way to which he was born; but the idea had not yet developed itself that a picture could be painted quite apart from the decoration of something, and it never entered his mind to do anything but adapt himself to the decorative situation.
A picture, then, in mediæval times was a work of decorative art, designed to fit a place, to fulfil part of a scheme of decoration, in which it might more often than not take the first place, but no more; it had no claim to independence.
In glass the picture obeyed two conditions which more or less pulled together: as art it subserved to decorative and architectural effect; as craftsmanship it acknowledged and accepted the limitations of glass painting. In the course of years the ideal of architectural fitness underwent successive changes, and the limitations of the glass painter grew less; his scope, that is to say, was widened, and his art took what we call more pictorial shape. Still, so long as the pictorial ideal itself was restrained within the limits of mediæval ambition, glass painting might safely approach the pictorial. It was not until painting broke loose from traditional decorative trammels and set up, so to speak, on its own account, until pictorial came to mean something widely different from decorative, that the term became in any way distinctive of one kind of art or another. It is in that later sense that the word pictorial is here used.
Artists still differ, and will continue to differ, as to the precise use of the term. There are artists still who contend that, since in old time art was decorative, and since in their opinion all art should be decorative, therefore the picture which is not decorative is not art. Arguing thus in a circle, they would say (the pictorial including in their estimation the perfection of decorative fitness, and all art which overshot the mark ceasing to count with them) that art was always at its best when it was most pictorial. But that is a species of quibbling about words which not only leads us no further, but hinders mutual understanding. It is wiser to accept words in the sense in which they are generally understood, and to try and see where the real difference of opinion is.
Difficult it may be, impossible even, to draw the line between a picture which is decorative and decoration which is pictorial; but there is no difficulty in drawing a band on one side of which is decoration and on the other picture. You have only to draw it wide enough. If we can succeed in defining a picture as distinguished from a work of decorative art, and can then show how a stained glass window, in attempting to conform to conditions which we have agreed to call pictorial, fails of its decorative function, it will then not be so difficult to see how, in proportion as glass aims at the pictorial, it falls short of making good windows. Granted, then, that a picture may fulfil all decorative conditions, and that a decoration may sometimes rightly be pictorial, that the two go, as historically they did, a long way hand in hand, it is contended that there is a point at which decoration and picture part company and take distinctly different ways; thenceforth, if either is led away by the other, it is at the cost of possible success in the direction more peculiarly its own.
Now, the first point at which picture definitely parts company with decoration is where the painter begins to consider his work apart from its surroundings. The problems the artist may set himself to solve are two. “How shall I adorn this church, this clerestory, this chancel, this window, with stained glass?”—that is distinctly a problem of the decorator; “How shall I realise, on canvas or what not, this thought of mine, this fact in nature, this effect seen or imagined?”—that is distinctly a problem of the painter. Each, it is granted, may be swayed more or less by the other consideration also, but according as a man starts with the one problem or the other, and seeks primarily to solve that, he is painter or decorator. Suppose him seriously to endeavour to combine pictorial and decorative qualities in his work, there will come times when he has perforce to choose between the two. Upon the choice he makes will hang the final character of his work, decorative or pictorial.
We are too much in the habit of laying down laws as to what a man may or may not do in art. He may do what he can. He may introduce as much decorative intention into his picture, as much pictorial effect into his decoration, as it will stand; it is not till he overweights one with the other, attempts more than his means or his power allow him, and fails to do the thing that was to be done, that we can say he has gone wrong.
When the two ideals of decoration and painting were more nearly one, and in proportion as that was so, success in the two directions was possible; when painting aimed at effects, of painting—in proportion, that is, as it became pictorial—it was impossible. It is safe to say, since masters attempted it and failed—since, for example, the finest work in glass which aims at the pictorial and depends upon painting ends always in being either thin or opaque in effect—that the happy medium was not found. The fact is, the time came when a painter, in order to design successfully for glass, was called upon to relinquish some of the effects he had come greatly to value in painting: effects of light and shade, atmosphere, reflected light, relief, perspective, violent foreshortening. To seek these at the expense of qualities proper to decoration and to glass, was to attempt picture; to sacrifice such pictorial qualities to considerations of architectural fitness, to the quality of the glass, its translucency, its colour, its consistent treatment, was to attempt decoration; and in proportion as the sacrifice is not made, the work of the glass painter may be characterised as “pictorial.” There should now be no possible misunderstanding as to what is meant by the word. It implies something of reproach, but only as applied to glass. Let the pictorial flourish, in its place—that is, in picture. All it is here meant to assert is that, pictures being what they are, what they were already by the end of the sixteenth century, the pictorial element in stained glass is bound to spoil the window.
There are two respects in which a stained glass window differs from a picture: first, in that it is a window; second, in that it is glass. Suppose we take these two points separately. It scarcely needs showing that the designing of a window is a very different thing from the painting of a picture. In the first place, the architectural frame of the window is there, arbitrarily fixed, whereas the painter chooses his frame to suit his picture. The designer of a window has not only to accept the window-shape, but to respect both it and the architecture of the building. The scale of his work, the main lines of its composition, if not more, are practically determined for him by architectural considerations, just as the depth of colour in his scheme is determined by the position of his window and the amount of light he desires “or is allowed” to shut out. Moreover, he has to accept the window plane, to acknowledge it as part of the building, to let you feel, whatever he does, that it is a window you see, and not something through the window or standing in it. That was tried, as we have seen, at Gouda and S. Gudule; but, even if the illusion had been achieved, it would have been destructive of architectural effect. The idea of a picture seen through the mullions of a window is one of the will-o’-the-wisps which led glass painters astray. They did not succeed; and, had they done so, they would have given a very false, and to some of us a very uncomfortable, impression of not being protected from the outer air.
Mullions are in any case a very serious consideration. It has been shown already ([page 197]) how the artist sought continuity of subject through the lights of his window, and gradually extended his picture across them. And if he is at liberty to occupy a four-light window with the Virgin and Child and the Three Kings, and if it is lawful to introduce more than one figure into a light, why may not each king be accompanied by an attendant, holding his horse or bearing gifts; why should not the Kings kneel in adoration; why should not Joseph be there, the manger, and the cattle; why should there not be one landscape stretching behind the Magi, binding the whole into one picture? So with the Crucifixion. If the Virgin and S. John may occupy sidelights, why not introduce as well in a larger window the two thieves, the Magdalene at the foot of the cross, the good centurion, the soldiers, the crowd? Obviously there is no reason why the subject should not be carried across a window; and from the time that windows were divided into lights it was done, at all events in the case of certain subjects, such as the Tree of Jesse, which spread throughout the window, or the Last Judgment, for which the available space was yet never enough.
But there is a wide difference between designing a subject which extends through the whole width of a window and designing it so that it appears to be seen through the window. In the one case the mullions are seriously taken into account; in the other they are ignored. If you were looking at a scene through a window, of course the mullions would interfere. Why, therefore, consider them if you wish to produce the effect of something seen through? Naturally you would not allow the stonework to cut across the face of a principal personage, or anything of that kind; but, apart from that, its intervention would only add to the air of reality. The problem of dealing with the mullions is thus rather shirked than solved. Its solution is not really so difficult as would seem. Mullions count for much less in the window than one would suppose. The eye, for example, follows naturally the branches of a Tree of Jesse from one light into another, and it is not felt that the stonework interferes with it at all seriously, whilst the scheming of the figures, each within a single light, is a very distinct acknowledgment of its individuality. So in the case of a subject. If the design is so planned that the important figures are grouped in separate lights, the landscape or other continuous background helps to hold the picture together, and is not hurt by the mullions.
The important thing is that mullions should be considered; only on that condition do they cease to interfere with the design. There is no reason always to put a border round each light, or even to keep every figure within the bounds of a single light. A reclining figure, such as that of Jesse at the base of the window ([below]), Jacob asleep and dreaming, or the widow’s son upon the bier, may safely cross two or three lights, if it be designed with reference to the intervening stonework.
Further, it seems desirable that the shape of each separate window opening should be acknowledged by at least a narrow fillet of white or pale colour next the masonry, broken, it may be, here and there by some feature designed to hold the lights together, but practically clearing the colour from the stonework, and giving to the division of the window the slight emphasis it deserves. It is not worth while dividing a window into lights and then effacing the divisions in the glass. Given a window of four or five lights, the decorator has no choice but to design a four or five-light window. He must render his subject so that the constructional divisions of the window keep their proper architectural place; if his subject will not allow that, he must abandon his subject, or give very good reason why not. The reason of mere pictorial ambition will not hold good. The test of a good picture-window is, how the mullions affect the design. If to take them away would make it look foolish, then it has probably been designed as a window, decoratively; if to take them away would improve it, then it has been designed pictorially; and, however good a picture it might have been, it is a bad window design.
171. S. Mary’s, Shrewsbury.
It is quite possible, nay, probable, that in connection with any given window, or series of windows, there will be architectural features which deserve to be emphasised. It may be the springing of the arch which calls for accentuation; it may be a string-course in the walls that asks for recognition; it may be that the proportion of the window wants correction. Whatever it be, it is the part of the decorator to feel the want and to meet it, to grasp the situation and to accept it. In not doing so, he shows perhaps pictorial, certainly not decorative, instinct. So with regard to the plane of a glass picture. It is not necessary to restrict one’s design to silhouette, to make one’s picture as flat as the first glass painters or the Greek vase painters made theirs. How much of distance and relief a man may indulge in is partly his own affair. It depends upon what he can manage to do without destroying the surface of his window. So long as he preserve that, he may do as he pleases, and yet not lay himself open to the charge of being unduly pictorial; only it is as well to remember that on the simplest and severest lines grand work has been done, and may still be done, without falling into archaism; whilst the Crabeths, and the rest of the astoundingly clever glass painters of Gouda fail to reconcile us to the attempt to render the sky beyond ([page 258]) or distant architectural vistas in glass.
It has sometimes been contended that all lines of perspective (which in the sixteenth century begin to take a very important place in design) are amiss in glass, inasmuch as they destroy its flatness. That is surely to go too far. So long as no effect of relief is sought, no effect of distance attempted, no illusion aimed at, one can hardly find fault with lines indicating the perspective necessary perhaps to the expression of the design—assuming, of course, that the lines of perspective take their place in the decorative scheme, and help the composition of the window. They do that very cleverly in Crabeth’s picture of “Christ Purifying the Temple” ([page 244]). Our complaint is rather with the strong relief attempted, the abuse of shadow, and especially of painted shadow. The case is far worse where, as at S. Eustache, Paris, the architectural background is shown obliquely. In that case, no uncommon one in the seventeenth century, when the painter would just as likely as not choose his point of view as best suited his picture, without any reference whatever to its architectural setting, the painter shows himself, as glass painter, at his most pictorial and worst.
So much for the window as an architectural feature, now let us look at it as glass.
It becomes here very much a question of craftsmanship. To a workman it seems so natural, and so obvious, that the material he is working in, and the tools he is using, must from beginning to end affect the treatment of his design, that it appears almost unnecessary to insist upon such a truism. Experience, however, goes to show that only the workman and here and there a man who ought, perhaps, to have been one, have any appreciation of what artists call treatment. The rest of the world have heard tell that there is such a thing as technique, to which they think far too much importance is attached. That is so, indeed, when artists think technique is enough; but not when they look upon it as indispensable, the beginning of all performance, not when they insist that a man shall know the grammar of his art before he breaks out into poetry.
Now the A, B, C, of workmanship is to treat each material after its kind. It is a truism, therefore, to say that glass should be treated as glass. Yet we find that a man may be enthusiastic to a degree about an art, learned above most men in its history, and yet end in entirely misconceiving its scope. “What is to be condemned on canvas,” said Winston, “ought not to be admitted on glass.” As well might he have said, that what would be condemned on glass should not be allowed on canvas, or that language and behaviour which would be unbecoming in church should not be tolerated on the platform, or at the dinner-table.
The fallacy that one rule applies to all forms of art is responsible alike for the muddiness of seventeenth and eighteenth century windows and for the thin transparent tinting of nineteenth century Munich glass.
That “art is one” is a fine saying, rightly understood. So is humanity one, and it is well to remind ourselves of the fact; but race, climate, country, count for something; and to speak with effect we must speak the language of the land. Each separate craft included in the all-embracing title of art, and making for its good and its glory, works under conditions as definite as those of climate, has characteristics as marked as those of nationality, and speaks also a language of its own. And, to express itself to full purpose, it must speak in its own tongue. The only pictures, then, which prove satisfactory in glass are the pictures of the glass painter; and by glass painter is not meant any one who may choose to try his hand at glass painting, but the man who has learnt his trade and knows it from end to end, to whom use has become second nature, who thinks in glass, as we say. Now and again, perhaps, where a draughtsman and a glass painter are in unusual sympathy, it may be possible for the one to translate the design of the other into the language of his craft; but good translators are rare, and translation is at best second-hand. Success in glass is achieved mainly by the man to whom ideas come in the form of glass, who sees them first in his mind’s eye as windows. Even such a man may lack taste, insight, discretion; he may be led away by a misplaced ambition—it is not merely on the stage that the low comedian aspires to play Hamlet—but only the man who knows so well the dangers ahead that he insensibly avoids them, who knows so surely what can be got out of his material that he makes straight for that, who does, in short, the best that can be done in glass, can dare to be “pictorial” without danger of being false to his trade.
A painter without experience of glass might, of course, be coached in the technique of the material; but he would never get the most out of it. Conditions which to the glass painter would be as easy as an old coat, would be a restraint to him, and the greater his position the more impatient he would be of such restraint, the more surely his will would override the better judgment of the subordinate who happened to know.
172. Christ purging the Temple, Gouda.
It was unfortunate that at a critical period in the history of glass, just when great painters from the outside began to be called in to design for it, knowledge was in rather an uncertain state. The use of enamel had been discovered; it offered undoubted facilities to the painter; it was believed in; it was the fashion. Any one who had protested the superiority of the old method would possibly have been set down as an old fogey, even by glass painters. At that moment, very likely, a glass painter, anxious of course to conciliate the great man, but flushed also with faith in his new-found method, would have said to Van Orley, in reply to any question about technique:—“Never you mind about glazing and all that; give us a design, and we will execute it in glass.” And he did execute it in a masterly and quite wonderful way. Still the success of it is less than it would have been had the designer known all about glass: in that case his artistic instinct would have led him surely to trust more to qualities inherent in glass, and less to painting upon it. Van Orley’s picture scheme depended too much upon relief to be really well adapted to glass, but it was splendidly monumental in design, and to that extent admirably decorative. Something of decorative restraint we find almost to the end in sixteenth century work; the picture had not yet emancipated itself entirely, and the pictorial ideal did not therefore necessarily go beyond what glass could do; in any case, it did not take quite a different direction.
It may be as well to define more precisely the ideal glass picture. The ideal glass picture is, the picture which gives full scope for the qualities of glass, and does not depend in any way upon effects which cannot be obtained in glass, or which are to be attained only at the sacrifice of qualities peculiar to it.
And what are those qualities? The qualities of glass are light and colour, a quality of light and a quality of colour to be obtained no other way than by the transmission of light through pot-metal glass.
Compare these qualities with those of oil painting, and see how far they are compatible. Something depends upon the conception of oil painting. The qualities of glass are compatible enough with the pictorial ideal of the oil (or more likely tempera) painters whom we designate by the name of “primitives”; and, indeed, fifteenth century Italian windows often take the form of circular pictures which one of the masters might have designed. A painting by Botticelli, Filippo Lippi, Mantegna, or Crivelli, might almost be put into the hands of a glass painter to translate. It is quite possible that some of the Florentine windows were executed in Germany from paintings by Italian masters; the odd thing is that they are attributed sometimes to sculptors. Ghiberti and Donatello may, for all one knows, have been great colourists; but it is so universal a foible to ascribe works of decorative art to famous painters or sculptors who could never by any possibility have had a hand in them, that one never has much faith in such reputed authorship.
The severity of the “primitive” painters’ design, the firm outline, the comparatively flat treatment, the brilliant, not yet degraded, colour—all these were qualities which the glass painter could turn to account. Without firm and definite outline, of course, a design does not lend itself to mosaic. But it is especially the early painter’s ideal of colour which was so sympathetic to the glass painter. A designer for glass must be a colourist; but the colour he seeks is sui generis. Not every colourist would make a glass designer. Van Thulden may not have been a colourist of his master’s stamp, but Peter Paul Rubens himself could not have made a complete success of those windows in the Chapel of Our Lady in S. Gudule. Reynolds was a colourist, but he came conspicuously to grief in glass. Velasquez was a colourist, but one fails to see how by any possibility the quality of his work could be expressed in glass.
On the other hand, colour in which the simple artist delighted, as in light and sunshine, in the sparkle of the sea, in the purity of the sky, in the brilliancy of flowers, in the flash of jewels, in the deep verdure of moss, in the lusciousness of fruit or wine, colour as the early Florentine painters saw it and sought it—this is what glass can give, and gives better than oil, tempera, or fresco, on an opaque surface. How far these early painters deliberately sacrificed to pure bright colour qualities of light and shade, aerial perspective, and so on, may be open to question. The certain thing is that, if we want the quality of glass in all its purity and translucency, we have to sacrifice to it something of the light and shade, the relief, the atmospheric effect, the subtlety of realistic colour, which we are accustomed nowadays to look for in a picture. Happy the men who could contentedly pursue their work undisturbed by the thought that there were effects to be obtained in art beyond what it was possible for them to get.
Even the Italian painters soon travelled beyond the limits of what could possibly be done in glass. Flesh-painting, as Titian understood it, or Correggio, or Bonifacio, is hopelessly beyond its range. But it was the Dutch who formed for themselves the idea most widely and hopelessly beyond realisation in glass. The Crabeths, like good glass painters, struggled more or less against it; but they could not keep out of the current altogether; and in proportion as their work aims at anything like chiaroscuro it loses its quality of glass. Rembrandt, to have realised his ideal in glass, would have had to paint out of it every quality which distinguishes it and gives it value. In proportion, as the painter’s aim was light and shade rather than colour, and especially as it was shade rather than light (or perhaps it would be fairer to say, as it was light intensified by obscuring light around it) it was diametrically opposed to that of the glass painter. His pursuit of it was a sort of artistic suicide. It led by quick and sure degrees to what was to all intents and purposes the collapse of glass painting. Realism of a kind was inevitable when once the painter gained the strength to realise what he saw, but when the glass painter, seeking the strength of actual light and shade, began to rely upon painted shadow for his effects, the case was hopeless. Glass asks to be translucent.
The point of perfection in glass design is not easily to be fixed. Glass painting, it must be confessed, as it approaches perfection of technique, is always dangerously near the border line; the painter is so often tempted to carry his handiwork a little further than is consistent with the translucency of glass. It happens, therefore, that one expects almost to find consummate drawing and painting marred by some obscuration of the glass. If on the other hand we travel back to the time when the evil does not exist, we find ourselves at a period when neither drawing nor painting were at their best. It is by no means surprising that this should be the outcome of the association of glazier and painter. According as one cares more for glass or for painting one will be disposed to shift, backwards or forwards, the date at which glass painting began to decline. It may safely be said, however, that pictorial glass painting was at its best during the first half of the sixteenth century. That is the period during which you may expect to find masterly drawing, consummate painting, and yet sufficient recognition of the character of glass to satisfy all but the staunch partisan of pure mosaic glass—who, by the way, stands upon very firm ground.
In Flanders, as has been said, and in France, are to be found exquisite pictures in glass, admirably decorative in design, glowing with jewel-like brilliancy of colour, not seriously obscured by paint, the figures modelled with a delicacy reminding one rather of sculpture in very low relief than of more realistic painting and carving, the colour delicate and yet not thin, the effect strong without brutality.
But it is in Italy that are to be seen probably the finest glass pictures that have ever been painted; the work, nevertheless, of a Frenchman—William of Marseilles—who established himself at Arezzo, and painted, amongst other glass, five windows for the cathedral there, which go about as far as glass can go in the direction of picture. The man was a realist in his way—realist, that is, so far as suited his artistic purpose. Not merely are his figures studied obviously from the life, but they are conceived in the realistic spirit, as when, in the scene of the Baptism, he draws a man getting into his clothes with the difficulty we have all experienced after bathing, or when, in the Raising of Lazarus ([page 397]), he makes more than one onlooker hold his nose as the grave-clothes are unwrapped from the body. In design the artist is quite up to the high level of his day (1525 or thereabouts); but you see all through his work that it was colour, always colour, that made his heart beat (we have here nothing to do with the religious sentiment which may or may not be embodied in his work), colour that prompted his design, as in the case of so many a great Italian master.
This man possibly did in glass much what he would have done on canvas; but he could never have got such pure, intense, and at the same time luminous, effects of colour in anything but glass, and he knew it, never lost sight of it, and tried to get the most out of what it could best give him—that is to say, purity of colour, and translucency and brilliancy of glass. Whatever amount of pigment he employed (probably more than it seems, the light is so strong in Italy) it seldom appears to do more than just give the needful modelling. Now and again, in the architectural parts of his composition, the white is lowered by means of a matt of paint, where a tint of deeper-coloured glass had better have been employed; but even there the effect is neither dirty nor in the least heavy. And in the main, for all his pictorial bias, the system of the artist is distinctly mosaic; his colour is pot-metal always or purest stain. The sky and the landscape, for example, in which the scene of the Baptism is laid, are leaded up in tints of blue and green. In the scene where Christ purges the Temple the pavement is of clear aquamarine-tinted glass, against which the scales, moneybags, overturned bench, and so on, stand out in quite full enough relief of red and yellow, without any aid of heavy shading, or cast shadow, such as a Netherlander would have used.
And, for all that, the difficulty even of foreshortening is boldly faced. Not even in the most violently shaded Flemish glass would it be easy to find a figure more successfully foreshortened than the kneeling money-changer, scooping up his money into a bag. That a designer could do this without strong shading, means that he was careful to choose the pose or point of view which allowed itself to be expressed in lightly painted glass. There is no riotous indulgence in perspective, but distance is sufficiently indicated; and the personages in the background, drawn to a smaller scale than the chief actors in the scene, keep their place in the picture. Everywhere it is apparent that the figures have been composed with a cunning eye to glazing.
These are not pictures which have been done into glass; they are no translations, but the creations of a glass painter—one who knew all about glass, and instinctively designed only what could be done in it, and best done. This man makes full use of all the resources of his art. His window is constructed as only a glazier could do it. He does not shirk his leads. He uses abrasion freely, not so much to save glazing, as to get effects not otherwise possible. Thus the deep red skirt or petticoat of the woman taken in adultery is dotted with white in a way that bespeaks at a glance the woman of the people, whilst more sumptuous draperies of red and green are, as it were, embroidered with gold, or sewn with pearls. These are the effects he aims at, not the mere texture of silk or velvet. He delights in delicate stain on white, and revels in most gorgeous stain upon stain. In short, these are pictures indeed, but the pictures of a glass painter.
Work like this disarms criticism. One may have a strong personal bias towards strictly mosaic glass, and yet acknowledge that success justifies departure from what one thought the likelier way. Things of beauty decline to be put away always in the nice little pigeon-holes we have carefully provided for them. Shall we be such pedants as to reject them because they do not fit in with our preconceived ideas of fitness?
Alas!—or happily?—alas for what might have been, happily for our wavering allegiance to sterner principles of design, it is seldom that the glass painter so perfectly tunes his work to the key of glass. In particular, he finds it difficult to harmonise his painting with the glazing which goes with it. He is incapable in the early sixteenth century of the brutalities of his successors, who carry harsh lines of lead across flesh painting recklessly; but the very association of ultra-delicate painting with lead lines at all demands infinite tact. An idea of the point to which painting is eventually carried may be gathered from the representation of little nude boys blowing bubbles in which are reflected the windows of the room where they are supposed to be playing. That is an extreme instance, and a late one. Short, however, of such frivolity, and in work of the good period, painting is often so delicate that bars and leads unquestionably hurt it. It is so even in the very fine Jesse window at Beauvais ([page 368]).
Occur where it may it is a false note which stops our admiration short; and, after all our enthusiasm, we come back heart-whole to our delight in the earlier, bolder, more monumental, and more workmanlike mosaic glass. The beautiful sixteenth century work at Montmorency or at Conches does not shake the conviction of the glass-lover, that the painter is there a little too much in evidence, that something of simple, dignified decoration is sacrificed to the display of his skill. The balance between glass decoration and picture is perhaps never more nearly adjusted than in some of the rather earlier Italian windows.
CHAPTER XX.
LANDSCAPE IN GLASS.
At once a distinguishing feature of picture-glass, and a characteristic of later work generally, is the mise-en-scène of the subject.
173. From The Entry into Jerusalem, Fairford.
In quite the earliest glass the figures, it was shown, were cut out against a ground of plain colour ([pages 33], [127]), or diapered perhaps with a painted pattern, or leaded up in squares, or broken by spots of pot-metal ([page 37]), which, by the way, being usually of too strongly contrasting colour, assert themselves instead of qualifying its tone. Sometimes the ground was leaded up in the form of a more or less elaborate geometric diaper ([page 336]). Occasionally it was broken by the simplest possible conventional foliage. The figure stood on a cloud, an inscribed label, a disc or band of earth. In the fourteenth century spots breaking the ground took very often the form of badges, fleurs-de-lys, heraldic animals, cyphers, and so on ([page 156]), and even in the fifteenth it was quite common to find figures against a flat ground, broken only by inscription, either on white or yellow labels ([pages 186], [339]), or leaded in bold letters of white or yellow into the background itself ([page 196]). But simultaneously with this the figure was frequently represented against a screen of damask ([page 191]), above which showed the further background, usually more or less architectural in character. In the Fairford windows ([page 187]) is shown this treatment together with the label which helps to break the formality of the horizontal line. Sometimes the line is curved, as though the figure stood in a semicircular niche, or broken, as though the recess were three-sided. Sometimes the figure stood upon a pedestal ([page 391]), but more usually, as time went on, upon a pavement. Certain subjects were bound to include accessory architecture, but at first it was as simple as the scenery in the immortal play of Pyramus and Thisbe. But even in the fifteenth century it was rendered, one may judge how naïvely, from the little Nativity on [page 54], a subject hardly to be rendered without the stable. Again, the quite conventional vinework, also from Malvern, shown in the upper part of [page 345] (a jumble of odds and ends), forms really part of the scene depicting Noah in his vineyard—see the hand holding the spade handle. The Fairford scenery ([pages 251], [372]), quaint as it is, goes much nearer to realism than that; and towards the sixteenth century, and during its first years, there was a good deal of landscape in which trees were leaded in vivid green against blue, with gleaming white stems suggestive of birch-bark, always effective, and refreshingly cool in colour. There is something of that kind in the window facing the entrance to King’s College, Cambridge; but the more usual English practice in the fifteenth century was to execute the landscape in white and stain against a coloured ground. That is the system adopted in the scene of the Creation at Malvern ([page 252]), where trees, water, birds, fishes, are all very delicately painted and stained. In the left-hand corner it will be seen that solid or nearly solid brown is used for foliage in order to throw up the white and yellow leafage in front of it. There is some considerably later work very much in this manner at S. Nizier, Troyes. But that kind of thing was not usual in French glass.
174. From The Creation, Malvern Abbey.
The sky had of course from the first been indicated by a blue background; but, the blue ground being used, in alternation with ruby, for all backgrounds, except a few in white, it was not distinctive enough to suggest the heavens, without some indication of clouds, which accordingly were leaded up upon it, sometimes in mere streaks of colour, sometimes in fantastically ornamental shapes. It was a later thought, which came with the use of paler glass, to paint the blue with clouds, indicating them, that is to say, more or less in the form of diaper. As with the sky so with the sea. It was at first glazed in wave pattern; eventually the wave lines were painted on the blue.
The blue background, which had gradually become paler and paler, became soon in the sixteenth century pale enough to stand approximately for a grey-blue sky, on which was painted, with marvellous delicacy, distant landscape, architecture, or what not, always in the brown tint used generally for shading, although a tint of green was given to grass and trees by the use of yellow stain. This distant view painted upon blue was a beautiful and most characteristic feature of sixteenth century glass. The French painters adopted it, and made it peculiarly their own, though it occurs also in German and Flemish glass. Backgrounds of this kind, which in themselves suffice to mark the departure from Gothic use, are shown on [pages 207], [213], and on a larger scale [opposite]. The wintry landscape there with the bare tree trunks against the cold grey sky, forms the upper portion of the subject shown on [page 207], in which Our Lord gives His charge to Peter; the paler grey behind the heads of the group stands for the sea. The wintry effect of the scene is not suggestive of the Holy Land, but it brings the subject innocently home to us. The leads, it will be seen, take the lines of the larger limbs of the trees, whilst the lesser branches and small twigs are painted on the glass. There is ingenuity in the glazing as well as delicacy in the painting. This is a very different thing from the landscape painted in enamel colours. The propriety, the beauty, the decorative quality of such work as this, comes of the acceptance of the necessary convention of treating the painted background, of rendering it, that is, always more or less in monochrome, and not attempting anything like realism in colour.
The painted landscapes illustrated are of the simplest. The French painters went much further than that, associating with their painting broad masses of pot-metal colour, but still keeping distinctly within the convention of deliberately simple colour. By the use of silvery-white and shades of pot-metal blue and purple and green, they produced the most pleasing and harmonious effects. There was no great variety in the tune they played, but the variations upon it were infinite. Let us picture here a few of them.
1. Ecouen.—A distant city, in white, and beyond that more distant architecture, painted on the pale blue of the sky.
2. Conches.—Against a pale blue sky, broken by cumulous white clouds, a grey-blue tower.
3. Conches.—A grey-blue sea and deeper sky beyond: from the waves rises a castle, in white, breaking the sky-line, the pointed roofs of its turrets painted in black upon the background.
175. Background to the Charge of S. Peter, S. Vincent, Rouen. ([Comp. 156.])
4. Freiburg, 1528.—A smoke-grey sea, fading away towards the horizon into pale silver, the sky beyond dark blue, its outline broken by a range of deeper blue mountains.
5. Conches.—Beyond the foreground landscape in rich green, a pale blue sea, with slightly deeper grey-blue sky beyond, a tower in darker blue against it; a strip of deep blue shore divides the sky and sea, and gives support to the dark tower; against that a smaller tower catches the light, and stands out in glittering white.
6. Montmorency.—A canopied figure subject in gorgeous colour; the foreground a landscape with rich green herbage, separated by a belt of white cliffs from buildings of pale grey, amidst trees stained greenish, backed by purple hills; further a pale blue sky; against the sky, overshadowed beneath the canopy arch by a mass of purple cloud, the stained and painted foliage of a tree, growing from this side the hill.
7. Montmorency.—S. Christopher crossing the stream; blue water painted with waves and water plants, the foliage stained.
8. S. Nizier, Troyes.—A vineyard, very prettily managed; the vines painted on the blue, their leaves stained to green, the grapes grey-blue, whilst grey stakes are leaded in pot-metal.
Sometimes, as at Ecouen, far-off architecture would be painted not upon blue but upon a pale purple hill. At Laigle figures and animals are painted upon green, but they do not hold their own. On the other hand, at Alençon, some distant figures appearing in very pale grey against a delicate greenish landscape (stained upon the grey), are charming in effect.
White backgrounds painted as delicately as the blue are not rare. At Groslay, for example, steely-white architecture is separated from white sky beyond by grey-blue hills, a church with blue steeple breaking the sky. But white does not lend itself so readily to combination with colour as blue; and, as a rule, such backgrounds are grisaille in character, relieved, of course, with stain.
The great sea-scape at Gouda ([page 223]), representing the taking of Dalmatia in Egypt (a very Dutch Dalmatia), is nearly all in grisaille, against quarries of clear white, with only a little stain in the flags and costumes, and one single touch of poor ruby (about two inches square), which looks as if it might be modern. The port in perspective, the ships, the whole scene, in fact, is realistically rendered, and comes as near to success as is possible in glass.
Delightful peeps of landscape are sometimes seen through the columns and arches of an architectural background. Whether the architecture be in purple of divers shades, or in white with only shadows in purple, or whether the nearer architecture be in white and the more distant in purple, in any case a distance beyond is commonly painted upon the grey-blue sky seen through it. Possibly, as at Conches, further vistas of architecture may be stained greenish upon it—any colour almost, for a change. But whatever it may be, and wherever it may be, in the best work it is colour; and it is always more effective than where the shadow is represented by paint, even though the brown be not laid on with a heavy hand, infinitely more effective than when blue or other coloured enamels are relied upon, as in some instances at Montmorency. Enamel may, for all one can tell, have been used in some of the landscapes here commended—it is impossible to say without minute examination of the glass, which is rarely feasible—but it never asserts its presence; and in any case it has not been used in sufficient quantity to damage the effect.
It will be gathered from the descriptions of early sixteenth century glazed and painted distances, that they were as carefully schemed with a view to glazing (though in a very different way) as a Gothic picture. Sometimes, as at Conches, they are rather elaborately leaded; and where that is the case there is not so much danger of incongruity between the delicacy of the painting and the strength of the leads—which assert themselves less than where they occur singly. It stands to reason also that the more mosaic the glass the less fragile it is. Painting alone upon the blue is best employed for small peeps of distance. It adapts itself to smaller windows; and it must be done (as for a while it was done) so well, that it seems as if the designer must himself have painted it. Were the artist always the glass painter, and the glass painter always an artist, who knows what case pictorial glass might not make out for itself?
176. The Relief of Leyden, Gouda.
It is a coarser kind of distance than the French that we find at King’s College, Cambridge. There the landscape backgrounds are in white and stain, grey-blue being reserved for the sky beyond, broken more or less by white clouds, or, occasionally, by the white trunks of trees, the foliage of which is sometimes glazed in green glass, sometimes painted upon the blue and stained. Here and there a distant tree is painted entirely upon the blue. This treatment is not ill adapted to subjects on the large scale of the work at King’s College, but one does not feel that the painters made anything like the most of their opportunity. The inexperience of the designers is shown in their fear of using leads, a most unnecessary fear, seeing that, at the distance the work is from the eye, the bars themselves have only about the value of ordinary lead lines.
Stronger and more workmanlike, but not quite satisfactory, is the much later landscape (1557) of Dirk Crabeth at Gouda. There the sky is blue, leaded in quarries, on which are trees, painted and stained, and some rather florid clouds. In the later work generally the lead lines are no longer either frankly acknowledged or skilfully disguised. The outline of a green hill against the sky will be feebly softened with trivial little twigs and scraps of painted leafage. The decline of landscape is amply illustrated at Troyes. At Antwerp again there is a window bearing date 1626, in which the landscape background of a quite incomprehensible subject extends to a distant horizon, above which the sky is glazed in white quarries, with clouds painted upon it. This is an attempt to repeat the famous feat of glass painting which had been done some twenty years before at Gouda. The Relief of Leyden, of which a diagram is here given, is in its way a most remarkable glass picture. In the foreground is a crowd of soldiers and citizens, upon the quay, about lifesize. They form a band of rich colour at the base of the composition; but the design is confused by the introduction of shields of arms and their supporters immediately in front of the scene. Beyond are the walls and towers of the city of Delft, and the adjacent towns and villages, and the river dwindling into the far distance where Leyden lies—in the glass a really marvellous bird’s-eye view over characteristically flat country. The horizon extends almost to the springing line of the window arch, and above that rises a sky of plain blue quarries, broken only towards the top by a few bolster-like and rather dirty white clouds. Absolute realism is of course not reached, but it is approached near enough to startle us into admiration. It is astonishing what has here been done. But the painter has not done what he meant to do. That was not possible, even with the aid of enamel.
CHAPTER XXI.
ITALIAN GLASS.
In the course of the preceding chapters the reader has been rather unceremoniously carried from country to country, in a way which may have seemed to him erratic. But there was a reason in the zig-zag course taken. The progress of the glass painter’s art was not by any means a straight line. Nor did it develop itself on parallel lines in the various countries in which it throve. It advanced in one place whilst it was almost at a standstill in another.
That is easily understood. It was inevitable that glass painting, though it arose in France, should languish there during the troublous times when English troops overran it under Edward III. and throughout the Hundred Years’ War, that it should revive in all its glory under Francis the First, and that during the disturbances of the Fronde it should again decline. The extremity of France was England’s opportunity; and our greatest wealth of stained glass windows dates from the reign of the later Plantagenets. The Wars of the Roses do not appear greatly to have affected art; but after the Reformation we were more busy smashing glass than painting it.
In Germany the course of art ran smoother. Glass throve under the Holy Roman Empire, and it was not until the Reformation that it suffered any very severe check. Mediæval Swiss glass may be classed with German.
In the Netherlands glass painting blossomed out suddenly under the Imperial favour of Charles V. It continued to bear fruit under the Dutch Republic, until it ran to seed at the end of the seventeenth century.
So it happens that, in following the development of glass painting, it has been necessary to seek the best and most characteristic illustrations first in one country and then in another, to travel from France to England, from England to Germany and back to France, thence to Flanders, to France again, and finally once more to the Netherlands, to say nothing of shorter excursions from one place to another, as occasion might demand. In each separate locality there was naturally some sort of progress, but we cannot take any one country as all-sufficient type of the rest; and to have traversed each in turn would have been tedious. There were everywhere differences of practice and design; in each country, for that matter, there were local schools with marked characteristics of their own. Some of the characteristic national differences have been pointed out in passing. To describe them at length would be to write a comparative history of glass, of which there is here no thought. What concerns us is the broadly marked progress of glass painting, not the minor local differences in style.
Something more, however, remains to be said of Italian glass than was possible in any general survey. The mere facts, that the Renaissance arose in Italy so long before it reached this side the Alps, and that glass painting was never really quite at home in Italy (any more than the Gothic architecture which mothered it), sufficiently account for the difficulty, nay, the impossibility, of classing it according to the Gothic periods. Indeed, one is reminded in Italian glass less often of other windows of the period, English, French, or German, than of contemporary Italian painting.
The comparative fitness of the works of the “Primitive” painters for models of glass design has already been pointed out. It is so evident that the Italian sense of colour could find more adequate expression than ever in glass, that one is inclined to wonder, until it is remembered that Italian churches were at the same time picture galleries, that it did not more commonly find vent in that medium. Even as it is, Italian painters did found a school of glass painting, comparatively uninfluenced by the traditional Gothic types of design, whilst observing the best traditions of glazier-like technique. Hence it is that we find in Italy windows such as are nowhere else to be seen, windows which at their best are of the very best.
There are resemblances in Italian glass to German work; and some of it is said to have been executed by Germans. It is none the less Italian. Though it were executed in Germany, glazier and painter must have worked under the direct influence of the Italian master, and in complete accord with him, putting at his service all their experience in their craft, and all their skill. So well did they work together, that it seems more likely that the executant not only worked under the eye of the master, but was at his elbow whilst he designed. That alone would account satisfactorily for the absolutely harmonious co-operation of designer and glass-worker. One thing is clear, that the artist, whatever his experience in glass, great or little, had absolute sympathy with his new material, felt what it could do, saw the opportunities it offered him, and seized them.
An Englishman, or a Frenchman, who found himself for the first time in Italy, would be puzzled to give a date to the windows at Pisa or Milan, or in either of the churches of S. Francis at Assisi. Even an expert in the glass of other countries has to speak guardedly as to Italian work, or he may have to retract his words. Italian Gothic is so Italian and so little Gothic, it is of no use attempting to compare it with Northern work. To those, moreover, who have been in the habit of associating the Renaissance with the sixteenth century, the forms of Quattro-Cento ornament will persist at first in suggesting the later date—just as the first time one goes to Germany the survival of the old form of lettering in inscriptions throws a suspicion of lingering Gothic influence over even full-blown Renaissance design. It takes some time to get over the perplexity arising from the unaccustomed association of an absolutely mosaic treatment of glass (which with us would mean emphatically Gothic work) with distinctly Renaissance detail, such as one finds at the churches already mentioned, at the Certosa of Pavia, or at Florence.
At Assisi the glass means, for the most part, to be Gothic. One is reminded there sometimes of German work, both by the colour of the glass and by the design of some of the medallion and other windows. The ornament generally inclines to the naturalistic rather than to the Quattro-Cento arabesque, or to the geometric kind shown on [page 96]; and though it includes a fair amount of interlacing handwork of distinctly Italian type, and is sometimes as deep in colour as quite Early glass, it is approximately Decorated in character. That is so equally with the brilliant remains in the tracery lights of Or San Michele at Florence. But it is characteristic of Italian glass of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that, both by the depth of its colour and the very quality of the material, it should continually recall the thirteenth century. Sometimes, as at Milan, for example, you find even sixteenth century glass in which there is practically no white at all except what is used for the flesh tint.
In the cathedral at Pisa are some windows with little subjects, framed in ornament, all in richest and most brilliant colour, which are at first sight extremely perplexing. The leading is elaborately minute, and there is no modelling in the figures, which yet have nothing of archaic or very early character. It turns out that the paint upon the glass has perished, and there is hardly a vestige of it left to show that this was not intended for mere mosaic. The effect, nevertheless, is such as to prove how much can be done in pot-metal glass, and how little it depends upon the painting on it.
177. Assisi.
Elsewhere, as at Arezzo (in work earlier than that of William of Marseilles), the paint has often peeled off to a very considerable extent, revealing sometimes patches of quite crude green and purple, which go to show that the Italians habitually used glass of a raw colour, where it suited their convenience, and just toned it down with brown enamel. The result proves that it was a dangerous practice; but, where the paint has held, the effect is not dull or dirty, as with us it would be. The Italian sun accounts probably both for the use of this scum of paint and for its not injuring the effect of colour.
The same quality of deep rich pot-metal colour associated with Renaissance design, is the first thing that strikes one in the windows at Bologna, in the cathedral at Milan, and in Florence everywhere. At Milan in particular there are compositions, in which blue and red predominate, magnificently rich and deep, in spite of recent cleaning. The cunning way in which green is occasionally used to prevent any flowing together of red and blue into purple, is a lesson in colour. Two schemes of design prevail in the nave windows (the old glass in the choir is so mixed up with new that it does not count), both equally simple. In the one the rectangular divisions formed by the mullions and the stouter bars are accepted, without further framing, as separate picture spaces; in the other the main form of the window is taken as frame to a single picture, the mullions being only so far taken into account that the prominent figures are designed within them. Some of these windows are late enough in the century to show a falling off in treatment. In the Apostle window (attributed to Michel Angelo?) the white glass is all reduced to a granular tint of umber; and in the one illustrating the Life of the Virgin there is a most aggressively foreshortened figure, which may have been effective in the cartoon, but is absurd in the glass. It is not, therefore, at Milan that typically Italian glass is best to be studied, though there is enough of it to startle the student of glass whose experience had not hitherto extended so far as Italy. Neither is Italian glass at its best at Bologna, though the city was noted for glass painting, which was practised there by no less a person than the Blessed James of Ulm. But, truth to tell, the best windows at Bologna (they are most of them fairly good) are not those of the Saint but of Pellegrino Tibaldi and Lorenzo Costa. It is at Florence that the distinctive quality of Italian glass is best appreciated. There is a vast quantity of it, varying in date from the early part of the fifteenth to the latter part of the sixteenth century, but it is uniformly Italian, and, with few exceptions, it is extremely good.
Figures under canopies are of common occurrence in Florentine windows; but the canopies differ in several respects, both from the ordinary Gothic canopy and from the shrine-like structure of the later Renaissance. In the first place, the canopy returns in Italy to its primitive dimensions. It may or may not be architecturally interesting, but there is in no case very much of it. The Italians never went canopy-mad; and they kept the framework of their pictures within moderate dimensions. The Italian canopy of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, then, was just a niche, sometimes of Renaissance design, sometimes affecting a more Gothic form with pointed or cusped arch and so on, under which, or in front of which, the figures stood. It bore definite relation to the figures, and it was neither impossible of construction nor absurd in perspective. Occasionally, in later work, as at the Certosa at Pavia, it was delicate in colour, but, as a rule, it was strong and rich. It was not merely that the shadowed portions were glazed in pot-metal, as when, at Santa Croce, the coffered soffits of the arches are one mosaic of jewellery, but that the canopy throughout was in colour.
178. S. Maria Novella, Florence.
That is the most striking characteristic of Italian canopy work, and indeed of other ornamental setting—that it is as rich as the picture, a part of it, not a frame to it. Constructionally, of course, it is a frame; but the colour does away with the effect of framework. It serves rather to connect the patches of contrasting colour in the figures, than to separate one picture from another. Occasionally this results in too much all-overishness, more commonly it results in breadth, making you feel that the window is one. It was explained what use was made of white canopy work in Gothic glass, judiciously to break up the surface of the window. In Italy the surface is judiciously left unbroken, and in that case also the result is most admirable.
179. Florence.
With the exception of an occasional brassy yellow canopy, recalling German colour, the same system of connecting canopy and subject together by colour is adopted alike at S. Croce, at S. Maria Novella, and at the Duomo at Florence. The composition of the windows is simple: within a border of foliage or other ornament, two or three tiers of figures, under modest canopies, separated perhaps by little medallions containing busts or demi-figures. That occurs at S. Domenico, Perugia, as well as at Florence.
A modification of the canopy occurs in the nave windows of the Duomo. The space within a narrow border which frames the broad lancet, is divided into two by a strong upright bar, and the divisions thus formed are treated as separate trefoil-arched lancets, each with another border of its own, the space above being treated much as though it were tracery. (Something like this occurs, it will be remembered, already in the thirteenth century, at Bourges.) In the tall spaces within the borders are the usual tiers of figures under canopies. Again, in the chapel of the Certosa in Val d’Ema, near Florence, there is a window with double-niched canopies and pronounced central shaft dividing the broad lancet into two narrow ones.
The Italian canopy is not of so stereotyped a character as in Decorated or Perpendicular design; and generally it may be said that there is, both in the design and colour of Italian glass, more variety than one finds out of Italy. The plan is less obvious, the scheme less cut and dried; you know much less what to expect than in Northern Gothic, and enjoy more often the pleasure of surprise.
180. S. Giovanni in Monte, Bologna.
Elaborately pictorial schemes of design are less common in Italian glass than might have been expected. There is a famous window in the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, at Venice (1473), in which the four lights below the bands of tracery which here takes the place of transom are given over to subject. There green trees and pale blue water against a deep blue sky and deeper blue hills, anticipate a favourite sixteenth century colour scheme; but the glass is a mere wreck of what was once probably a fine window.
Figure groups on a considerable scale are chiefly to be found in the great “bull’s-eye” windows, which are a striking feature in Italian Gothic churches, occupying a position where in France would have been a rose—over the West door, for example.
181. Arezzo.
These great circular windows, which occur at Arezzo, at Bologna, at Siena, and especially at Florence, are usually surrounded by an arabesque border. Occasionally the border consists of a medley of cherubic wings and faces; occasionally, as at Siena, it is in white, more in the form of mouldings; in one case, at least, it disappears, as it were, behind the figure group in the lower part of the window; but, as a rule, it consists of Renaissance pattern, such as are shown here and on [page 70], large in scale, simple in design, and as mosaic in execution as though it had been twelfth century work. The centre of these circular lights may have, as at the Duomo at Florence, a single upright figure, enthroned, occupying a sort of tall central panel, supported by angels in the spandrils at the sides; or it may have a subject running across it, as in the case of Perino del Vaga’s “Last Supper” (1549) at the West end of the cathedral at Siena. But very often it enclosed one big figure subject, such as the “Descent from the Cross” at Santa Croce, attributed to Ghiberti. An earlier manner of occupying a bull’s-eye is shown in the East window at Siena, dating probably from about the beginning of the fourteenth century. This is subdivided by four huge cross bars (two horizontal and two vertical) into nine compartments, or a cross consisting of one central square, four squarish arms, and four triangular spandrils. Each of these divisions is taken as though it were a separate light, and has its own border, enclosing a separate subject. The bars, it is true, are of great size, wide enough almost to have been of stone; but the scheme rather suggests that the designer was not quite aware, when he designed it, how much less significant they would appear in the glass than they did in his drawing.
Unquestionably the finest windows in Florence are the great lancets in the apse and south apsidal transept of the Duomo, finer than the three lights at the East end of S. Maria Novella, which are so much more often spoken of, possibly because they are seen to so much more advantage in the dark-walled Lady Chapel. It is difficult to trace in these Duomo windows the hand of Ghiberti or Donatello (1434), their reputed designers. They are planned on the simplest lines. In the upper series, the space within a narrowish border is divided, by a band of ornament or inscription, into two fairly equal parts, in each of which stand two figures facing one another ([opposite]) under the simplest form of canopy, if canopy it can be called. It is a mere frame, at the back of which is a two-arched arcade, with shafts disappearing behind the figures. They stand, that is to say, not under but in front of it.
182. Figures, Duomo, Florence.
In the lower series the arrangement is the same, except that the upper compartment contains a single figure, larger in scale, and seated, under a canopy of rather more architectural pretensions. Some of the canopies have cusped arches, and some of the borders are foliated in a more or less Gothic way; but obviously the Gothicism throughout is only in deference to prevailing fashion. In feeling and effect the work is Renaissance.
The design here given shows about one half of a window; but it gives, unfortunately, no hint of the colour. The depth of it may be imagined when it is told that the only approach to white in it is in the beaded line round the nimbus of the figure to the right, and that is of the horniest character. The flesh is of a rich brownish tint.
The head on [page 270] goes nearer to suggesting colour. There again the face is brown, the hair and beard dark and bluish; against it the band round the head, which is ruby, tells light. The orange-yellow nimbus, rayed, is rather lighter still, the beaded fillet edging it bone-white. The drapery is of brightest yellow diapered with occasional blue trefoils, each of which has in its centre a touch of red. The background is of very dark blue, the architecture nearest it bright green, beyond that it is dark red.
183. Florence.
This short explanation will serve to indicate the key in which the colour is pitched. The glass itself, it has been said, is as rich as French work of the twelfth century, as deep as German of the fourteenth, but more vivid than either; there are no low-toned greens or inky blues. The blue is sapphire, the green has the quality of an emerald. In this palette of pure colour the artist revelled. Nowhere as in the Duomo at Florence is one so impressed with the feeling that the designer was dealing deliberately always with colour. Plainly that, and no other, was his impulse, colour—broad, large, beautiful, impressive, solemn colour masses. Elsewhere the story-teller speaks, or the draughtsman, here the colourist confesses himself. The grand scale of his figures allows him to treat his colour largely, and its breadth is no less notable than its brilliancy. There is infinite variety in it; but the general impression is of great masses of red, blue, yellow, green, purple, brown, and so on, held together by the same colours distributed in smaller threads and spots, as in diapers on drapery. The broad mass of any one colour is itself made up of many various tints of glass. The accidental fusion of colour, as of red and blue into purple, is guarded against by framing, say, the blue with green, or the ruby with brownish-yellow. At other times neutral tones are deliberately produced by the combination of, for example, red and green lines.
The event proves that in this way, and by the choice of deep rather than low tones, not only mellowness but sobriety of colour is to be obtained. The artist would certainly have chosen rather to be crude than dull; but it is very rarely that a false note occurs, and then most likely it is due to the decay of the brown paint upon which he relied to bring it into tone.
At Arezzo one was disposed to think nothing could be finer than the glass of William of Marseilles; at Florence one is quite certain that nothing could be more beautiful than the glass in the Duomo. Each is, after its kind, perfect. But at Florence, at all events (les absents ont toujours tort), one finds that this is not only the more decorative kind, but the more dignified. One is disposed to ask, whether it is not better that in glass there should be no deceptive pictures, no perspective to speak of, only simple and severely disposed figures, which never in any way disturb the architectural effect, which give to the least attractive interior—the Duomo is as bare as a barn and as drab as a meeting-house—something of architectural dignity.
184. Prato.
CHAPTER XXII.
TRACERY LIGHTS AND ROSE WINDOWS.
Glass in tracery lights and Rose windows cannot consistently be planned on the lines suitable to lancets or other upright shapes; and it is interesting to observe the modifications of design necessitated by its adaptation to circumstances so different. This applies not only to Gothic glass but to Renaissance, the best of which, as it happens, is in Gothic windows. Happily it never occurred to sixteenth century artists to hamper themselves by any affectation of archaism, and their work is deliberately in the new manner. One can understand, too, a certain “up-to-date” contempt on their part for the “old-fashioned” stonework; but it is rather surprising that so few of them seem to have realised how greatly their own work would have gained by a little more consideration of (if not for) the stonework.
Where, as at Gouda, by way of exception, Gothic windows were built to receive later glass, tracery is to all intents and purposes abandoned: the builders would have done away with mullions had they known how otherwise to support such huge glass pictures. It has been explained already, in reference to the influence of the window-shape, and especially of the mullions, upon glass design, how much more formidable these divisions appear upon paper than in the window. That is very plainly seen in many a window where the designer has relied upon them to frame his subjects. The pictures have a way of running together in the most perplexing way, and one has to pick them out for oneself again. The practical conclusion from that is, that the designer is under no obligation to confine himself too strictly within the separate lights of a large window. What he is bound to do is to take care that the mullions never hurt his picture; if they do, it is his picture which is to blame. He may urge with reason that the upright shafts of stone are there merely for the support of the window, and that it is not his business to emphasise them, enough if he acknowledge them. In tracery, however, it is his bounden duty to take much more heed of the stonework. It was designed, in intricate and often very beautiful lines, with deliberately ornamental intent; it was meant to be seen, and it is his function to show it off. The question he has to put to himself is now no longer: does the stonework hurt my design? but: does my design hurt the stonework? And he should not be satisfied unless it helps it. The artist who, at Bourges, having fleur-de-lys-shaped tracery to deal with, carried across it a design quite contrary to the lines of the stonework, was guilty of a blank absurdity.
The Early Rose windows, which were habitually filled with rich coloured glass, consisted either of simple piercings, as at Lincoln, or they were made up of piercings very definitely divided by massive stonework. In proportion as mullions become narrow, and form in themselves a design, it seems doubtful how far deep-coloured glass can do them justice. Only strong tracery lines will stand strong colour. At Châlons-sur-Marne, for example, the foils of certain cusped lights surrounding a central circular picture are successfully ornamented with arabesque of deep yellow upon paler yellow ground; and again at Or San Michele, Florence, certain gorgeous wheels of ruby and yellow, or of blue, green, and yellow, and so on, are unusually satisfactory. In such cases not only breadth of effect but definition of the tracery forms is gained by keeping them (more especially in their outer circumference) much of one tone, whilst contrast of colour between one light and another helps still further to assist definition. But this applies only to stonework strong enough to take care of itself. There is a sort of perverse brutality in putting into delicate and graceful tracery deep rich glass which hides its lines. Such lines want sharply defining against the light.
Early windows had, of course, no tracery properly so called. The great Rose windows, and the smaller Roses surmounting a pair of lancets, were rather piercings than tracery; and it was not difficult to adapt the design of a medallion window to suit them. A small piercing was ready designed for a medallion subject; nothing was wanted but a border round it, narrower, of course, than would have been used for a broad lancet light, but of the same foliated character. The individual quatrefoils or other principal openings, which went to make up a great Rose window, were filled in the same way. If the opening were wedge-shaped, as it often was, the obvious thing to do was to introduce into it a medallion (probably circular) of the full width of the opening, at about its widest, and to fill up the space about it with foliated ornament or geometric mosaic, with which also the smaller and less important piercings would naturally be filled. Sometimes the recurring figure medallions were set alternately in foliated ornament and geometric diaper; or the lights might be grouped in pairs, two with foliage and two with diaper. Similar alternation of the two common kinds of Early filling, naturally occurred in minor openings which contained no medallion. Something of this kind occurs at Reims.
When the shape of the great Rose permitted it—if, that is to say, the circular outline was strongly pronounced—it was possibly further acknowledged by a fairly broad border, following it and disappearing, as it were, behind the stonework; otherwise, except in the case of smaller medallion-shaped openings, it was not usual to mark them by even so much as a border line. Small Roses had sometimes, as at Auxerre, a central figure medallion round which were secondary foliage medallions set in diaper. A certain waywardness of design, already remarked in medallion windows, was sometimes shown by filling the central medallion with ornament and grouping the pictures round it.
As the lights of a Rose window radiated from the centre, features which recurred throughout the series arranged themselves inevitably in rings; and according to the disposition of the emphatic features of the design, the rays or the rings pronounced themselves. This is partly the affair of the architect who sets out the stonework, but it lies with the glazier whether he choose to subdue or to emphasise either feature. It is hard to say why one or other of these schemes of glass design, in rays or in rings, should be preferred; but, as a matter of experience, the sun and star patterns are not among the most happy. Perhaps the stone spokes of a wheel window assert themselves quite enough any way, and the eye wants leading, not vaguely away from the centre, but definitely round the window.
The circular belts of pattern formed by medallions or other features answer to, and fulfil the part of, the horizontal bands in upright windows ([page 153]), and bind the lights together. The band has it all its own way in a mere “bull’s-eye,” such as you find in Italy, where there are no radiating lines of masonry. It is strongly pronounced in some circular medallion windows at Assisi, in which an extraordinarily wide border (a quarter of their diameter in width) is divided into eight equal panels, each enclosed in its own series of border lines, within which is a medallion set in foliated ornament. This is fourteenth century work; but, as in thirteenth century Roses, the bars follow and accentuate the main divisions of the window.
Even when it came to the glazing of a Rose window in a later Gothic style, it is not uncommon to find a series or two of medallions running round the window, as occurs at Angers. They hold the design together; but in the nature of the case they are on too small a scale for the pictures to count for more than broken colour. Indeed you may see here the relative value in such a position of small figure subjects and bold ornament. The scrollwork is as effective as the medallions are insignificant. In fact, compared to them, the illegible medallion subjects in the lancet lights below are readable by him who runs. It has to be confessed that quite some of the most beautiful and impressive Rose windows are perfectly unintelligible, even with a good field-glass. This is so with the West Rose at Reims. In the centre it is ablaze with red and orange, towards the rim it shades off into deliciously cool greens and greenish-yellows. It may mean what it may; the colour is enough.
Room for figure work on an intelligible scale is only to be found by a device which verges on the ridiculous. In the beautiful North Rose at S. Ouen, Rouen, figures which should be upright are arranged in a circle like herrings in a barrel. Similar figures on a smaller scale occur in certain tracery lights at Lincoln, two of which are here given. Again in the North Rose at Le Mans there are twenty-four radiating figures. In fact, they were customarily so arranged, even down to the sixteenth century, a period at which one does not credit the designer with mediæval artlessness.
It is obvious that out of a series of twenty or more figures, radiating like the spokes of a wheel, only a very few can stand anything like upright. The designer of the South Rose at S. Ouen has endeavoured to get over the difficulty, as well as to accommodate his design to the exceeding narrowness of the lights as they approach their axis, by giving his personages no legs, and making them issue from a kind of sheath or bouquet-holder. A number of the figures pretending to stand in the radiating lights by a Rose or wheel window must be ridiculously placed. And then there occurs the question as to whether they shall all stand with their feet towards the hub. Where the figures have space to float, it is different. The angels in the Late Gothic Rose window at Angers, with swirling drapery which hides their feet, and makes them by so much the less obviously human, if not more actually angelic, solve the difficulty of full-length figures (on any appreciable scale) in the only possible way.
185. Two Lights of a Rose Window, Lincoln.
A portion of a simple and rather striking wheel window of the Decorated period, in which concentric bands of ornament form a conspicuous feature, is shown [overleaf]. In the small Rose from Assisi ([page 278]) the glazier has very successfully supplemented the design of the architect, completing the four circles, and accentuating them further by glazing the central spandrils in much darker colour than the rest of the glass, which is mainly white.
In the elaborate tracery of the Decorated or geometric period the mullions, as was said, ask to be pronounced. This was usually done in the Second Gothic period by framing each light with a border, separated from the stonework always by a fillet of white glass. The exception to this was in the case of trefoiled or other many-foiled openings, in which a central medallion or boss, usually circular, extended to the points of the cusps, and the border round the cuspings stopped short against the border to that. Or again in triangular openings a central boss would sometimes extend to its margin, and the borders would stop against that, or pass seemingly behind it.
A typical form of Decorated tracery occurs in the West window at York Minster, by far the most beautiful part of it. There, every important opening has within its white marginal line a broader band of ruby or green, broken at intervals by yellow spots, within which border is foliage of white and yellow on a green or ruby ground. Some of the smaller openings show white and yellow foliage only, without any coloured ground. A plan equally characteristic of the period is illustrated at Tewkesbury. There again occurs similar white foliage, its stem encircling a central spot of yellow. This also is on green and ruby backgrounds, the former reserved for the more prominent openings; but the border is in white, painted with a pattern. This broader white border more effectively relieves the dark lines of the masonry than the border of colour, which sometimes confuses the shapes of the smaller tracery openings: it does so, for example, in the Late glass on [page 200].
186. Part of a Rose Window, German 14th Century.
For what was said of the difficulty of carrying a broad border round the heads of Decorated lights applies more forcibly still to tracery. The merest fillet of colour is often as much as can safely be carried round the opening, if even that. On the other hand, a broad border of white and stain, even though it contain a fair amount of black in it, may safely be used—as at Châlons, where it frames small subjects in rich colour. Some admirable Decorated tracery occurs at Wells, much on the usual lines, and containing a good deal of pleasant green; but there the white and yellow foliage in the centre part of the lights is sometimes so closely designed that very little of the coloured ground shows through it, and it looks at first as if what little ground there is had all been painted-out. At S. Denis Walmgate, York, the background to the foliage in white and yellow (which last predominates) is painted solid: the only pot-metal colour (except in the central medallion head) is in a rosette or two of colour leaded into it; the border is white. Another expedient there employed is to introduce figures in white and stain upon a ground of green or ruby, diapered. At Wells there occur little figures of saints in pot-metal colour, planted upon the white foliated filling of the tracery lights. Decorated circular medallions occupying the centre of ornamental tracery lights are usually framed in coloured lines; occasionally the inner margin of the medallion is cusped, in imitation of stonework.
187. Assisi.
An effective plan, adopted at Evreux, is to gather the lights into groups, by means of the colour introduced into them, which grouping may or may not be indicated by the stonework. In any case, it is a means of obtaining at once variety and breadth of colour.
Perpendicular tracery lights are themselves, in most cases, only copies in miniature of the larger lights below, and the glass is designed on the same plan. A good illustration of this is at Great Malvern, where the design consists of the orthodox canopy work in white and stain, with little figures also nearly all in white, colour occurring only in the lower skirts of their drapery, in the background about their heads, and behind the pinnacles above. The effect is beautifully silvery. Often such figures under the canopies are angels, all in white and stain. Sometimes seraphim, in stain upon a white ground, quarried perhaps, fill the lights, without canopies. These are all typical ways of filling the tracery of a Perpendicular window.
It was quite a common thing to fill it with glass wholly of white and stain. In the centre there might be a medallion head in grisaille, or an inscribed label, the rest of the space being occupied by conventional foliage having just a line of clear white next the stonework. Beautiful examples of this treatment occur at Great Malvern; occasionally the foliage is all in yellow with white flowers. Small openings are thus often glazed in a single piece of glass, or in any case with the fewest possible leads. At S. Serge, Angers, there is larger work of a similar kind, a bold scroll in white and stain on a ground of solid pigment, out of which is scratched a smaller pattern, not so bold as in the least to interfere with the scroll, but enough to prevent anything like heaviness in the painted ground. Similar treatment is adopted in the cathedral at Beauvais. Once in a while one comes, in English work, upon figures in white and stain on a solid black ground extending to the stonework, without any line of white to show where the glass ends and the stonework begins. It would be impossible more emphatically than that to show one’s contempt for the architecture.
Some disregard, if not actually contempt, is shown for architecture in the practice, common no less in Late Gothic than in Renaissance design, of carrying a coloured ground right up to the stone, without so much as a line of light to separate the two. Comparatively light though the colour may be, it is usually dark enough, unless it be yellow, to confuse the forms of any but the boldest tracery. Something of the kind occurred by way of exception even in fourteenth century glass, as at S. Radegonde, Poitiers, and at Toulouse, where the tracery of the windows is one field of blue, irregularly sprinkled with white stars. The lines of the tracery are lost, and one sees only spots of white.
The Later Gothic plan was to keep tracery light, even though the window below it were altogether in rich colour, and the effect was good; as at Alençon, where a distinctly blue window has in the tracery only angels in white and yellow on a white ground; or, again, at Conches, where white-robed angels, on a ground of rich stain, contrast pleasantly with the cool blue of the lights below.
Unusual treatment of the tracery occurs at Auch (1513). In the main the tracery lights contain figures in colour upon a ruby or paler-coloured ground, which, as in so many a Renaissance window, runs out to the stonework; but occasionally here and there a light is distinguished by a border of white. Moreover, the ground is, as a rule, not of one colour throughout, nor even throughout a single light, but varied; and that not symmetrically or pattern-wise, but so as artfully to carry the colour through. In fact, the artist has taken his tracery much more seriously than usual, and has carefully studied how best he could balance by the colour in it the not quite so easily-to-be-controlled colour of his figure composition below. The result is that the windows are all of one piece—each a complete and well-considered colour composition: the tracery is not merely the top part of the frame to the coloured picture below.
188. Lyons.
In Renaissance glass the tracery was more often in comparatively full colour, even though the lights below were pale. A grisaille window at Evreux, with practically blue tracery, has a very pleasant effect.
It was not often that the Renaissance glass painters gave very serious attention to the tracery which they had to fill. They were, for the most part, content to conceive each separate opening as a blue field upon which to place an angel (as [above]), a crown, a fleur-de-lys, or other emblem, as best might fit. In very many sixteenth century windows the design consists merely of angels, emblems, labels, or even clouds, dotted about, as suited the convenience of the designer. Sometimes, as at S. Alpin, at Troyes, there occurs in a tracery light a tablet bearing a date,—presumably, but not always positively, that of the window. Such devices were very often in white upon a ground of blue, purple, or ruby. Angels of course adapted themselves to irregular shapes in the most angelic way; and they are introduced in every conceivable attitude—standing, kneeling, flying, swinging censers, singing, playing on musical instruments, bearing scrolls or shields; angels all in white, angels in white with coloured wings, angels in gorgeous array of colour: and more accommodating, still, is the bodiless cherub, beloved of Luca della Robbia.
There is a quite charming effect of colour in a Jesse window at S. Maclou, Rouen, where the tracery lights are inhabited by little cherubs, in ruby on a grey-blue ground, in grey on deeper grey-blue, and in emerald-like green upon the same.
The scroll without the angel was a very convenient filling for smaller openings. Some elaborately twisted scrolls, in white and stain on purple, occur at Moulins.
Larger and more prominent lights often contain a separate picture, or one picture runs through several lights, or perhaps all through the tracery. Worse than that is, where the picture runs through from the lights below; as at Alençon, where the trees grow up into the blue of the tracery, broken otherwise only by white clouds; or at Conches, where the architecture from the subject below aspires so high. It is almost worse still where, as at Alençon again, and at the chapel at Vincennes, it is the canopy which so encroaches. In the exceptional case of a Jesse window there seems less objection to accepting the whole window as a field through which the tree may grow; yet the tracery is not the happiest part of the Beauvais window ([page 368]). Sometimes the heads of the lower lights are made to appear as though they were part of the tracery.
A happier form of Renaissance tracery design is where medallion heads in white and stain are introduced upon a ground of plain colour—blue at Châlons, purple-brown at Montmorency. These are sometimes most beautifully painted, as are the Raffaellesque little cherubs amidst white clouds, also at Montmorency; but they are much more delicately done than they need have been, and less effective than they might. Very delicate painting upon white does produce an effect even at a distance; at least it gives quality; but there should be some relation between effort and effect; and here the effect is weak as compared with the expenditure of art. In the tracery on [page 213], fairly effective though monotonous, the birds are glazed in with such unnecessary avoidance of lead, that the cutting of the ground must have been a work of great difficulty. In glass of every period it has been the custom to put too much into tracery; in Early work too much detail, in Later too much finish. What is wanted is breadth.
CHAPTER XXIII.
QUARRY WINDOWS.
The very simplest form of window glazing, the easiest and the thriftiest thing for the cutter to do, and the most straightforward for the glazier, is to frame together parallel-sided pieces of glass in the form of a lead lattice.
189. Lincoln.
Quarries, as all such little square or rhomboid shaped panes of glass came to be called, were used from the first. Ordinarily they were set on end, so as to form diamonds; which as time went on, were generally not rectangular, but long in proportion to their breadth.
190. Evreux.
For the most part they were painted with patterns traced in brown; and, on the discovery of silver stain, they were in parts tinted yellow. From the fourteenth century onwards, quarry lights, framed in borders, and enlivened with colour, form a very important variety of grisaille.
Many a grisaille pattern was not far removed from quarry glazing, as may be seen [opposite]. It was natural that, for clerestory and triforium windows in particular, the glazier should do all he could to simplify his work. Clerestory windows are placed too high to be fairly seen in a narrow church, and triforium lights are often half shut off from view by projecting shafts of open arcading in front of them. It is only when, by rare chance, they happen to front you squarely at the end of an aisle or transept, that they are properly seen. There is no occasion, therefore, to indulge in subtleties of design; the one thing needful is that the effect of the windows as a whole, should be pleasant, since all study of detail is out of the question, except from the triforium galleries opposite, or by the aid of a field-glass; and light arrangements of grisaille and colour are in most cases all that is wanted. The colour may be more or less, according as it is desired to exclude light or to admit it; but some very simple, unpretending, and perhaps even rude treatment, is indicated by the conditions of the case, which to contradict, is wasteful and unworkmanlike. The effect, for example, of the band of figures across the grisaille in the triforium of the transepts at Evreux is admirable; but the way in which seven saints out of the eight are cut vertically in two by the pillars of the architectural screen in front of them, is nothing less than exasperating. These figures tell only as the patches of colour; and that could so easily have been obtained by much simpler means. In such a position, quarries may well take the place, not only of figures, but of more interesting grisaille; and, even though they be not painted at all (as is again the case at Evreux), but merely broken by occasional sun-discs in white and stain crossing them, and framed in a simple block border of white and colour, the effect may be entirely adequate. It is not meant to deny that figures in rich colour embedded in carefully designed grisaille are more attractive; but, for its purpose, quarry work, with borders and bosses of colour, is in the majority of such cases, enough.
191. Quarry Window, Evreux.
Figures or figure subjects in formal bands across tall quarry lights are always effective; so are figures planted more casually upon the quarries—kneeling donors, flying angels, or whatever they may be. So again, are figure panels alternating with bosses of ornament; but, if the window occupy a position where the figures can be appreciated, a surrounding of quarries seems hardly of interest enough, and if not, the figures seem rather thrown away. One is tempted to make exception in favour of figures in grisaille, which, if very delicately painted (as for example at S. Martin-cum-Gregory, York), show to advantage on a quarry ground, which has the modesty not to compete with them in interest. The quarries keep their place perfectly as a background; and the slight painting upon them is just enough to give the glass quality, and to indicate that, however subordinate, it is yet part of the picture.
192. Lincoln.
A quarry window, no less than any other, wants a border, if only to prevent the strongly marked straight lines of lead from appearing to run into the stone work. A simple line of colour with another of white next the mullions is enough for that. Even this is occasionally omitted, more especially in tracery lights, but in that case the glass seems to lack finish. The most satisfactory border to quarry lights into which otherwise no colour is introduced, is a broadish border of white, painted with pattern and in part stained. A coloured border seems to imply other colour breaking the field of quarries. By itself it is too much or not enough. Its proportion is a thing to be determined in each case on the spot; but even in narrow lights, if they contain bosses of colour (as do those in the transepts at Le Mans) a broad border about one fifth the width of the window, with a broad white line next the stone, is very effective.
193. German Quarry Border.
The monotony of any great surface of quarry work, has led to the introduction of medallions and the like, even where it is not desired to introduce pot-metal colour. In the window from Evreux, illustrated [opposite], the effect of the delicately painted little angel medallions, in white on a ground of stain, is all that could be wished. Any little surprise of that kind is always welcome; but, should it occur too frequently, it becomes itself monotonous.
194. Early English Quarry.
There is no end to the variety of forms in which colour may be introduced into quarry work. It is best in the form of patches, and not in the form of lines between the quarries as occurs occasionally, at Poitiers, for example, at Rouen cathedral, and at Châlons ([page 167]).
Big rosettes, discs, wreaths, rings of colour, and the like, are more effective than small spots. They need not be heavy, there may be any amount of white in them. In narrow lights, they may sometimes with advantage come in front of the border; that admits of the biggest possible medallion, and it is best to have such features large and few. Mean little rosettes are too suggestive of the contractor; in the church of S. Ouen, at Rouen, one is uncomfortably reminded of him—it would be so easy to estimate for glass of that kind at so much the foot! Heraldic shields form often peculiarly effective colour-patches in quarry windows, more especially because of the accidental arrangement of colour they compel. There is a point at which symmetry of colour palls upon the eye.
195. Quarry Patterns (Shaw).
The even surface of quarry lights all in white and stain is broken sometimes by an occasional band of inscription, which may either take the line of the quarries, or cross them in the form of a label. At Evreux some quarry lights are most pleasingly interrupted by square patches of inscription in yellow, or, which is still more satisfactory, in white. In the same cathedral there is a very interesting instance of inscription, in letters some five or six inches high, leaded in blue upon a quarry ground.
196. 14th Century Quarry.
197. 14th Century Quarries.
198. 14th Century Quarry.
The patterns with which quarries are painted naturally followed the ordinary course of grisaille. In the thirteenth century the designs were strongly outlined, and showed clear against a cross-hatched ground; which, however, did not, as a rule, extend to the lead, but a margin of clear glass was left next to it, in acknowledgment of the quarry shape. The combination of quarries and strap ornament in the example at Lincoln ([page 287]) is unusual, but the quarries themselves are, but for the absence of a clear line next the leads, characteristically of the thirteenth century. The quarry border from Nuremberg ([above]) is rather later in character. In that case also, as it happens, there is no marginal line of clear glass. The typical treatment is shown [below]. Later, as in other grisaille, the cross-hatched ground was omitted; and the foliage took, of course, more natural form. It was presently more delicately traced ([page 290]), and more often than not tinted in yellow stain. Consistently with the more natural form of leafage the design in fourteenth century work was often one continuous growth trailing through the window, and passing behind the marginal band of stain which now usually emphasised the top sides of the quarries. Often a futile attempt was made ([page 286]) to give the appearance of interlacing to these bands, but that was nullified by the stronger lead lines. True, interlacing was only possible where, as in some earlier work, the bands were continued on all four sides of the quarry, so that the lead fell into its place as interspace between two interlacing bands. It was better when there was no pretence of interlacing ([below]). Additional importance was sometimes given to the marginal band by tracing a pattern upon it, or, as on [page 291,], painting it in brown, and then picking out geometric tracery upon it. There came a time when marginal lines were omitted altogether. That was the usual, though not invariable, practice in the fifteenth century, by which time the draughtsman had apparently learnt to husband his inventive faculty. The continuous growth of the pattern, as well as the marginal acknowledgment of the lead lines, died out of fashion, and quarries were mostly painted sprig fashion. The character of these sprigs will be best judged from the specimens on [page 289], some of the most interesting given in “Shaw’s Book of Quarries.” Quarry patterns do not, of course, occur in that profuse variety; it is seldom that more than two patterns are found in a single window, often there is only one. The range of design in quarries of this kind is limited only by the invention of the artist. It includes both floral and conventional ornament, animal and grotesque figures, emblems and heraldic badges, cyphers, monograms, mottoes, and so on. There is scope not only for meaning in design, but for the artist’s humour; but, when all is said, the Late Gothic pattern windows, now given over entirely to quarry work, are of no great account as concerns their detail. The later quarry patterns are often pretty enough, sometimes amusing, but they go for very little in the decoration of a church. Plentiful as quarry work is everywhere, and characteristic as it is of Perpendicular glass, there is not much that shows an attempt to do anything serious with the quarry window. All that was done was to paint more or less delicate and dainty patterns upon the little lozenge panes. However, they were traced with a light hand and a sure one, and with a kind of spontaneity which gives them really what artistic charm they have.
199. Round Glass, Roundels, or Bull’s-Eyes.
“Photo-Tint” by James Akerman, London, W. C.
The occasional endeavours to get stronger and bolder effects in quarry work were not very successful. At Evreux and at Rouen there are some late quarries painted more after the fashion of bold mosaic diaper; but the effect, though satisfactory enough, is not such as to convince one that that is the better way.
200. Heraldic Glass.
To heraldry, and especially to shields of arms surrounded by mantling ([page 293]), quarries form an excellent background, but only in the event of there being enough of them left free to show that it is a quarry window upon which the heraldry is imposed, or rather into which it is inlaid. Odds and ends of quarries want to be accounted for, as forming the continuation of the glass above and below. In the case of a window not a quarry window, it is a mistake to break up the background, as was sometimes done, into quarries, or rather into fragments of quarries. The object of the square or diamond shape is to break up a plain surface. If the ground is naturally broken up by figures, foliage, mantling, or what not, why introduce further quarry lines? They are not in themselves interesting. Their great value is in that they give scale to a window; but that is only on condition that they are seen in their entirety.
201. Quarry from Chetwode Church.
In Germany the place of quarries was supplied by roundels ([page 292]) unpainted. What applies to quarries applies in many respects to them; and they have a brilliancy which flat glass has not. They were usually enclosed in painted borders of white and stain, and have a very delicate and pearly effect; but where (as at S. Peter’s, at Cologne) they occur in great quantity as compared with coloured subjects, these appear to be floating rather uncomfortably in their midst. The Italians, who also used roundels in place of quarries, often let colour into the interstices between them, and also little painted squares or pateræ of white and stain. In the sham windows decorating the Sistine Chapel at Rome, separating Botticelli’s series of Popes, the pointed spaces between the rounds are coloured diagonally in successive rows of red, yellow, and green; but the result is most pleasing where, as at Verona and elsewhere, the little triangular spaces are neither of one tint nor yet symmetrically arranged, but distributed in a quasi-accidental and unexpected way. Sometimes it was the little pateræ that was in colour and the rest white. In any case, the effect is refined, as it is at Arezzo also, where the monotony of roundels, in sundry clerestory windows, is broken by figure medallions and other features in white and colour. The adaptation of roundels to the circular shape is shown in the portion of a round window from Santa Maria Novella. What more remains to be said about roundels and quarry windows is reserved for the chapter on “[Domestic Glass].”
202. Window in the Certosa in Val D’ema, Florence.
CHAPTER XXIV.
DOMESTIC GLASS.
It is customary to draw a distinction between “Ecclesiastical” and “Domestic” glass.
In mediæval days the Church was the patron of art; and, when kings and corporations commissioned stained glass windows, it was usually to present them to Mother Church. It is in churches, then, that the greater part of the old glass remains to us, iconoclastic mania notwithstanding; and it is only there that the course of glass painting can be traced. Once in a while, as at S. Mary’s Hall, Coventry, one comes upon a great window designed to decorate a civic building; but the whiles are few and far between. When such windows do occur they prove not to differ widely from more familiar church work.
What, then, is the difference between the two kinds of glass? It is not that the one is ecclesiastical the other secular, the one religious the other profane art. “Sacred Art” is a term consecrated by use; but, strictly speaking, it is a meaningless combination of words, signifying, if it signify anything, that the speaker confounds the art of telling with the thing told. Art has no more a religion than it has a country. No doubt there clings always to the art of the devout believer some fervour of faith, as there may hang about the sceptic’s doing a chill of doubt. The historian will enrich his glass with story, the preacher will convey in it a dogma. Poet or proser, philosopher or fool, may each in turn peep out of the window. Youth will everywhere betray its ardour, manhood its vigour, age its experience. A live man cannot help but put himself into his work. But none of that is art. His art is in the way he expresses himself, not in what he says; and there is no more religion in his glass painting than in his handwriting, though the graphologist may read in it his character.
The difference between church glass and domestic arises, speaking from the point of view of art, solely from architectural conditions. In so far as they are both glass, the same methods of glazing and painting apply to both. It is only in so far as the position and purpose of the two are different, that they call for different treatment in design. The treatment suitable to a great hall does not materially differ from that adapted to a church; the same breadth of design, the same largeness of execution, are required; what suits a cloister would suit a passage. When, however, it comes to the windows of dwelling-rooms, the scheme and execution appropriate even to the smallest chapels of a church, would most likely be out of place. The distinction is very much as that between wall decoration in fresco and cabinet paintings in oil- or water-colour.
In the house there is less need than in the church for severity, and more for liveliness, less occasion for breadth, and more for delicacy. The scale of the dwelling-room itself justifies, perhaps demands, a smaller treatment. Here, if anywhere, is opportunity for that preciousness of execution which, in work of more monumental character, it seems a pity to expend upon so frail a substance as glass—frailer than ever when it was the thin white glass employed for window panes. For, so far from the glazier of the sixteenth or seventeenth century imagining, as we mostly do, that it was any part of the purpose of domestic glass to shut out the view—less need in those days!—he employed in most cases a material which was not merely translucent but absolutely transparent.
This use of transparent glass marks a distinction, and forms something of a new departure. It was employed to some extent in Renaissance church work; but there it was more as a background to the stained glass window than as a part of it. Here the transparent glass is the window; and the design, whether in pot-metal or in enamel, shows more or less against the clear.
The relationship of certain seventeenth century windows at Antwerp to the Italian windows on [pages 295], [299], [352], is obvious. They may be quite possibly founded upon them. There is the same arrangement of subjects in cartouches, set in geometric glazing of clear glass. But in the Italian windows one kind of glass is used throughout (the little pieces of thin pot-metal colour in the cartouches, and so on, scarcely count); and the proportion of the painted work to clear glass is so schemed that, although you may feel that the plain work wants just a touch of enrichment to bring it all together, you are not asked deliberately to imagine yourself to be looking through, beyond the painting, into space.
203. Italian Grisaille, Florence.
“Photo-Tint” by James Akerman, London, W. C.
The detail in these windows from the Certosa in Val d’Ema, near Florence, is all outlined and painted in brown upon clear white glass, the flesh warmer in tint than the rest; the high lights are brushed out of a matt tint, and some pale stain is washed in. The artful thing about the design is, the cunning way in which the borders are planned, so as to avoid the absolute parallelism of marginal lines. For the rest the design is rather characteristically Late Renaissance, though the relation of border to cartouche, and of both together to clear glass, is better than usual. It will be noted that these are not strictly domestic windows; but they are designed to be seen about on a level with the eye, and from a distance of not more than ten feet, which is as far as the width of the cloister allows one to get away from them.
They fulfil, therefore, altogether very much the conditions which apply generally to domestic glass, and may be taken, if not as types of domestic work, at least as something on the way from the church to the house. This, though the common type of Italian Renaissance grisaille, was not invariable. At S. Frediano, Lucca, for example, there is a white window, which, except for a little medallion in its centre, might at a glance almost pass for thirteenth century work: the Cinque-Cento scroll is so rendered, with cross-hatched ground and all, as to suggest the early mediæval craftsman; it is centuries away from Da Udine in style.
204. Certosa in Val d’Ema.
The domestic quarry window differed, in mediæval work, in no respect from church work. In the sixteenth century it took rather a new form. It consisted no longer of a more or less diaper-like all-over pattern, but of a panel, designed to be glazed in quarries. Here, again, is an approximation to the seventeenth century practice of leading up pictures in rectangular panes, but only an approximation. There is this important difference, that the quarry window starts from the lead lines, and is religiously designed within them.
Thus to accept, the simple square and obviously fit lines of quarry glazing, and to expend his art in painting upon them, simplifies the task of the glass painter; and he very frequently fell back upon that plan, more readily perhaps when he happened to know more about painting than about glazing. That was Da Udine’s case, who is credited with the design of the windows in the Laurentian library at Florence, as of those at the Certosa in Val d’Ema. They bear a date some few years after his death; but they are so like what he certainly would have done that, directly or indirectly, the design is clearly due to him. The one illustrated on [page 298] is quite one of the best of these windows; in the others the ornament is even less coherent. The characteristic arabesque is painted in brown enamel, with redder enamel for the flesh tints, some yellow stain, and a little blue enamel in the heraldic lozenge, all upon clear white glass. The effect is delicate and silvery and no appreciable amount of light is excluded (a point usually of some importance in domestic work); but, though the main forms are designed within the lead lines, one feels that these have not been considered enough, that the leads compete with the painting, and that the bars, in particular, which are far thicker than need be, and occur with unnecessary frequency (in fact, at every horizontal quarry joint but one), very seriously mar the effect of delicate painting. That is as much as to say that the design, graceful and fanciful as it is, does not fulfil the conditions of quarry glass.
It is not enough for complete success in this form of window that the quarry lines shall be the basis of the design; the painting also must be strong enough to hold its own against leads and bars. That is hardly the case with the exceptionally delicate ornament in the Dutch glass [opposite]. But here, notwithstanding that the scroll is slighter than the Italian work and more delicately painted, the central patch of enamel colour in the shield and mantling does, to some extent, focus the attention there, and so withdraw the eye from the lead lines. The window is not merely cleverly designed; it is a frank, straightforward, manly piece of work, marred only by the comparative heaviness of the leads. The truth is that a glass painter becomes so used to lead lines, and gets to take them so much for granted, that they do not offend him; and he is apt to forget how obtrusive they may appear in the eyes of the unaccustomed. Hence his sometimes seemingly brutal treatment of tenderly painted ornament.
205. Dutch Quarry Window, S. K. Museum.
Other good examples of Dutch domestic glass, not quite so good as this, but painted with admirable directness, are to be found at the Musée des Antiquités at Brussels. At the Louvre also the Dutch work is good. There are two lights there in which cartouches enclosing small oval subjects (fables) spread over the greater part of the quarry glazing, leaving only the lowermost of them comparatively empty. On these are painted butterflies, a dragon-fly, even a gad-fly, almost to the life. These flies upon the window pane, like the little miniature figures in the bottom corner quarries on [page 301], are trivial enough in idea; but the idea is cleverly and daintily expressed; and one does not expect much else than triviality in seventeenth century design. Moreover, in the privacy of domestic life it is permitted to be trivial.
For dignity of treatment it would be difficult to match the specimen of Flemish glass shown on [page 304], now at Warwick Castle. Like the Dutch and Italian work, it is painted on clear glass but without the prettiness of flesh tint, and the background to the ornament (it shows dull grey in the print) is brilliant yellow stain. This little light and its companion on [page 98] are as large in style as they are beautiful in effect.
There is a gayer touch in the less seriously decorative panel of French work in the Louvre given on [page 307]. In that pot-metal is used for the dark ruby of the outer dress, and for the little bits of blue rather cunningly let into the spandrils of the arch. The fancifully designed canopy, the arabesque, and a portion of the drapery are in stain, all delicately painted upon clear glass, and glazed mainly on quarry lines—from which, however, the designer saw fit to depart. What he meant by the unfortunate circular lead line about the head is difficult to imagine. It can hardly be, like other erratic leading, the result of mending. No fracture could possibly have steered so carefully between the figure and the ornament. It looks almost as if at the last he had lost confidence in his technique, and, in trying vainly to avoid lead lines, had ended in giving them extraordinary emphasis.
206. Grisaille, Warwick Castle.
“Photo-Tint” by James Akerman, London, W. C.
In ultra-delicate domestic work the leads are more than ever the difficulty. One is uncomfortably conscious of them in the wonderful series of windows—formerly at Ecouen, and now in the Château de Chantilly—in which is set forth in forty pictures the story of Cupid and Psyche. A specimen of these is given on [page 218], thanks to the friendly permission of Monsieur Magne, who illustrates the whole of them in his admirable monograph of the Montmorency glass. The legend to the effect that Raffaelle designed and Palissy painted them, is past all possible belief; but they are very remarkable specimens of sixteenth century work, restored about the period of the First Empire, and mark somewhere about the high-water mark of French domestic picture glass.
A glance at these windows is enough to show that they were never schemed with any definite view to glazing. Rather it would appear that the pictures were first designed and then the leads introduced where best they could be disguised. But the disguise is everywhere transparent. Such gauzy painting is inadequate; it hides nothing. You see always the thick black lines of lead, cruel enough, but clinging in a cowardly way to the edges of weak forms, sneaking into shadows, and foolishly pretending to pass themselves off as the continuation of painted outlines not one-twentieth part so strong as they. The sparing use of glazing lines makes them all the more conspicuous. They must originally have asserted themselves even more than they do now; for the accidental lead lines introduced in reparation, however much they damage the pictures, do in a measure support the original glazing lines, and pull the windows together. The Chantilly glass goes to prove the impossibility of satisfactorily disposing of the leads in very small figure subjects in grisaille. In work on a larger scale it wants only a man who knows his trade to manage it. Witness what was done in church work.
The propriety of executing figures in grisaille at all has been called in question by Viollet le Duc. “Every bit of white glass,” he said, “should be diapered with pattern traced with a brush; and, since this treatment is not possible in flesh painting, flesh ought not to be painted.” Moreover, he says that grisaille has always the appearance of vibrating, and the vibration fatigues the eye; therefore, he argues, it is labour lost to paint white figures. Far be it from an ornamentist to deny that a great deal too much importance is attached to figure work in decoration. But the amount of tracing necessary on white glass is relative. In grisaille it is quite safe to leave some glass clear; and, if it is not worth while to paint figures, is it worth while to paint anything worth looking at, or worth painting?
207. Louis XIII. and Anne of Austria.
The truth is, it wearies the sight to look at any glass for long at a stretch, and for a mere coup d’œil the most brutal workmanship would often do. But, if work is ever to be seen from near, the charm is gone when once you know how coarse it is. One tires of crude work, and delights more and more in what is delicate. Whoever has taken pleasure in such work as the windows at S. Alpin at Troyes would find it hard to renounce the figure in grisaille.
208. Domestic Glass, The Louvre.
To return to the leading of grisaille. Of the two extremes, the bold, even the too bold, acknowledgment of the constructional lines of a window, is far preferable to the timid attempt to conceal them. The glaziers of the Renaissance eventually got over the difficulty by the simple plan of inserting into quarry windows (usually unpainted) or into pattern work of plain glass only, little panes of painted glass. In this way there are introduced into some windows at the Château de Chaumont some very beautiful little portrait medallions, outlined with a firmness and modelled with a delicacy which remind one of the drawings of Clouet. At the Germanic Museum at Nuremberg are some similar medallion heads, quite Holbein-ish in character. A later portrait panel, lacking the style and draughtsmanship of these, but very cleverly painted (by Linard Gontier they say), is reproduced on [page 305]. It represents, as the inscription and cypher go to show, Louis Treize and Anne of Austria, as bride and bridegroom. Its date, therefore, speaks for itself. Another little pane by Gontier, from the Hôtel des Arquebusiers at Troyes, now in the library there, is given on [page 310]. The characteristic ornamental work surrounding this, though not forming a consecutive frame to the picture, is of about the same period with it (1621). Its design consists of that modified form of Arab foliation (compare it with the detail on [page 352]), which was very much used in damascening and niello work; indeed, the French still call that kind of pattern “nielle.” Here it is traced in a fine brown outline, and filled in partly with yellow stain and partly with blue enamel. The effect is pleasing.
It was in Switzerland that glass painting other than for churches was most extensively practised. The Council Chambers of Swiss towns, and the halls of trade and other guilds, were enriched with bands of armorial glass across the windows; and throughout the sixteenth century it was the custom to present to neighbouring towns or friendly Corporations a painted window panel. Great part of these have been dispersed, and in Switzerland they are now perhaps rarer than in the museums of other countries. The Germanic Museum at Nuremberg and the Hôtel Clûny, at Paris, are rich in Swiss glass; and we have some at South Kensington. Superb examples, however, still remain in Switzerland—for example, in the Rath-haus at Lucerne—though they belong to a period as late as the first ten years of the seventeenth century.
209. Pierced Quarries, Warwick.
The usual form of design consisted of a sort of florid canopy frame of moderate dimensions, enclosing a shield or shields of arms, supported by fantastically dressed men-at-arms. There was often great spirit in the swagger of these melodramatic swashbucklers, admirably expressive of the idea which underlies all heraldry: “I am somebody,” they seem to say, “pray who are you?” It is a comparatively modest specimen of this class that is presented on [page 90]. In the windows of a private house it was frequently the master and mistress who supported the armorial shield, all in their Sunday best, and very proud of themselves too. Little Bible subjects were also painted, mainly in grisaille. It was for window panes that Holbein drew the Stations of the Cross, now among the chief treasures of the museum at Bâle. These also must be classed with domestic work. They may in some cases have been destined for a church; but they would much more appropriately decorate a private oratory.
210. Quarry of Fretted Lead.
These heraldic or pictorial panes go even beyond the delicacy of cabinet pictures, and are sometimes more on the scale of miniatures; but of such miniature painting the Swiss were masters. They carried craftmanship to its very furthest point, and among them traditions of good work lingered long after they were quite dead in France. Of English work there was not much; and of that the less said the better.
Far into the eighteenth century the Swiss still had a care for their window panes, and, when painting went out of fashion, engraved them with armorial or other devices. Precisely that kind of engraving was employed also upon polished mirrors, of which one finds examples in Italy.
Unpainted quarry windows in English houses were sometimes relieved, at the same time that ventilation was secured, by the occasional introduction (in the place of glass) of little fretted panels of pierced lead, as shown on [page 308]. [Below] is a diamond-shaped piercing of the Jacobean period.
211. Domestic Window Pane, Troyes.
CHAPTER XXV.
THE USE OF THE CANOPY.
No one can have paid much attention to stained glass without observing the conspicuous part played in its design by the quasi-architectural canopy.
Inasmuch as it, in a sense, enshrines the figure, there exists some sort of symbolic reason for its use. But that is not enough to account for its all but universal employment. A more obvious excuse for it is, the purpose it fulfils in the construction of design. It is a means of accounting for the position of figures midway up the window, perhaps one above the other, and not standing upon the sill. It is at once framework and support to them, preventing them from seeming to float there in space.
Where the designer of the church designed also the glass for it, it was almost inevitable that he should plan it more or less upon architectural lines; and so we find that in windows known to have been designed by architects the canopy is very often the most conspicuous part of the design. But at all times the master-builder must have been a power, and at all times also even glaziers and glass painters must have been so intimately acquainted with forms of architecture, that it is not surprising they should have introduced them into their work.
The fact is, the designer happens upon something like a canopy almost without intending it, and, having arrived so far, perfects the resemblance to it. Suppose a window of four long lights, in each of which it is desired to introduce three figures. That means dividing it horizontally into three, which may be done by the use of bands of inscription, as at a in the diagram [overleaf]: there is no suggestion of architecture there. Supposing you wish to frame the window at the sides, so as to stop the picture, as at b, to the left of the diagram; you have still no very distinct suggestion of architecture. But if, the better to frame the picture, you add an extra band of colour, as shown at c, you arrive at once at something so like perspective as to indicate an architectural elevation. Indeed, that is precisely the form the canopy takes sometimes in Italian glass. Even when the cinque-centist framed his picture merely in lines he could hardly help giving them the appearance of mouldings, painting upon (as at Arezzo) egg-and-tongue or other familiar architectural enrichment in white and stain.
212. Diagram.
In the clerestory at Freiburg is a window in which the serried saints appear at first sight to be simply framed by lines of pale purple; but on examination these resolve themselves into a simple architectural elevation, with even a hint of unsuspected shadow in it. The date of that example is 1512; and canopies, not to go back to Græco-Roman decoration, begin with the beginning of Gothic. It is adduced, therefore, to show, not the origin of canopy work, but how inevitably something of the sort occurred. Its immediate source is clearly imitation. The thing is borrowed straight from architecture, and indicates, it may justly be said, if not a certain lack of inventive faculty on the part of the designer, at least some disinclination to take the pains to invent.
So in the thirteenth century we have funny little glass penthouses over the figures of saints, architectural in form but not in colour; in the fourteenth windows are crossed by rows of tall brassy disproportioned tabernacles, as yet flat fronted; in the fifteenth, white ghosts of masonry pretend to stand out over the figures; in the sixteenth, altar-like, or other more or less monumental, structures, are pictured with something like the solidity of stonework; and eventually the canopy is merged in painted glass architecture, which joins itself on as best it can to the actual masonry.
The forms of canopy typical of each period of architecture have been discussed in the several chapters on design, but something remains to be said upon canopy work in general, and upon particular instances of it.
The Early canopy goes for nothing as design. Its one merit is that it is inconspicuous. One could wish that the Decorated were equally so. There is, as a rule, no shutting your eyes to its mass of overpowering shrinework. When, by way of exception, it chances to be modest it is sometimes more interesting—as where it is scarcely more than a cusped arch, or where, as at Strassburg, it takes the form of an arcaded band across the window, in which are series of little demi-figures. At Cologne Cathedral also sundry saints are pigeon-holed in this way. Apropos of this, it should be mentioned that it invariably adds to the interest of a canopy, when; for example, the broad shaft of a Decorated canopy enniches angels and other figures, or when they are introduced among its pinnacles or in its base. The wide-spreading German canopy affords scope for variety of design not possible so long as the structure is confined within a single light. In some four-light windows at Erfurt (1349-1372) the broad shafts of the canopies, with saints in separate niches, occupy the whole width of the outer lights, leaving only two lights for the central picture. In a five-light window at Strassburg the canopy is five-arched, allowing separate arches in the outer lights for figures of saints, whilst the three central ones cover a single subject.
In canopies which include niches with separate subsidiary subjects, these are sometimes by way of prelude to the main story. In the cathedral at Berne is something of the kind. There, among the pinnacles of the canopy which crowns the subject of the Adoration, are seen the Kings setting out on their pilgrimage, journeying by night, having audience of Herod, and arriving finally at the city of Bethlehem.
In the great altar-like canopies of the Renaissance there is sometimes a gallery above, with angels or other figures, which give points of colour amidst the white. In any case, the canopy is usually more interesting when it is peopled.
The Perpendicular canopy is in effect much more pleasing than what had gone before, but it sins in its simulation of stonework. There also little figures in white and stain are very effectively introduced into the shafts and other parts of the construction, but more in the form of architectural sculpture. There are some very interesting instances of this at Fairford, though the canopies themselves are not otherwise peculiarly interesting.
The useful device of low, flat-topped canopies, adopted in the nave windows at Cologne Cathedral, seldom occurs out of Germany. It is there most successful. Indeed, these particular canopies are interesting examples of the interpenetration of architectural tracery as well as of its moderate and modest use.
Late German canopies are often much more leafy than French or English; they are less architectural—or rather, the architecture breaks out into more free and flowing growth. The charm of Late Gothic canopy work, as was said, lies in its colour, or in the absence of colour—in its silvery effect, that is to say. And one may safely add that quite the most satisfactory canopies, in whatever style, are those in which white largely prevails, modified by stain, but preserving its greyish character. In later Renaissance work white is still largely used; but it is made less brilliant by painted shadow, and so has less to excuse its architectural pretensions. At Milan there is a window in which what should be white is in various granular tints of brown.
The coloured canopy, to which the Italians adhered (as well as to the border enclosing it), does not frame them as the white glass does. The idea appears to be, on the contrary, that it should form part of the picture. Elsewhere than in Italy coloured canopies, other than yellow, are rare; but they occur. There are, for example, the hideous flesh-coloured constructions peculiar to Germany. At Troyes are some not unsatisfactory little canopies in green, and others in purple (1499). At Châlons-sur-Marne is an effective canopy (1526-1537) of golden arabesque on purple. At Freiburg (1525) is a steely-blue Renaissance canopy, from which depend festoons of white and greenish-yellow, against the ruby ground of the subject. And there are others satisfactory enough. But so invariably effective is the framework of white and stain, that to depart from it seems almost like giving up the very excuse for canopies.
The Late Gothic canopy work does most effectually frame the pictures, and gives light, of course, at the same time. It goes admirably with the colour scheme, which includes always a fair quantity of white, even in comparatively rich figure subjects. There is no denying, nor any desire to deny, its altogether admirable effect. If the effect were not otherwise to be obtained, the end would justify the means. But the effect is due simply to the setting of the subjects in a framework of white, not to the architectural character of the design. All that those Perpendicular canopies do could be done equally without architectural forms at all. Canopies make no more beautiful screens of silvery-white than, say, the Five Sisters at York. Intrinsically they are less interesting than pattern work. They give less scope for arranging subjects variously, just as one will; and they allow less range for the fancy of the artist. The most interesting canopies, and among the most effective, are those Early Renaissance picture frames (French, German, or Italian) which, whilst just sufficiently suggesting something near enough to architecture to be called canopies, are really little more than arabesque. One might almost say they are pleasing in proportion as they depart from the quasi-architectural formula.
The enormous value of the mass of white afforded by the canopy, as a setting for colour, has reconciled us too readily to its use. Why not this mass of white without pretended forms of masonry, without this paraphernalia of pinnacles? The architect alone, perhaps, in his heart likes canopy work, and would prefer it to any other kind of ornamental device. When he plans a window, or directs its planning, forms of architectural construction occur to him naturally. Supposing him to be an artist (as we have perhaps a right to expect him to be) he produces a fine thing; but were he to work upon more workmanlike lines, or, to speak quite precisely, more upon the lines of the worker in glass, how much better he would do—being an artist! In his reliance upon inappropriate structural forms, he makes the obvious mistake of depending upon the kind of thing with which he is most familiar, not the thing especially called for. Each particular craft has a technique of its own.
One other class of person also loves canopy work—the tradesman; but his affection for it is less disinterested, and more easily accounted for. The stock canopy (as every one knows who has been, as it were, behind the counter) is a famous device for cheapening production. The examples chosen for illustration throughout these pages do, on the whole, much more than justice to the periods which they were chosen to represent; but, taken altogether, they do not, even so, form a very effective plea for canopy work.
Were the canopy more defensible than it is in glass, it would still have monopolised far too large a place in the scheme of mediæval and Renaissance design. We owe largely to it, in connection with the gradually increasing claims of figure work, the all but extinction of pattern glass. Figure work is practically implied by the canopy. Occasionally, indeed, architecture has formed the whole motif of a window; but the case is so rare that it does not count. Once in a while there may be excuse, and even occasion, for almost any device.
There is no valid reason of art why figures and figure subjects should not be framed in ornament, designed indeed with reference to the architecture of the building, but not in the least in the likeness of architecture. This ornament might perfectly well be in white and stain. Ornamental setting in colour does occur in thirteenth century medallion windows, and again (though only by exception) in certain Early Renaissance glass; but by that time pictures, as a rule, absorbed all the interest of design. The instinct which makes us want to give even pictured personages some sort of roof above their heads is more natural than logical. Anyway, to make windows to look like niches in the wall, is an absurd ideal of design, and the nearer the glass painter gets to it the further he has gone off the track. If anything in the nature of a canopy be desirable, clearly it should be constructed on the lines, not of masonry, but of glazing.
CHAPTER XXVI.
A PLEA FOR ORNAMENT.
There is a direction in which glass has never been fully developed, that of purely ornamental design. This is the more to be deplored because that direction is the one in which was most scope for the peculiar depth and brilliancy of colour characteristic of mosaic glass. Ornament was used in the thirteenth century not only as a setting for figure medallions, but as of sufficient interest to form of itself most beautiful windows in grisaille. Presently the attractions of figure work put an end to that; and, furthermore, the preference for picture naturally led to the development of design in the direction of glass painting, which lent itself so much more readily than mosaic to pictorial expression. We owe to that, not only the perfection of glass painting, and its ultimate degradation, but the neglect of latent possibilities in more thoroughly mosaic glass, aye, in pure glazing.
Even in figure work, much might be done for clerestory and other distant work, at all events, in pure mosaic glass. Those who have not closely observed old glass have no conception of the amount of leadwork there is in the windows they admire, at the very moment that they deprecate leading, so little do these interfere with the design, when disposed with the cunning of a craftsman. One can imagine figures on a large scale boldly blocked out, with broad shadows, in which not only the shadows, but even the reflected lights in them, might be glazed in pot-metal, and from the floor of a big church the leads would be inappreciable. But, except in work upon an absolutely heroic scale, there would always be the difficulty of the flesh; the features would have to be painted; and glass pictures of this kind would needs be designed with a severe simplicity not calculated to satisfy the modern pictorial sense.
The advocates of painting complain that due consideration of the qualities of glass would limit the artist to the baldest kind of pictorial effect. Something certainly must be sacrificed to fit treatment of the material, or glass suffers, whatever picture may gain. That is what has happened. But if so much sacrifice is necessary to figure, why always adopt that form of design? Why not sometimes at least abandon subject, and seek what can best be done in glass, even though that be barbaric? It is not quite certain but that glass really lends itself only to a rather barbaric kind of design, or what we are barbarous enough to call barbaric. This is certain: the interest of figure work has put an end to ornamental glass. It has become almost an article of faith with us that, to the making of a window worth looking at, figure design is indispensable. That should not be so. And, seeing that picture does not afford full scope for the qualities which glass-lovers most dearly love in glass, it seems rather cruel that picture should so largely preponderate in its design as to suppress the possibilities in the way of ornament. Why should it be so?
There are two very important reasons for the introduction of figure into glass, the one literary, the other artistic. In the first place, we love a story, that is no more than human; we want to know what it is all about, that is no more than rational; and figure subjects afford the most obvious means of satisfying those cravings of ours. But artists want these cravings satisfied by means of art. Some of them, perhaps, think more of the means employed than of the end achieved, and would have “art for art’s sake.” Theirs is a doctrine of very limited application. Sanity insists upon subordination of the means to end; and art is not an end in itself, nor is craftsmanship. It is not, therefore, for one moment suggested that story, sentiment, meaning, in windows, should be ruthlessly sacrificed to craftsmanship, even though expression implied the use of figure, which it does not. What is claimed, is merely this: that when you employ a material or a process some consideration is due to it.
Before undertaking to express an idea, it is always as well for the artist to consider how far its expression is consistent with art. If it can be expressed only at the cost of all that is best in art, it were better to adopt some other means of expression. If a particular craft is your one means of expression, and that particular thing cannot well be said in it, then say what can be said; it will be to much more purpose than saying even a better thing and saying it ill. The better the thought, the greater the crime of saying it inadequately.
After all, the sentiment, or what not, which people ask for in glass, and which compels figure work, is not, in the majority of instances, by any means so important, even in their eyes, but that they would sacrifice it readily enough if they knew the price in art at which they would have to pay for it. Let patrons of stained glass, if they care for art, ponder this statement; it is not spoken in haste, but in conviction.
There is one reason of sentiment which would argue against great part of the use that is made of figure work, at all events in church glass, the doubt, namely, as to how far it is possible, in these days, to reconcile the devout with the decorative treatment of sacred subjects. We are all admiration when we gaze up at the splendid figure of Moses in the great transept window at Chartres. But it is the artist in us that is entranced, the lover of glass, and especially of colour; the artless worshipper might feel that the dignity of the Lawgiver would perhaps have been better expressed with less attention to decorative effect. We are not shocked at the archaic effigy, because we realize that reverence underlies its simplicity. In modern work it is otherwise. Artistic intention, admirable or not from the æsthetic point of view, is responsible for the introduction into our churches of delineations of all that Christians hold sacred so ridiculous, it is a wonder devout worshippers allow them to be there. The excuse for glass is its decorative effect. Its value is in its colour. A Saint in stained glass (to mention no higher Person) stands in a window for just so much colour: is not that rather a degradation of the saint?
In the second place, apart altogether from what has been called the literary interest (which no one will dispute) there is in figure work a charm, altogether artistic, in the very unexpectedness of the colour-patches you get in it, not accidental quite, but in many instances at least, inspired by accident. The besetting sin of ornament is obviousness; it has a way of distributing itself too symmetrically and evenly, of laying its secret bare to the most casual glance. We see at once there is nothing to find out in it, and our interest drops to zero.
In figure design, on the contrary, there are breaks even in the very best balanced scheme; there is always something unexpected, unforeseen, something to kindle interest; in fact, the difficulty is, there, to distribute the composition evenly enough. The question arises whether this sameness, and consequent tameness, of ornament, the way the points of intended interest recur with irritating frequency and regularity, resolving themselves into mere spots—whether this defect is inherent in ornament, and inseparable from it.
Proof that it is not is afforded by heraldry, distinctly a branch of ornamental design, in which, for precisely the same reasons as in figure work, we get just that inevitable deviation from system, and more especially from symmetry, which seems necessary to the salvation of ornament. Where by happy chance an ornamental window has been patched with glass not belonging to it, or where portions of it have been misplaced, we get similar relief from monotony. Here the unexpectedness of contrast, colour, and so on, is accidental; in heraldry it is, in the nature of things, unforeseen of the artist, and unavoidable. May not similar results be obtained of set purpose and design? Surely they may. Were it otherwise, it would be worth falling back now and then upon haphazard, and letting colour come as it might.
Happily there is no occasion for that feeble sort of fatalism. Given a colourist and a man with that sense of distribution (whether of line, mass, or colour) which makes the artist, what is to hinder him from deliberately planning so much of surprise as may be necessary to tickle the appetite for the ornamental? The ogre in the path is what we call economy. Because ornament can without doubt be more cheaply executed than figure work, it is taken for granted that it must be reserved by rights for cheap work. What else is there to recommend it? And, that being so, ornament being but padding, by all means, it is argued, let it be not only cheap but of the cheapest!
Design, moreover, if it be worth having at all, is costly, and there is clearly thrift in repeating the same pattern, and even one unit of it, over and over again. The practice of saving design in this way has become at last so much a matter of course, that no one thinks of designing an ornamental window, as a whole, without repetition of pattern—except the artist; and with him it is a fond desire which he hopes perhaps some day to fulfil—at his own expense.
Under circumstances such as these, what wonder ornament is monotonous? It could not well be otherwise. But these conditions are not in the nature of things. Ornamental design has subsided because no one asks for, cares for, or encourages, ornament. It needs only to be in the hands of an artist—not necessarily a Holbein, but just a Rhodian potter, a Persian carpet weaver, a mediæval carver, or a nameless glazier—to be worthy of its modest place in art.
Considering the costliness of good figure work and the absolute worthlessness of bad, considering the way in which glass lends itself especially to ornament, considering how in ornament the qualities most necessary to decorative effect and most characteristic of the material can be obtained, surely the wiser policy would be to do what can so readily be done. When glass lends itself so kindly to ornament it seems a sin to neglect it. Is it quite past praying for, that there may still be a future for windows merely ornamental, which shall yet satisfy the sense of beauty?