BOOK III.
CHAPTER XXVII.
THE CHARACTERISTICS OF STYLE.
What are the characteristics of the various styles in glass? How does one tell the period of a window? These are not questions that can be fully answered in the short space of a chapter, which is all that can here be devoted to it; but it may help those to whom a window tells nothing of its date, briefly to mention the characteristics according to which we class it as belonging to this period or that. With a view to conciseness and to convenience of reference it will be best to catalogue these characteristics rather than to describe them.
Any subdivision of glass into “styles” must be more or less arbitrary. One style merges into the other, and the characteristics of each overlap, so to speak. The most convenient lines of demarcation are the centuries; for, as it happens, the changes in manner do take place more or less towards the century end. The one broad distinction is between Gothic and Renaissance.
Gothic may best be divided into three periods—viz., Thirteenth century and before, Fourteenth century, and Fifteenth century and after.
Thirteenth century glass, commonly called “Early English,” or, as the case may be, “Early French,” may as well be taken to include, for our purpose, what little remains of twelfth century or Norman work. It includes naturally Early German work, which is Romanesque and not Gothic in character.
Fourteenth century glass belongs to the Middle or Transitional Gothic period. We call it “Decorated,” for the inadequate reason that its detail is naturalistic.
213. St. Remi, Reims.
Fifteenth century glass, with us “Perpendicular,” in France “Flamboyant,” in Germany “Interpenetrated,” may, for convenience’ sake, be taken to include so much of Gothic as may be found lingering in the sixteenth century.
The Sixteenth century is more properly the period of the Renaissance. It is better not to apply to it the Italian term “cinque-cento,” since the greater part of it is not of the purely Italian character which that would imply.
Seventeenth century glass is to be distinguished from that of the sixteenth mainly inasmuch as it shows more markedly that decadence which had already begun to set in before the year 1600. It may be conveniently described as Late Renaissance.
Eighteenth century glass is not of sufficient account to be classed.
It will be seen that the dates above given do not quite coincide with those of Winston, who gives Early English to 1280, Decorated to 1380, and Perpendicular to 1530. There is here no thought of impugning his accuracy; but it seems more convenient not to distinguish a new style until the work begins markedly to differ from what had gone before, especially when the marked difference happens conveniently to coincide with the beginning of a new century; and Winston himself says of Perpendicular work (and implies as much of Decorated) that the style “can hardly be said to have become thoroughly established” until the beginning of the new century.
We have thus a century of Middle Gothic, the fourteenth century. What goes before is Early Gothic or Romanesque, as the case may be; what comes after is Late Gothic, coœval for a quarter of a century or more with the Renaissance.
214. Detail from Medallion Windows at Canterbury.
Early Glass.
The first thing which strikes one in Early Glass is either its deep rich, jewelled colour (Canterbury, Chartres), or its sober, silvery, greyness (Salisbury; Five Sisters, York). Exception to this alternative occurs mainly in very early ornamental glass (circa. 1300—S. Denis; S. Remi, Reims; Angers), in which white and colour are somewhat evenly mixed. Early figure work occurs also occasionally in colour on a white ground. The design of the richer class of windows consists largely of figure work. The design of “grisaille” windows consists mainly of ornamental pattern.
215. Mosaic Diaper.
Composition.—Rich windows are of three kinds: medallion windows, rose windows, figure and canopy windows. Jesse windows form an exception. ([Chapter XXIX.])
1. Medallion Windows are the most characteristic of the period ([Chapter XII.]). These contain figure subjects, on a quite small scale, within medallion shapes set in ornament (Canterbury, Chartres, etc.).
In the very earliest medallion windows (Angers, Poitiers) the ordered scheme of the medallioned window is sometimes interrupted by subjects not strictly enclosed in medallions. Or else, perhaps (Chartres), the subjects take the form of panels one above the other—they can scarcely be called medallions—with little or no ornament between.
After the first few years of the thirteenth century, however, the figure medallions (circles, quatrefoils, etc.) occur, as a rule, one above the other throughout the length of the light, with perhaps a boss of ornament between; the interstices being filled, in English glass with ornamental scrollwork, in French with geometric diaper ([opposite]).
216. Detail of Medallion Window, Chartres.
In the broad windows of Norman churches ([pages 123], [124]) the medallions are proportionately large, and are subdivided into four or five divisions, each of which is devoted to a separate picture. In our narrower lancet lights there is no occasion for that.
The figures in medallion subjects are few and far apart, standing comparatively clear-cut against a plain background ([page 325]); compacter groups indicate a later period. Landscape is symbolised rather than represented by a conventional tree or so; a town by an arch or two, a battlemented wall, or the like.
Medallions are framed by lines of colour and beaded bands of white, but they do not, as a rule, separate themselves very markedly from their ornamental surroundings. The effect is one rather indeterminate glory of intense colour.
Except in quite the earliest medallion windows, the strong iron bars supporting the glass are, as a rule, bent ([above]), to follow the outline of the medallions. That was done in no other period.
2. Rose Windows occur mainly in French churches. They are a variation upon the medallion window. A great Rose window (Chartres, Bourges, etc.) may be regarded as a series of radiating medallion lights, with subjects relatively fewer in number, and a greater proportion of pattern work. Occasionally they consist of pattern work altogether. Smaller Roses (the only form of tracery met with in quite Early work) contain very often a central circular medallion subject, the cusps or foils round it being occupied with ornament, all in rich colour, even though the lights below it be in grisaille.
217. Bars in Medallion Windows.
3. Figure and Canopy Windows ([page 40]) are more proper to the clerestory and triforium of a church, but they are not entirely confined to a far-off position.
With regard to them it should be mentioned that figures under canopies, sitting, or more often standing—one above the other in long, narrow lights—occur throughout the Gothic periods, and even in Renaissance glass. The characteristic thing about the Early ones is the stiffness and comparative grotesqueness of the figures and the modesty of the canopy. This last is of small dimensions. It may be merely a trefoiled arch ([page 40]). Usually it is more architectural ([page 46]), gabled, with a little roofing, and perhaps a small tower or two rising above, not beautiful. It is in fairly strong colours. It is so little conspicuous that it is not at first sight always distinguishable from the background to the figure. Occasionally the figure has no canopy at all. The saint stands front face, straight up in his niche, in a constrained and cramped position, occupying its full width, which is obviously insufficient. His feet rest in an impossible manner upon a label bearing his name; or, if that be inscribed upon a label in his hand, or on the background behind him, then he stands upon a little mound of green to represent the earth ([page 40]).
Figure and canopy alike are archaic in design, and rudely drawn. It is seldom that a figure subject on a smaller scale is introduced below the standing figure, as was frequently the case in later work. Groups of figures are characteristically confined to medallion windows.
218. Le Mans.
The Border is a feature in Early glass. It is broad. In medallion windows it measures sometimes as much as one-fourth the width of the light. It takes up, that is to say, perhaps half the area of the window. It consists of foliated ornament similar in character to that between the medallions. Very broad borders occasionally include smaller figure medallions. In figure and canopy windows the borders are less, and simpler. Sometimes they consist merely of broad bands of colour interrupted by rosettes of other colours. Circumstances of proportion, and so on, influence the width of the border; but a broad border is characteristic of the Early period.
219. Chartres.
In Rose windows the border is of less account, and is confined, as a rule, to the outer ring of lights, or, it may be, to their outer edge.
220. Auxerre.
Detail.—Ornamental detail is severely conventional. In very Early work ([page 327]) it has rather the character of Romanesque ornament, with straplike stalks interlacing, often enriched by a beaded, zig-zag, or other pattern, which may be either painted upon it or picked out of solid brown.
Early in the thirteenth century foliage assumes the simpler Gothic form, with cinque-foiled, or more often trefoiled, leafage ([as here shown]).
When it begins to be more naturalistic it is a sign of transition to the Decorated period. In Germany something of Romanesque flavour lingered far into the thirteenth century ([page 330]). There is properly no Early Gothic period there. Heraldry is modestly introduced into Early glass. The Donor is occasionally represented on quite a small scale in the lower part of a window, his offering in his hand; or he is content to be represented by a small shield of arms.
Colour.—The glass in Early windows is uneven in substance, and, consequently, in colour. This is very plainly seen in the “white” glass, which shades off, according to its thickness, from greenish or yellowish-white to bottle colour. The colour lies also sometimes in streaks of lighter and darker. This is especially so in red glass. The shades of colour most usually employed for backgrounds are blue and ruby. White occurs, but only occasionally.
221. Patchwork of Grisaille, Salisbury.
J. Akerman, Photo-lith, London, W. C.
The Early palette consists of:—
White, greenish, and rather clouded; red, rubylike, often streaky; blue, deep sapphire to palest grey-blue, oftenest deep; turquoise-blue, of quite different quality, inclining to green; yellow, fairly strong, but never hot; green, pure and emerald-like, or deep and even low in tone, but only occasionally inclining to olive; purple-brown, reddish or brownish, not violet; flesh tint, actually lighter and more pinkish shades of this same purple-brown. In very early work the flesh is inclined to be browner.
222. S. Kunibert, Cologne.
It must be remembered that, though the palette of the first glaziers was restricted, the proceeding of the glass-makers was so little scientific that they had no very great control over their manufacture. No two pots of glass, therefore, came out alike. Hence a great variety of shades of glass, though produced from a few simple recipes. They might by accident produce, once in a way, almost any colour. A pot of ruby sometimes turned out greenish-black. Still, the colours above mentioned predominate in Early work, and are clearly those aimed at.
Workmanship.—The glazing of an Early window is strictly a mosaic of small pieces of glass. Each separate colour in it is represented by a separate piece of glass, or several pieces.
The great white eyes, for example, of big clerestory figures are separate pieces of white glass, rimmed with lead, and held in place by connecting strips of lead, which give them often very much the appearance of spectacles ([page 40]). In work on a sufficiently large scale the hair of the head and beard are also glazed in white, or perhaps in some dark colour, distinct from the brownish-pink flesh tint peculiar to the period (same page). No large pieces of glass occur.
223. S. Kunibert, Cologne.
Upon examination the window proves to be netted over with lines of lead jointing, much of which is lost in the outlines of the design.
In large clerestory figures and the like, masses of one colour occur, but they are made up of innumerable little bits of glass, by no means all of one shade of colour; whence the richness in tone.
224. S. Jean-aux-Bois.
Painting.—In Early glass painting plays a very subordinate part. Only one pigment is used, and that not by way of colour, but to paint out the light and define form.
Details of figure and ornament are traced in firm strong brush lines.
Lines mark the exaggerated expression of the face, the close folds of the spare drapery wrapped tightly round the figure, the serration of foliage, and so on ([pages 33], [37], [324]). Lines, in the form of sweeping brush strokes or cross-hatching, are used also to emphasise such shading (not very much) as may be indicated in thirteenth century work, or perhaps it should rather be said that the lines of shading are supplemented very often by a coat of thin brown paint, not always very easily detected on the deep-coloured glass of the period.
White Windows, or “Grisaille.”—Grisaille assumes in France the character of interlacing strapwork all in white. Sometimes this is quite without paint ([page 25]). Plain work of the kind occurs also with us; but it is dangerous to give a date to simple glazing. That at Salisbury ([page 26]) is probably not of the very earliest.
In France, as with us, such strapwork is associated with foliated detail, traced in strong outline upon the white glass and defined by a background of cross-hatched lines which go for a greyer tint ([above]).
After the beginning of the thirteenth century, this strapwork is sometimes in colour, or points of colour are introduced in the shape of rosettes, etc., and in the border ([pages 137], [138]).
In England there is from the first usually a certain amount of coloured glass in grisaille windows ([pages 141], [332]). Sometimes there is a considerable quantity of it (Five Sisters, York); but it never appears to be much. The effect is always characteristically grey and silvery.
225. Grisaille, Salisbury.
J. Akerman, Photo-lith, London, W. C.
So long as the painted foliage keeps closely within the formal lines of strapwork, etc., it is, at all events in English glass, a sign of comparatively early thirteenth century work.
Later in the century the scroll winds rather more freely about the window ([page 143]).
The omission of the cross-hatched background and the more natural rendering of the foliation ([page 386]) announce the approach to the Decorated period.
Figure subjects in colour, planted, as it were, upon grisaille or quarry lights (Poitiers, Amiens), and grisaille borders to windows with figures in rich colour (Auxerre), are of exceptional occurrence.
Winston gives the year 1280 as the limit of the Early period, but there seems no absolute reason for drawing the line at that date. The use of stain, which was the beginning of a new departure in glass, does not pronounce itself before the fourteenth century. It seems, therefore, more convenient to include the last twenty years of the century in the first period, and to call it thirteenth century, accepting the more naturalistic type of foliage, when it occurs, as sign of transition; for, apart from that, the later thirteenth century work is not very markedly different from what was done before 1280.
Fourteenth Century.
Decorated or Intermediate Gothic.—Decorated glass grows characteristically livelier in colour than Early glass; at first it becomes warmer, owing to the use of more yellow, then lighter, owing to the use of white. It does not divide itself so obviously into coloured and grisaille.
The figure subjects include, as time goes on, more and more white glass. The grisaille contains more colour.
Figures and figure subjects are now very commonly used in combination with grisaille ornament in the same window. That is a new and characteristic departure ([page 159]).
226. S. Urbain, Troyes.
Composition.—Figure windows occur, indeed, with little or no ornament, in which case the subjects are piled one above the other, in panels rather than medallions, or under canopies. When the canopies are insignificant the result is one apparently compact mass of small figure work, as deep and rich perhaps in colour (S. Sebald’s, Nuremberg) as an Early medallion window; but the colour is not so equally distributed; it occurs more in patches.
Decorated canopies, however, are usually, after the first few years, of sufficient size to assert themselves as very conspicuous patches of rather brassy yellow, which in a window of several lights (and windows now almost invariably consist of two or more lights) form a band (or if there are two or more tiers of canopies, a series of bands) across the window.
In the case of grisaille windows also, figures or figure subjects are introduced either in the form of shaped panels or under little canopies, and take the form of a band or bands of comparatively rich colour across a comparatively light window.
When these canopies are themselves pronounced, the window shows alternate bands of figures (rich), canopies (yellowish), and ornamental pattern (whitish). In any case these horizontal bands across the window mark departure from the earlier style.
227. Châlons.
Canopies.—Canopies occur now over subjects as well as single figures.
The canopy is designed in flat elevation. Any indication of perspective betokens the end of the period. It has broadish shafts, usually for the most part white, which terminate in pinnacles ([page 155]). It has seldom any architectural base: the figures stand upon grass or pavement. It has usually a three-cusped arch, and above that a pointed gable decorated with crockets and ending in a finial. Crockets and finial are usually in strong, brassy yellow. Above are pinnacles and shrinework in white and colour, including as a rule a fair amount of yellow.
It may rise to a great height, dwarfing the figure beneath it. This occurs very especially in German work.
Sometimes the most conspicuous thing in the window is this disproportionate canopy. Its very disproportion is characteristic of the period.
In German work one great brassy canopy will frequently be found stretching right across the several lights of the window, over-arching a single subject. This triptich-like composition will occupy, perhaps, two-thirds of the height of the window. The background behind the pinnacles of this canopy may be either of one colour or of geometric diaper in mosaic (elsewhere characteristic of the Early period), finished off by a more or less arbitrary line—a cusped arch, for instance—above which is white glass. This kind of canopy has, by way of exception, an architectural base.
Another German practice is to fill the window with huge circular subject medallions, occupying the entire width of the window, and intersected by the mullions.
Single-light windows have sometimes a central elongated medallion or panel subject (without canopy), above and below which is ornamental grisaille.
228. Early Decorated Figure, Troyes.
Borders.—All windows have, as a rule, borders; but they are narrower than in Early work.
Tracery lights, which now form a conspicuous part of the window, are, as a rule, also each separately bordered, often with a still narrower border in colour, or it may be only a line of colour.
Grisaille windows have usually coloured borders, foliaged or heraldic (as [above]). The border does not necessarily frame the light at its base; very often there is an inscription there. Between the coloured border and the stonework is still invariably a marginal line of white glass.
Sometimes, more especially in tracery, this white line is broad enough to have a pattern painted upon it, in which case there is no coloured border. Or this white border line may be enriched at intervals by rosettes or blocks of colour upon it. Or, again, it may be in part tinted with pale yellow stain.
Some such border is usually carried round each separate tracery light, with the result that Decorated tracery may usually be distinguished at a glance from later work by a certain lack of breadth about it.
There is no need to say more about Decorated tracery, seeing that the idea of this epitome is to enable the amateur to form some opinion as to the period of a window, and not to prompt the designer. The geometric character of the stonework proclaims the period, and, unless there is something in the design of the glass to indicate a later date, it may be taken to belong to it. It cannot well be earlier if it fits.
229. S. Ouen, Rouen.
Stain.—Yellow stain is proof positive that the glass is not much earlier than the fourteenth century, for it is only about that time that the process of staining white glass yellow was discovered. The occurrence therefore of white and colour upon the same piece of glass—i.e., not glazed up with it, but stained upon it, is indicative of Middle or Late Gothic.
Stained yellow is always purer and clearer than pot-metal; when pale it inclines to lemon, when dark to orange. It is best described as golden. In comparison with it pot-metal yellow is brownish or brassy.
This yellow stain warms and brightens Decorated windows, especially those in grisaille. It naturally does away with a certain amount of glazing, for colour is now not entirely mosaic. Bands of yellow ornament in white windows, if stained, have lead on one side of them at most.
The hair of angels comes to be stained yellow upon white glass, which towards the fifteenth century takes the place of the flesh tint.
Figures.—Figures are still rather rudely drawn. They do not always fill out their niches, which, indeed, frequently overpower them. In attitude they pose and would be graceful. There is some swing about their posture, but it is often exaggerated. Drapery becomes more voluminous, fuller and freer, as shown [opposite].
At the back of the figure hangs commonly a screen diapered damask-fashion—the diaper often picked out of solid paint.
230. 14th Century German.
Grisaille.—The distinguishing characteristics of Decorated grisaille are fully described in the chapter dealing with it. It has usually a coloured border. The foliated pattern no longer follows the lines of the white or coloured strapwork, but it does not interlace with the straps ([pages 163], [333]).
Coloured bosses adorn the centre of the grisaille panels. Frequently these take the form of heraldic shields, planted, as it were, upon the grisaille.
The practice of cross-hatching the background to grisaille foliage dies out in France and England. In Germany it survives throughout the period; or, it may be, the background is coated with solid paint, and the cross-hatching is in white lines scratched out of that.
Naturalism.—The foliation of the ornament is now everywhere naturalistic. That is the surest sign of the period, at first the only sign of change. In grisaille patterns and in coloured borders you can identify the rose, the vine, the oak, the ivy, the maple, and so on ([pages 162], [166], [168]).
In Germany, the design of ornamental windows consists often of naturalistic foliage in white and colour upon a coloured ground, the whole rich, but not so rich as Early glass ([pages 171] et seq.). There also occur windows stronger in colour than ordinary grisaille, designed on lines more geometric than those of French or English glass of the period ([page 170]).
231. Wells.
Colour.—Glass gets less streaky, evener, and sometimes lighter in tint, as time goes on. Flesh tint gets paler and pinker, and at last white; “white” glass gets more nearly white.
Much blue and ruby continue to be used; but more green is introduced, and more yellow, often the two in combination. In fact, there is a leaning towards combinations of green and yellow, rather than the red and blue so characteristic of Early glass. Green is frequently used for backgrounds. The pure bright emerald-like green gives way to greens inclining more to olive. In some German windows, green, yellow, and purple-brown predominate. Occasionally, in the latter part of the century, pale blue is modified by yellow stain upon it, which gives a greenish tint.
Painting.—Outline is still used; but it becomes more delicate. Shading is still smeared on with a brush. But in the latter half of the century it was the practice to stipple it, so as to soften the edges and give it a granular texture. This is not quite the same thing as the “stipple or matt shading” described on [page 64], where the glass was entirely coated with a stippled tint and the lights brushed out.
Decorated glass is plentiful in England and Germany, not so abundant in France.
Fifteenth Century.
Perpendicular Glass.—By the fifteenth century the glass painter had quite made up his mind in favour of more light. He makes use of glass in larger sheets, and of lighter and brighter colour. His white is especially purer than before, and he uses it in much greater quantities.
232. FIGURES, S. MARY’S, ROSS.
So decidedly is this so, that a typical fifteenth century window strikes you as a screen of silvery-white glass in which are set pictures or patches of more or less brilliant, rather than intensely deep, colour.
Design.—Design takes, for the most part, the form of figure and canopy windows, schemed somewhat on the same lines as in the Decorated period—the subjects, that is to say, cross the window in horizontal bands.
But there is so much white glass in the canopy work—it is practically all in white (as stone) touched with stain (as gilding)—and it so entirely surrounds the figure subjects, that you do not so much notice the horizontal bands (into which the subjects really fall when you begin to dissect the design) as the mass of white in which they are embedded.
Canopies.—The larger Perpendicular windows are now crossed by stone transoms, so that very long lights do not, as a rule, occur.
Each light has a canopy, without any enclosing border ([233]). The canopy stands, as it were, in the window opening, almost filling it, except that, above, behind the topmost pinnacles, are glimpses of red or blue background, not separated from the stonework by so much as a line of white, heretofore of almost invariable occurrence. The hood and base of canopy are shown in misunderstood perspective, indicating usually a three-sided projection ([page 342]).
Its shafts and base rest upon the ground, on which are painted grass and foliage, all in white and stain. When standing figures occupy the place of honour, the base may very likely include a small subject, illustrative of a scene in the life of the personage depicted above. Or the base may be a sort of pedestal ([page 179]).
The figures usually stand upon a chequered mosaic pavement in black and white, or white and stain, not very convincingly foreshortened ([page 185]).
233. Perpendicular Canopy.
In the canopy may be little windows of pot-metal colour, and in the base perhaps a spot or two of colour; but, whatever the amount of pot-metal (never much) or of stain (often a good deal), the effect is always silvery-white; and as time goes on the canopy becomes more solidly and massively white. The groining at the back of the niche just above the figures is a feature of the full-blown style. The vault is usually stained, less often glazed in pot-metal. There is more scope for this coloured groining in windows where the canopy runs through several lights. That is more common in France and Germany than with us. In English work each light has, as a rule, its own canopy.
In France, and more especially in Germany, the canopies are not seldom in yellow instead of white, golden in effect instead of silvery. Sometimes white and yellow canopies alternate (Nuremberg, Munich). The German canopy is often more florid, and less distinctly architectural than the English.
Perpendicular canopies are more in proportion to the figures under them than Decorated. Usually they are important enough to be a feature in the window, if not the feature. Sometimes, however, they are quite small and insignificant (East window, York), in which event the subjects appear more like a series of small panels, one above the other. In that case there is likely to be a large amount of white glass in the subjects themselves ([pages 252], [339]). Possibly the background is white. In any case, there is usually a fair share of white glass in the drapery of figures. The faces also are almost invariably white, often with stained hair; and this white flesh is characteristic of the period.
234. FIGURE AND CANOPY WINDOWS, BOURGES.
Until the turn of the century, landscape or architectural accessories are, to a large extent, in white and stain, against a blue or ruby ground.
Variety of colour in the background (or a further amount of white) is introduced by means of a screen of damask behind the figure, shoulder high, above which alone appears the usual blue or ruby background, diapered. The screen may be of any colour: purple-brown is not uncommon. When scale permits, the damask pattern is often glazed in colours, or in white and stain upon pot-metal yellow.
Heraldic shields are more conspicuous than ever in the design. Donors and their patron saints are often important personages in the foreground of the picture.
Tracery.—Tracery lights being now more of the same shape as the lights below, the glass is designed on much the same plan. That is to say, they also contain little figures under canopies. These are often entirely, or almost entirely, in white and stain, only here and there a point of colour showing in the background, more especially about their heads.
Trefoiled, quatrefoiled, three-sided, or other openings not adapted to canopy work, have usually foliated ornament in white and stain, with border line of white and stain, the background painted in solid brown. Inscribed scrolls and emblematical devices in white and stain also occur in the smaller tracery lights.
Grisaille.—Grisaille takes almost invariably the form of quarries. The pattern of the quarries consists ordinarily of just a rosette or some such spot in the centre of the glass, delicately outlined and filled in with stain. A band of canopied figures sometimes crosses quarry windows, the pinnacles of the canopies breaking into the quarries above. Figures occur also often in white and stain, against a quarry ground, without canopy, standing perhaps on a bracket, or on a mere label or inscription band (York Minster). Occasionally we get subjects altogether in white and stain, without quarry glazing. In Germany unpainted roundels, or circular discs of white glass, take the place of quarries ([page 292]).
235. Fairford.
Detail of Ornament.—The detail of Perpendicular foliage is no longer very naturalistic; it has often the appearance of being embossed or otherwise elaborated. It is most commonly in white with yellow stalks.
Borders.—The border is no longer the rule, except in quarry windows. It is now very rarely used to frame canopies. Where it occurs it is usually in the form of a “block” border, differing only from that of the Decorated period by the character of the painted detail. Borders all in white and stain also occur.
The border does not follow the deeply cut foils of the window head. These are occupied each by its separate round of glass painted with a crown, star, lion’s head, or other such device, in white and stain, against which the coloured border stops.
Stain.—Abundant use of beautiful golden stain is typical of the period. Stain is always varied, sometimes shading off by subtle degrees from palest lemon to deep orange. The deliberate use of two distinct tones of stain, as separate tints, say of a damask pattern, argues a near approach to the sixteenth century. So does the use of stain upon pot-metal yellow.
236. SCRAPS OF LATE GOTHIC DETAIL.
Other signs of the mature style are:—
1. The very careful choice of varied and unevenly coloured glass to suggest shading or local colour.
2. The use of curious pieces of accidentally varied ruby to represent marble, and the like.
3. The abrasion of white spots or other pattern on flashed blue (the abrasion of white from ruby begins with the second half of the century).
4. The introduction of distant landscape in perspective, and especially the representation of clouds in the sky, and other indications of attempted atmospheric effect.
5. The treatment of several lights as one picture space, without canopy.
Colour.—White glass is cooler and more silvery, more purely white. Red glass is less crimson, often approaching more to a scarlet colour. Blue glass becomes lighter, greyer; sometimes it is of steely quality, sometimes it approaches to pale purple. More varieties of purple-brown and purple are used. Purer pink occurs.
Drawing.—In the fifteenth century the archaic period of drawing is outgrown. Figures are often admirably drawn, more especially towards the end of the period, at which time the folds of drapery are made much of.
Painting.—Painting is much more delicate. The method adopted is that of stippling ([page 64]).
Figure and ornament alike are carefully shaded, quarry patterns and narrow painted borders excepted.
For a long while painters hesitated to obscure the glass much; they shaded very delicately, and used hatchings, and a sort of scribble of lines, to deepen the shadows. As a result the shading appears sometimes weak, but the glass is always brilliant.
237. Fairford.
With the progress of the century stronger stipple shading was used; more roundness and greater depth of shadow was thus achieved, at proportionate cost of silvery whiteness and brilliancy in the glass.
The characteristic of the later technique was that it depended less upon mosaic, and more upon paint.
Leads were not used unless they were constructionally unavoidable; and it was sought to avoid them. The nimbus, for example, was glazed in one piece with the head ([page 189]), stained perhaps, or with a pattern in stain upon it, to distinguish it from the face; or it showed white against the yellow hair.
From the lead lines alone of an Early window, and of many a Decorated one, you could read the design quite plainly. The later the period the less that is so. By the end of the fifteenth century the lead lines convey very often little or no idea of the picture, which they hold together but no longer outline. Canopies, for example, are sometimes leaded in square quarries, without regard to the drawing, except where that must be ([page 342]).
A pretty sure sign of period is afforded by the way the leads give, or do not give, the design. Exceptions are mentioned on [page 73]. Where leads seem to occur more or less as it happens, as though they might have been an after-thought, that is most positive proof of Late work.
Sixteenth Century.
Renaissance glass does not, like Gothic, divide itself into periods. It was at its best when it was still in touch with mediæval tradition.
238. French Renaissance, Mosaic.
The finest work in the new manner must be ascribed therefore to the first half of the sixteenth century. After that its merits belong more to picture than to glass.
Apart from details of architecture, ornament (as [above]), costume and so on, which at once proclaim the style, it is difficult to distinguish between Gothic and Renaissance glass of the very early sixteenth century. The distinction does not in fact exist; for Gothic traditions survive even in work belonging, according to the evidence of its detail, to the Renaissance.
Design.—Design takes now mainly the pictorial direction. It spreads itself more invariably over the whole face of the window. The canopy, for example, is seldom confined to a single light.
Canopies.—The canopy scheme is at first not widely removed from Gothic precedent, although the detail may be pronouncedly Renaissance. It frames the subject as before; but it is less positively white. It is enriched with much more yellow stain; and the mass of white and stain is broken by festoons and wreaths of foliage, fruit, and flowers, medallions with coloured ground, ribbons, or other such features, in pot-metal colour. A simple François Ier canopy is given on [page 349].
Sometimes these canopies consist rather of arabesque ornament than of anything that can properly be called architectural, in white and yellow ([page 350]), or perhaps all in yellow, upon a ground of pot-metal colour ([page 205]); that is to say, the setting out of the window and the technique employed are absolutely Gothic, and perhaps not even very late Gothic, whilst the detail is altogether Renaissance in design. This mosaic manner (as at Auch) bespeaks, of course, the early years of the Renaissance.
Another sure sign of lingering Gothic influence is where the round arch is fringed with cusping.
The more typically Renaissance form of design is where a huge monumental structure fills the greater part of the window, not canopying a subject, but having in front of it a figure group (Transept of S. Gudule, [page 71]). The foreground figures stand out in dark relief against the architecture and the sky beyond, seen through the central arch. Into this grey-blue merges very often a distant landscape, painted in great part upon the blue, and really seeming to recede into the distance. The effect of distance is largely obtained by contrast with the strong shadow of the soffits and sides of the arch seen in perspective.
We have here four characteristics of Renaissance glass:—
1. The monumental canopy with figures in front of it.
2. Strong contrast of light and shade.
3. Fairly accurate perspective in the architecture.
4. Something like atmospheric effect in the landscape, which is painted more or less upon the sky.
When in a canopy the shadowed portions of the architecture are glazed in deep-coloured glass (purple, as a rule), and not darkened by painting, it indicates the early part of the century. The canopy, instead of being arched, ends sometimes in a rich frieze and cornice (Church of Brou). When it is in two stages, enclosing two subjects, the lower one has naturally this horizontal entablature (Chapel of the Holy Sacrament, S. Gudule).
A less usual treatment is where the figures do not occupy the foreground, but are seen through the arch. The subject occupies, in fact, very much the position of a painted altar-piece in a carved stone altar.
Foreground figures prove often to be donors and their patron saints. The head of the window above the great architectural canopy, as it is convenient to call it, is usually of plain white glass, glazed in rectangular or diamond quarries ([page 71]).
A coloured ground above a Renaissance canopy indicates Gothic tradition, and an Early period therefore (S. Jacques, Liège).
More to the latter half of the century belong the pictorial compositions in which architecture, more or less proper to the subject, fills great part of the window, the foremost arches adapting themselves, sometimes, to the stonework. In this case the architecture is in white glass, more or less obscured by painted shadow; and pot-metal colour occurs only in the figures, where it is perhaps quite rich, in occasional columns of coloured marble, and in a peep of pale blue distance seen through some window or other opening ([page 213]).
239. François Ier Canopy, Lyons.
The grey-blue distance has often figures as well as landscape and architecture painted upon it; to represent verdure it is stained green. Blue is more usual than white as a ground; but that also occurs, similarly painted. The not very usual landscape in white, with a blue sky above, in the windows of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, belongs to the early part of the century.
Tracery.—In small windows the subject, or its canopy, is often carried up into the tracery lights ([page 368]), or the architecture ends abruptly and horizontally at the springing of the arch, and the heads of the lights are treated as part of the tracery.
Tracery lights often contain figure subjects. Very commonly they are occupied by figures of angels robed in white and stain, or in rich colour, or with colour only in their wings, playing upon musical instruments, bearing emblems, scrolls, and so on, all on a coloured ground ([page 280]). There occur also, but less frequently, cherubic heads, portrait medallions, badges, twisted labels, or other devices, upon a ground of ruby, pale blue, purple, or purple-brown. A purple or purplish background is of the period.
Coloured grounds are used without borders. White grounds are usually diapered with clouds.
There is no very distinctive treatment of rose windows. They are filled as pictorially as they well can be. They contain, perhaps, a central subject and in the outer lights angels, cherubs, and the like, much as in other tracery lights.
Ornament.—The detail of their ornament is a ready means of distinguishing Renaissance windows. In place of Gothic leafage we have scrollwork of the marked arabesque or grotesque character derived from Italy. It needs no description.
Screens and draperies have often patterns in white and stain on ruby and other coloured grounds, produced by abrading the red and painting and staining the white thus exposed. The process may be detected by the absence of intervening lead between the white or yellow and the deep ground.
240. Church of S. Peter, Cologne.
Other damask patterns are stained on the coloured glass without abrasion, yellow on blue giving green, on purple olive, and so on.
Ornamental windows scarcely go beyond quarry work, with a border of white and stain. Except in quarry windows, borders are seldom used.
Grisaille windows scarcely occur. The little subjects in white and stain painted upon a single piece of glass, usually circular and framed in quarries or in a cartouche set in plain glazing ([page 352]), belong to a class by themselves.
241. S. Jean, Troyes, 1678.
Technique.—In many respects the technique of the Renaissance glass painter is only a carrying further of the later Gothic means. He uses more and more white glass, employing it also as a background; he uses more shades of coloured glass, especially pale blues, greens, and purples; he chooses his glass more carefully for specific purposes; he uses more coated glass, and abrades it; he makes greater use of stain, staining upon all manner of colours—ruby, blue, purple, green—and even painting in stain, and picking out high lights upon it in white. He paints delicate work more delicately. Flesh-painting he carries to a very high point of perfection, more especially in the portraits of Donors. In strengthening his shadows he eventually gets them muddy. At first he used to hatch them to get additional strength; eventually he was not careful always so much as to stipple them. He uses often a warmer brown pigment for flesh painting, and by-and-by resorts to a quite reddish tint by way of local colour; he uses large pieces of glass when he can, and glazes his backgrounds and other large surfaces in rectangular panes. Above canopies he comes to use pure white glass, as if to suggest that the canopy is solid, and beyond only atmosphere.
The one quite new departure in sixteenth century technique was the use of enamel colour (see [Chapter VIII].). That began to come into use towards the middle of the century. When you detect the least touch of enamel colour in a window, other than the pinkish flesh tint, you may suspect that it belongs to the second half of the century; when it seriously affects the design and colour of the window, you may be sure it does. But it is not until quite the end of the century that mosaic anywhere practically gives way to enamel painting.
The sixteenth century, therefore, includes, broadly speaking, all that is best in Renaissance glass and much that is already on the decline. There is a tide in the affairs of art; and after the full flood of the Renaissance, sweeping all before it, glazing and glass painting sank to the very lowest ebb, out of sight in fact of craftsmanship. Only here and there, by way of rare exception, was good or interesting work any longer done,—as for example at Troyes, where good traditions, piously preserved in a family of exceptionally skilful glass painters, were followed long after they were elsewhere extinct.
Seventeenth Century.
You may recognise seventeenth century work not so much by any new departure in design (except that it aims more and more at the effect of an oil picture, and that the portrait of the Donor and his family constitutes the picture) as by its departure from the old methods, the methods above described; by the introduction of pure white glass, glazed in geometric pattern, in the upper half of the window or, it may be, as a background; by the use of enamel paint instead of coloured glass; by the abuse of heavy shading (in the vain attempt to get chiaroscuro), and by a loss, consequently, of the old translucency and brilliancy; by the aggressiveness of the lead lines (now that it is sought to do as much as possible without them); by the adoption of thin-coloured glass, toned by paint, instead of deep pot-metal; by the occurrence of whole panes of glass coated with solid paint; by the decay of the enamel; and by the general dilapidation of the window.
242. Certosa in Val d’Ema.
The unlearned must not be misled by the shabbiness of a window, by the breakages, the disfiguring leads which represent repair, the peeling off of the paint, and so on, into the supposition that these are signs of antiquity. On the contrary, the very method of its making was the saving of Early glass, and Late work owes its vicissitudes largely to the mistaken process adopted in its execution,—by which you may know it.
It would be beyond the scope of a book about glass to go more thoroughly into the characteristics of style generally. Enough to indicate what more especially concerns the subject in hand.
Without some slight acquaintance with the course of art, it will perhaps be difficult to trace the development of glass design. Historical or antiquarian knowledge of any kind will make it more easy. Not merely the character of ornament or architecture, but the details of lettering, costume, heraldry, give evidence in abundance to those who can read it; but it is with art and craftsmanship that we have here to do.
The data given in this chapter and throughout are derived from the study of old work. Winston and other authorities have been referred to only to corroborate impressions gained by personal experience,—the experience only of a designer, a workman, a lover of glass, professing to no more learning than a student must in the course of study acquire. Nevertheless these few notes on what is characteristic in design and workmanship, may, it is hoped, be helpful to artists, craftsmen, students, and lovers of art, and perhaps sufficient for their guidance.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
STYLE IN MODERN GLASS (A POSTSCRIPT).
It is easy, and it is only too common a thing, for the designer to depend for inspiration over much upon old work; but until he knows what has been done he is not fully equipped for his trade.
Moreover, a workman skilled only in his craft may be prolific in good work: one, on the other hand, learned only in archæology, is, in the nature of things, sterile. He may know as much about old glass as Winston, and fail as utterly even to direct design a-right as he did at Glasgow. The Munich windows there are glaring evidence as to what a learned antiquary and devoted glass-lover can countenance. Too surely the fire of archæological zeal warps a man’s artistic judgment.
What, then, about historic style? Are we to disregard it in our work? That question may be answered by another: What about old work? Old work, it is argued, should be our guide. Well, old work preaches no adherence to past styles. It went its own way, in delightful unconsciousness that the notion could ever occur to any one deliberately to go back to a manner long since out of vogue; and when the idea of a Renaissance did occur to the artist, he very soon made it something quite different from the thing he set out to revive—if ever that was his deliberate intention.
It is too lightly assumed that “the styles” are there, ready made for us, and that all we have to do is to make our choice between them, and take the nearest to a fit we can find. So many of us only learn to copy, whereas the whole use of copying is to learn. Artists study style for information, not authority.
The truth is, no style of old glass is fashioned to our use. Early Gothic glass has most to teach us with regard to the mosaic treatment of the material, and perhaps also about breadth and simplicity of design; but when it comes to figure drawing and painting, here is surely no model for a nineteenth century draughtsman. Renaissance work has most to teach in the way of painting and pictorial treatment; but it is not an exemplar of workmanlike and considerate handling of glass.
Because Early work was badly drawn, because Decorated was ill-proportioned, because Perpendicular was enshrined in stone-suggesting canopy work, because Renaissance was apt to depend too much upon finish, because seventeenth century work was overburdened with paint; must a man, therefore, according to the style of the building for which his work is destined, make it rude, misproportioned, stonelike, ultra-finished, or over-painted?
It happens that Early figure work in glass was mostly in deep rich colour. Are we to have no figures, therefore, in grisaille? It happens that later glass was, at its best, delicate and silvery in effect. Are we, therefore, to have no rich windows any more? Thirteenth century pictures were diminutive in scale. Are we to have no larger pictures ever? Sixteenth century subjects spread themselves over the whole window. Are we never to frame our glass pictures? And as to that frame, are we to choose once and for all the ornamental details of this period or that, or the formula of design adopted at a given time?
Whether in the matter of technique or treatment, of colour or design, no one style of old glass is enough for us. What does an historic style mean? Partly it means that during such and such years such and such forms were in fashion; partly it means that by that time technique had reached such and such a point, and no further. Must we rest there? If at a certain period in the history of design the scope of the glass painter was limited, his art rude, shall we limit ourselves in a like manner? If at another it was debased, ought we to degrade our design, just because the building into which our work is to go is of that date, or pretends to be? It was the merest accident that in the thirteenth century drawing was stiff and design more downright than refined, that the appliances of the glazier were simple, and the technique of the painter imperfect. It was an accident that silver stain was not discovered until towards the middle of the fourteenth century, that the idea of abrading colour-coated glass did not occur to any one until nearly a century later, that the use of the glass-cutter’s diamond is a comparatively modern invention, and so on.
Out of the very scarcity of the craftsman’s means good came; and there is a very necessary lesson to us in that; but to throw away what newer and more perfect means we have (all his knowledge is ours, if we will) is sheer perversity.
To affect a style is practically to adopt the faults and follies of the period. If you are bent upon making your glass look like sixteenth century work, you glaze it in squares, and introduce enamel. To treat it mosaically would be not to make it characteristic enough of the period for your pedant, notwithstanding that sixteenth century glass was, by exception, treated in a glazier-like fashion.
Should one, then, it may be asked, take the exception for model? The answer to that is: take the best, and only the best. It is no concern of the artist whether it be exceptional or of every-day occurrence; some kinds of excellence can never be common. Is it good? That is the question he has to ask himself.
With regard to the use of the forms peculiar to a style—Gothic Tracery or Renaissance Arabesque—that is very much a question of a man’s temperament. Has he any sympathy with them? Does that seem to him the thing worth doing? If his personal bias be that way, who shall say him nay? Assume even that the conditions of the case demand Decorated or Italian detail, it does not follow that they demand precisely the treatment of such detail found in the fourteenth or the sixteenth century.
The style of a building is not to be ignored. To put, nowadays, in a thirteenth or fourteenth century church windows in the style of the fifteenth or sixteenth would be absurd; to put in a fifteenth or sixteenth century church windows in the style of the thirteenth or fourteenth, more foolish still. But it does not follow that in a church of any given century, the modern windows should be as nearly as possible what would have been done in that century.
No man in his senses, no artist at all events, ever denied that the designer of a stained glass window must take into consideration the architecture of the building of which his work is to form part. The only possible question is as to what consideration may be due to it.
The archæologist (and perhaps sometimes the architect) claims too much. Certainly he claims too much when he pretends that the designer of a window should confine himself to the imitation of what has already been done in glass belonging to the period of the building, or of the period which the building affects. Why should the modern designer submit to be shackled by obsolete traditions? What is his sin against art, that he should do this dreary penance, imposed by architectural or ecclesiastical authority? And what good is to come of it?
The unfortunate designer of modern glass is asked to conform both to the technique and to the design of glass such as was executed at the period to which belongs the building where his glass is to go, no matter how inadequate the one or the other, or both, may be. So far as technique is concerned, it can scarcely be questioned that the only rational thing to do, is to do the best that can be done under the circumstances.
That is equally the thing to aim at in design, simply one’s level best. It seems strange that there should be two opinions on the subject. A building of some centuries past (or in that style) is to be filled with nineteenth century glass. Choose your artist: a man whose work has something in common with the sentiment of the period of the building, a man with education enough to appreciate the architecture and what it implies, with modesty enough to think of the decorative purpose of his work and not only of his cleverness; let such a man express himself in his own way, controlled only by the conditions of the case; and there would be little likelihood that his work would, in the result, shock either the feelings or the taste of any but a pedant—and if art is to conform to the taste of the pedant, well, it is time the artist shut up shop. Why will men of learning and research discount, nay, wipe out, the debt art owes to them, by claiming what is not their due?
Even though it were necessary or desirable that we should restrict ourselves to what might have been done in the thirteenth century or in the sixteenth, that would not argue that we must do only what was done. Surely we may be allowed to do what the men of those days might conceivably have done had they possessed our experience. Surely we need not go for inspiration to the glass of a period when glass was admittedly ill-understood, inadequate, poor, bad. It is quite certain that the thirteenth century workmen did not realise all that might be done in painted glass, quite certain that those of the seventeenth did not appreciate what might be done in mosaic glass. It would be sheer folly to paint no better than a thirteenth century glazier, because our window was destined for Salisbury Cathedral, to make no more use of the quality inherent in glass than was made by a painter of the seventeenth century, because it was designed for St. Paul’s. Those who are really familiar with old work know that, even in periods of decline, work was sometimes done which showed no falling away from good tradition. You may find Renaissance glass almost as mosaic in treatment as thirteenth century work. But because that was comparatively rare, because the average work of the period was much less satisfactorily treated, modern Renaissance must, it is absurdly assumed, be on the same unsatisfactory lines.
Suppose we want modern Italian Renaissance, and, further, that we wish not only to retain the character of Renaissance detail but to get good glass, suppose also that we do not want forgery,—the thing to do would be, to inspire oneself at the very best sources of Italian ornament—carving, inlay, goldsmith’s work, embroidery, no matter what (ornament is specifically mentioned because it is in ornament that the tyranny of style is most severely exercised), and to translate the forms thence borrowed into the best glass we can do. That, of course, is not quite so easy as appropriation, wholesale; it implies research, judgment, a thorough knowledge of glass; but it would certainly lead, in capable hands, to nobler work, and work which might yet be in the Italian spirit. The danger is that it would clash, not with Renaissance feeling, but with preconceived ideas as to what should be.
Our affectations of old style would be much more really like old work if they pretended less to be like it. Had the old men lived nowadays they would certainly have done differently from what they did.
An artist in glass cannot safely neglect to study old work, more especially in so far as it bears upon modern practice. It is for him to realise, for example, what artistic good there was in early archaic design, what qualities of colour and so on came of mosaic treatment, what delicacy is due to the liberty of the later Gothic glass painter, what fresh charm there was in the more pictorial manner of the Cinque-Cento, and at what cost was this bought. Questions such as these are much more to the point than considerations of the date at which some new departure may have been made.
The several systems on which a window design was set out, the various methods of execution—mosaic and paint, pot-metal and enamel, smear-shading and stipple, cross-hatching and needle point, matting and diapering, staining and abrading—all these things he has to study, not as indices of period, but that he may realise the intrinsic use and value of each, that he may deduce from ancient practice and personal experience a method of his own.
Doubtful and curious points concern the antiquary not the artist. He had best keep to the broad highway of craftsmanship, not wander off into the byeways of archæology. Typical examples concern him more than rare specimens—examples which mark a stage in the progress of art, and about which there is no possibility of learned dispute. He wants to know what has been done in order to judge what may be done, and especially he wants to know the best that has been done.
The problem is how to produce the best glass we can in harmony with the architecture to which it belongs, but without especial regard to what happens to have been done during the period to which the architecture of the building belongs. We may even inspire ourselves at the sources of sixteenth century Italian art, and yet in no wise follow in the footsteps of the glass painters of the period, who were more or less off the track; we may set ourselves to do, not what they did (glass was not their strong point), but what they might have done. There, if you like, is an ideal worthy of the best of us.
If we pretend to be craftsmen we must do our work in the best way we know. If we are men, let us at least be ourselves. Let us work in the manner natural to us. If we undertake to decorate a building with a style of its own, let us acknowledge our obligation to it; let us be influenced by it so far as to make our work harmonious with it—harmonious, that is to say, in the eyes of an artist, not necessarily of a savant. Evidence of modernity is no sin, but a merit, in modern work. To see how a man adapted his design to circumstances not those of his own day, gives interest to work. We never wander so wide of the old mediæval spirit as when we pretend to be mediæval or play at Gothic. True style, as craftsmen know, consists in the character which comes of accepting quite frankly the conditions inherent in our work.
CHAPTER XXIX.
JESSE WINDOWS.
The subjects depicted in stained glass tell the story of the Church, or preach its doctrine. Scenes from the Old Testament, from the Life of Christ, from the legends of the Saints, and so on, recur from the earliest Gothic times, and throughout the period of the Renaissance. These pictures accommodate themselves to the current plans of design, or the plan of design is chosen to suit them, as the case may be.
There is one subject, however, occurring from the first in glass, which does not fall into any of the usual schemes of design, and which, in fact, differs so entirely from any of them, that it forms a class of design apart. The subject, in fact, by way of exception to the rule, not merely affects but determines the decorative form of the window. This subject is the Descent of Christ—in short, the genealogical tree of the Saviour; and the window devoted to its delineation is called a Jesse window. Much freer and more varied scope for composition was offered by this piece of church heraldry than the ordinary medallion or figure and canopy window afforded, and the glazier turned it early to exceedingly decorative use. The tree is shown issuing, as it were, from the loins of Jesse. It bears his descendants, or rather a very arbitrary selection of them (it is as well not to inquire too strictly as to their legitimate right to be there), ending in the Virgin and the Saviour.
The earliest arrangement of a Jesse window is as follows: at the base is the recumbent figure of Jesse; the straight stem of the tree, proceeding from him, is almost entirely hidden by a string of figures, one above the other, occupying the centre part of the window, and represented, for the most part, as Kings; above them is the Virgin, also crowned; and in the arch of the window sits our Lord in Majesty, surrounded by seven doves, to signify the gifts of the Spirit. It is not perhaps quite clear upon what these figures sit. They hold on with both hands to branches of highly conventional Romanesque foliage, springing from the main stem, and occupying the space about the figures in very ornamental fashion. A series of half medallions on each side of this central design contain little figures of attendant prophets—in a sense, the spiritual ancestors of the Saviour. All this is in the deepest and richest mosaic colour, as in the beautiful bluish Jesse window at the West end of the cathedral at Chartres, which belongs to about the middle of the twelfth century. Very much the same kind of thing occurs at Le Mans and elsewhere.
Later the tree more often branched out into loops, forming oval or vesical-shaped spaces, in which the figures sat, as may be seen on [page 362]. The ground of the window is in that case blue, the background of the figure ruby. Had it been red the figures would probably have been upon blue. This particular instance, by the way, is said to be of the twelfth century, although the ornament has more the character of thirteenth century work. You see also the doves referred to encircling the figure sitting in Majesty, and the figures attendant upon the Virgin. Sometimes these are prophets, sometimes angels; sometimes they stand in little canopy niches, sometimes they are in the midst of the foliage. The fragment from Salisbury on [page 117] formed most probably part of a Jesse window. The symbolic doves have often each a nimbus. A single dove represents, of course, the Holy Ghost.
A rather suggestive variation upon the orthodox Early scheme occurs in a window at Carcassonne. Each of the three lights is bordered with a rather geometric pattern. Within the border the central light is designed much on the usual lines: Jesse recumbent below, and above the figures of Kings, sitting each in his own little vesical-shaped space formed by the growth of the tree. In the sidelights, however, the Prophets are provided with the very simplest canopies, one above the other.
An interesting arrangement is to be found in the clerestory of the cathedral at Tours, where the central light of a window has a Tree of Jesse, with the usual oval compartments, corresponding with hexagon-shaped medallions in the two sidelights, in which are depicted scenes presumably appropriate to the subject; it is difficult to make them out with any certainty.
243. PART OF EARLY JESSE WINDOW, MUSÉE DES ARTS DÉCORATIFS, PARIS.
Occasionally what seems at first sight a medallion window resolves itself, as at S. Kunibert, Cologne, into a kind of genealogical tree, enclosing subjects illustrative of the descent of Christ. The rather unusual combination of medallion and vine shown [below], also German, is of rather later date.
244. Freiburg.
In the fourteenth century the tree naturally becomes a vine, usually in colour upon a blue or ruby ground, extending beyond the limits of a single light, and crossing not only the mullions, but the borders (which, by the way, often confuse the effect of a Decorated Jesse window). The vine extends also very often into the tracery, where sits the Virgin with the Infant Christ. The figure of our Lord is always, of course, the topmost feature of the tree—in the arms of the Virgin, in the lap of the Father, or sitting in Majesty. A variation upon ordinary practice occurs where the Father supports a crucifix. The figure of Jesse naturally, as at Shrewsbury ([page 241]), extends across several lights.
Occasionally a figure and canopy window proves to be also a Jesse window—a vine, that is to say, winds about the figures, and connects them with the figure of Jesse; but this combination of canopy work with tree work (as at Wells, some of the detail of which is given [overleaf]) is confused and confusing. A much happier combination of figures under canopies with tree work occurs in a sixteenth century window at S. Godard, Rouen, which has at the base a series of five figures, above whom spreads the tree, its roots appearing above the head of the central one, who proves to be Jesse.
By the fifteenth century the vine is rather more conventionally treated. It is usually in white and stain upon a coloured ground, or, if the leaves are green, the stems are white and stain. The figures also have more white in their drapery. In the earlier part of the century the main stem branches very often in an angular manner so as to form six-sided bowers for the figures, framing them, perhaps, in a different colour from the general groundwork of the window. Or the various lights of the window may have alternately a blue and a ruby ground. It is rarely that two figures are shown in the width of a single light, either in separate compartments or grouped in one.
245. Part of a Jesse Window, Wells.
Later the tree, oftenest in white and stain, branches more freely, not twisting itself any longer into set shapes or obvious compartments. The figures are, as it were, perched amongst its branches. In French and German work the tree, towards the sixteenth century, is not so necessarily a vine. It may take the form more of scrollwork, white or yellow, and the personages in its midst may be only demi-figures, issuing possibly from vase-like flowers or flower-like ornament.
That is so in a remarkably fine window in the clerestory of the cathedral at Troyes (three lights of which are shown on [page 366]), where the figures no longer occupy the centre of the lights, but are scattered about from side to side, balanced in a very satisfactory way by their names writ large upon the background. This characteristic lettering gives not only interesting masses of white or yellow on the ruby ground, but horizontal lines of great value to the composition. In the lower part of the window a separate screen of richest yellow marks off the figure of Jesse, and at the same time distinguishes the Donors, together with their family and their armorial bearings, from the merely scriptural part of the design. In earlier windows, it should have been stated, prominence is sometimes given to the really more important personages by drawing them to a much larger scale, or by showing them full-length when the others are only half-length, or by draping them all in white and stain, whilst the rest are in colours not so strongly relieved against the ground.
There are two other rather unusual Jesse windows at Troyes, both of Late Gothic period. The one is at S. Nizier: there the foliage is so rare as to give the effect almost of a leafless scroll. The other is at S. Nicholas: there the tree grows through into the tracery, where it appears no longer, as in the lights below, upon a deep blue ground, but upon yellow, the radiance, as it proves, from the group of the Trinity, into which the tree eventually blossoms.
246. PART OF A JESSE WINDOW, CATHEDRAL, TROYES, 1499.
Quite one of the most beautiful Jesse trees that exist is in a Late Gothic window at Alençon. It is unusual, probably unique in design. The figures, with the exception of Jesse, are confined to the upper lights and tracery, forming a double row towards the top of the window. This leaves a large amount of space for the tree, a fine, fat, Gothic scroll, foliated more after the manner of oak than acanthus leaves, all in rich greens (yellowish, apple, emerald-like) on a greyish-blue ground. It forms a splendid patch of cool colour, contrasting in the most beautiful way with the figures, draped mostly in purple, red, and yellow. The figures issue from great flower-like features as big as the width of the light allows, mostly of red, or purple, or white, with a calyx in green. The Virgin issues from a white flower suggestive of the lily. In the window shown on [page 368] the tree blossoms also into a topmost lily supporting the Madonna. A characteristic feature about the Alençon window is, the absence of symmetry in its scheme. Of the eight lights which go to make up its width, only three are devoted, below the springing of the great arch over it, to the Jesse tree. Three others contain a representation of the death of the Virgin, under a separate canopy, and in the two outermost lights are separate subjects on a smaller scale. This kind of eccentricity of composition is by no means unusual. A Jesse window very often occupies only one half or one quarter of a large Late Gothic window. And the strange thing is that the effect is invariably satisfactory, often delightful. You do not miss the symmetry, but enjoy the accidental variety of colour.
In sixteenth century work, and even before that, you meet with windows in which figures are in colours upon a white ground. In that case the tree is usually painted upon the white and stained. So it was in the beautiful Flemish window, parts of which are now dispersed over the East windows of S. George’s, Hanover Square, calculated, there, rather to mystify the student of design. In it the grapes, it will be seen ([page 216]), are glazed in purple pot-metal colour. In the present condition of the window, now that the enamel-brown has partly peeled off, the grape bunches scarcely seem to belong to the rather ghostly vine behind them. That is a misfortune which not uncommonly happens where reliance has been placed upon delicate painting; but for all that this is noble glass, and the figures, as was also not uncommon at the period, are designed with great dignity.
247. JESSE WINDOW, BEAUVAIS.
There is distinction, again, in the drawing of the figures in the Jesse at S. Etienne, Beauvais, shown on [page 368]. That is a splendid specimen of characteristically Renaissance work. Jesse is honoured by a rich canopy of white and stain, which allows of a deep purple background separating him from his descendants. These appear as demi-figures, very richly robed, in strong relief against a pale purplish-blue ground of the atmospheric quality peculiar to the period. The vase-shaped flowers whence they issue are also in rich colour, dark against the ground, as are the variegated fruits and green leaves of the tree, but its branches are of silvery-white, suggesting of birch-bark. This tree-trunk is altogether too realistically treated for the ornamental leafage and still more arbitrary flowers growing from it; but it is a marvellously fine window, masterly in drawing and perfectly painted. And it owes positively nothing to age or accident. Indeed, the effect is somewhat diluted by restoration. Even on the reduced scale of the illustration given, you can detect in the head of the hatless figure to the right a touch of modern French character; and the fine colour of it all is fine in spite of the flatness of tint in the background, for which the nineteenth century must be held responsible.
Except for the confusion caused by the occasional introduction of canopies and borders, a Jesse window may be usually recognised at a glance. In the cathedral at Troyes, however, is what might be mistaken, at first sight, for a Jesse tree. But the recumbent figure is not that of Jesse, but of Christ. He lies, in fact, in the wine press, whence grows a vine bearing half effigies of the Twelve Apostles, and the patron saints of the Donor and his wife, who themselves had places in the lower portion of the sidelights, but the figure of the wife is now missing. The general design and effect of this window, and especially the seriousness of the ornamental portion of it, are such as almost to belie the period of its execution. It is an exceptionally fine window for the year 1625.
This same subject is anticipated in a sixteenth century window (1552) at Conches. There the Saviour treads the blue grapes, and a stream of blood-red wine issues from them. The frame of the press immediately behind him is designed to suggest the cross.
The Jesse window referred to in the north transept at Carcassonne is balanced by a window on the south, which is of peculiarly interesting design, not, to my knowledge, elsewhere to be found in glass, although it occurs in Early Italian painting. It represents the Tree of Life, of Knowledge of Good and Evil—which knowledge appears to be inscribed all over it and the window. It might almost be described as a tree of lettering, for it bears upon its branches (which are labels) and upon its fruit (which are heart-shaped tablets) voluminous inscriptions, not, in the present state of the glass, always easy to decipher, but most effectively decorative. On either side the window, by way of border to the outer lights, is a series of little figures, prophets, or whoever they may be, bearing other inscribed scrolls, mingling with the boughs of the tree, the leaves of which form, as it were, a kind of green and yellow fringe to the inscribed white branches. At the foot of the tree stand Adam and Eve, in the act of yielding to the temptation of the woman-headed serpent coiled round its trunk, and beyond are shown the Ark of Noah and the Ark of the Covenant. Amidst the upper branches is a crucifix, the narrow red cross so inconspicuous that the Christ seems almost to hang upon the tree, and at its summit is the emblem of the pelican, Qui sanguine pascit alumnos. This is altogether not only a striking, and, at the same time, most satisfactory window, but an admirable instance of the use of lettering in ornament. Lettering is very often introduced into Jesse windows, and forms sometimes a conspicuous feature in them: how much more use might be made of it is suggested by this Tree of Life.
CHAPTER XXX.
STORY WINDOWS.
There is something very interesting in the simple heartedness with which the mediæval artist would attack a subject quite impossible of artistic realisation, apart from his modest powers of draughtsmanship, or the limitations of glass.
248. The Temptation, Fairford.
The daring of the man may be taken as evidence of his sincerity. If he had not believed absolutely in the things he tried to pourtray, he could not have set them forth so simply as he did, not only in the quite archaic medallions of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but even in pictures conceived at the end of what we call the Middle Ages. It would be impossible nowadays to picture Paradise, as in the scene of the Temptation at Fairford ([overleaf]), with its bald architecture and little Gothic fountain, to say nothing of the serpent. But down to the sixteenth century no subject was impossible to the designer. Even the Creation did not deter him; on the contrary, it was a favourite subject in old glass, throughout the mediæval period ([page 252]): there is no shirking the difficulty of rendering the division of light from the darkness, or the separation of the waters from the dry land. Indeed, problems such as these are sometimes solved with very remarkable ingenuity, if not quite in a way to satisfy us: the Creator in the likeness of a Pope, triple crown and all, as at Châlons-sur-Marne, was pictured no doubt in all good faith and reverence.
Perhaps one of the most daring notions ever put into stained glass occurs in a window in All Saints’ Church, North Street, York. The design illustrates an old Northumbrian legend called “The Pryck of Conscience,” and boldly sets out to show—the fishes roaring, the sea a-fire, a bloody dew, and, as a climax, the general conflagration of the world. “Of heaven and hell I have no power to tell,” wrote the “idle singer” (as he most wilfully miscalled himself) of this perhaps “empty day.” It was left to the modern artist to discover that.
The subject most frequently affected by the designer of the West window of a Gothic church was “The Last Judgment,” in which appeared our Lord in Majesty, St. Michael weighing human souls, angels welcoming the righteous into heaven, and fiends carrying off the doomed to hell. These “Doom” windows, as they are also called, are not, to the modern mind, impressive—not, that is to say, as the pictures of reward and punishment hereafter they were meant to be. The scene strikes us invariably as grotesque rather than terrible, actual as it may have been to the simple artist, who meant to be a sober chronicler, and to the yet simpler worshippers to whom he addressed himself.
Apart from that, “Last Judgment” windows are among the most interesting in the church. The portion of the window, in particular, which is devoted to perdition is most attractive. Hell flames offered to the artist a splendid opportunity for colour, upon which he seized with delight. And the fiends he imagined! Doubtless those crude conceptions of his were very real to him, convincing and terror-striking. The grim humour which we see in them may be of our own imagining; but that the draughtsman enjoyed his creations no artist will doubt.
249. PART OF LAST JUDGMENT, FAIRFORD.
J. Akerman, Photo-lith, London, W. C.
That is easy to understand. His subject allowed him freedom of imagination, gave him scope for fancy, humour, colour; and all his faculties found outlet. No wonder his would-be fiends live beautiful in our recollection! In the midst of ruby flames dance devils, purple, black, and brown, gnashing carnivorous teeth or yellow fangs, their beady, white eyes gleaming with cruelty. Devils there are apparently red-hot; others green and grey, with a beautiful but unholy kind of iridescence about them. As for the blue devils, they are beautiful enough to scare away from the beholder blue devils less tangible, which may have had possession of him. There is a great white devil in a window at Strassburg, who has escaped, it seems, from the Doom window near by, but not from the flames about him, a background of magnificent ruby. The drawing of a part of the Last Judgment from Fairford ([page 373]) gives only the grotesqueness of the scene, the quaintly conceived tortures of the damned; but that division of the glass is in reality a glory of gorgeous colour, to which one is irresistibly attracted. For that, as ever, the designer has reserved his richest and most glowing colour.
Some slight touch of human perversity perhaps inspires him also. At Fairford, at all events, he has put some of his best work, and especially some of his finest colour, into the figures of the Persecutors of the Church. Unfortunately, they are high up in the clerestory, and so do not get their share of attention; certainly they do not get the praise they deserve. Why, one is inclined to ask, this honour to the enemies of the Church on the part of the churchman? Was he at heart a heathen giving secret vent in art to feelings he dared not openly express? Not a bit of it! He was just a trifle tired of Angels, and Saints, and subjects according to convention; he was delighted at the chance of doing something not quite tame and same, and revelled in the opportunity when it occurred. In the tracery openings above the persecutors, where in the ordinary way would be angels, are lodged much more appropriate little fiends. They haunt the memory long after you have seen them, not as anything very terrific, but as bits of beautiful colour. The Devil [overleaf], hovering in wait for the soul of the impenitent thief upon the cross, is not by any means a favourable specimen of the Fairford fiends.
Occasionally there is a grimness about the mediæval Devil which we feel to this day. In a window at S. Etienne, Beauvais, there is a quite unforgettable picture of a woman struggling in the clutches of the evil one. She is draped in green, the Devil is of greenish-white, the architecture is represented in a gloom of purple and dark blue; only a peep of pale sky is seen through the window. On the one hand, this is a delightful composition of decorative colour. On the other it is intensely dramatic. It sets one wondering who this may be, and what will be the outcome of it. The struggle is fearful, the fiend is quite frantic in action. One is so taken with the scene that one does not notice that his head is wanting, and has been replaced by one which does not even fit his shoulders. That the effect, for all that, is impressive, speaks volumes for the story-teller.
250. Fairford.
Alas, alas, the Devil is dead! His modern counterfeit is a fraud. You may see this at the church of S. Vincent, at Rouen, in one of the subjects representing the life of that saint, where he puts the devils to flight. The nearest of them is an evil-looking thing, ruby coloured, uncannily spotted, like some bright poisonous-looking fungus. The restorer has supplemented these retreating devils by a farther one painted on the grey-blue sky. The imp is grotesque enough, and very cleverly put in, but it plainly belongs no longer to the early sixteenth century. It suggests a theatrical “property,” not the hobgoblin of old belief. That is just what the devilry in old glass never does.
It must be owned that mediæval Angels charm us less. They are by comparison tame. Their colour is delicate and silvery, belike, but not seductive; their wings sit awkwardly upon them; they fulfil more or less trivial functions, bearing scrolls or emblems, shields of arms even. They are not in the least ethereal. They are too much on the model of man or woman. What possible business, for example, have they with legs and feet? Yet it is by the rarest chance that the body is, as it were, lost in a swirl of drapery, which, by disguising the lower limbs, makes the image by so much, if not the more angelic, at least the less obviously of the earth.
The glass hunter cannot but be amused every now and again by odd anachronisms in mediæval and even later illustrations in glass. But wonder at them ceases when we remember how simple-minded was the craftsman of those days before archæology. If he wished to picture scenes of the long past—and he did—there was nothing for it but to show them as they occurred to his imagination—as happening, that is to say, in his own day; and that is practically what he did. He had perhaps a vague notion that a Roman soldier should wear a kilt; but in the main he was content that the onlookers at the Crucifixion should be costumed according to the period of William the Conqueror, or Maximilian, in which he himself happened to live. The practice had, at least, one advantage over our modern displays of probably very inaccurate learnedness, in that it brought the scene close home to the unlearned observer, and, as it were, linked the event with his own life. In short, there is more vitality in that rude story-telling than in the more elaborate histories, much less inaccurate in detail doubtless, to which to-day and henceforth artists are pledged.
There is no occasion to dwell upon the oddities of glass painting; they are those of mediæval art all through. If we take a certain incongruity for granted, the guilelessness of it only charms us. That same guilelessness enables the artist to make absolutely ornamental use of themes which to-day we might think it profane to make subservient to decorative effect. We never question his sincerity, though in the scene of the Creation, as at Erfurth, he made a pattern of the birds, pair and pair, each on its own tree. He can safely show the staff of S. Christopher, as at Freiburg, blossoming so freely as conveniently to fill the head of the window and balance the Child upon his shoulder. According as it occurs to him, or as it suits his purpose, kings and bishops take part in the Crucifixion; S. Michael tramples upon a dragon big enough to swallow him at a mouthful; Abraham goes out, gorgeously arrayed in red and purple, to slaughter Isaac on a richly decorated altar, and a white ram, prancing among the green, calls his attention to itself as the more appropriate sacrifice; Adam and Eve are driven forth from Eden by a scarlet angel, draped in white, with wings as well as sword of flaming red. In this last case the peculiar colour has a significance. Elsewhere it implies the poverty of the glazier’s palette, or indicates the sacrifice of natural to artistic effect. So it was that, till quite the end of the thirteenth century, we meet with positively blue beards, ruby cows, and trees of all the colours of the rainbow; and even at a much later date than that, primary-coloured cattle look over the manger at the Nativity, and Christ is shown entering Jerusalem on a bright blue donkey.
To the last the glass painter indulged in very interesting compound subjects—the Nativity, for example, with in the distance the Magi on their way; the Last Supper, and in the foreground, relieved against the tablecloth, Christ washing Peter’s feet, the apostles grouped round so as to form part of each or either subject. Sometimes a series of events form a single picture, as where you have the Temptation, the Expulsion, Eve with her distaff, Adam with his spade, the childhood of Cain and Abel, and the first fratricide, all grouped in one comprehensive landscape.
Consecutive pictures, by the way, generally follow in horizontal not vertical series, beginning on your left as you face the window. There is no invariable rule; but in most cases the order of the subjects is from left to right, row after row, terminating at the top of the window.
From the beginning difficult doctrinal subjects are attempted, as well as histories and legends. In the sixteenth century the design is often an allegory, full of meaning, though the meaning of it all may not be very obvious. The Virtues, for example, no longer content to stand under canopies, systematically spearing each its contrasting Vice, harness themselves, as at S. Patrice, Rouen, to a processional car, in which are the Virgin, Christ upon the Cross, and sundry vases, preceded by the Patriarchs and other holy personages. Another interesting “morality,” at S. Vincent, Rouen, is pictured in a medley of little figures each with descriptive label—“Richesse,” for example, a lady in gorgeous golden array; “Pitie,” a matron of sober aspect; “Les Riches Ingrass,” a group of gay young men; “Le Riche” and “Le Poure,” alike pursued by death. Another decorative device of the sixteenth century is the Virgin, lifesize, surrounded by her emblems and little white scrolls describing them—“Fons ortorum,” “Sivit as Dei,” and so on, in oddly spelt Latin. This occurs at Conches.
In Later Gothic, and of course in Renaissance glass, the situation is, if not realised, at all events dramatically treated. One scarcely knows to which period to attribute the window at S. Patrice, Rouen, with scenes from the life of S. Louis, an admirably sober and serious piece of work. Conspicuous in it is the recurring mantle of the King, deep indigo coloured, embroidered with golden fleurs-de-lys, on an inky-blue ground. The whole effect is rich but strikingly low in tone. An exceptionally fine scene is that in which the King, in a golden boat with white sails, ermine diapered, a crown upon his head, kneels in prayer before a little crucifix, whilst his one companion lifts up his hands in terror: the man is clad in green; for the rest the colour is sombre, only the pale blue armour of the Saint, his dark blue cloak, for once undiapered—as if the artist felt that here the golden lilies would be out of place—and the leaden sea around: that extends to the very top of the picture, distant ships painted upon it to indicate that it is water. An inscription explains how:—
“En revenant du pays de Syrie En mer fut tourmente ... gde furie Mais en priant Jesu Christ il en fut delivré.”
It must be allowed that the storm does not rage very terrifically; but the effect is not merely beautiful as colour but really descriptive, and something more.
It is only occasionally that this much of dramatic effect is produced; but touches of well-studied realism are common, as where, in the same church, at the martyrdom of a saint, the executioners who feed the fire shrink from the yellow flames and guard their eyes.
Decorative treatment goes almost without saying in the early sixteenth century. At S. Patrice, again, is a singularly fine instance of that. In the centre of the window, against a background of forest, with the distant hunt in full cry, S. Eustache stands entranced, his richly clad figure a focus of bright colour; facing him, in the one light, the legendary stag, enclosing between its antlers the vision of the crucifix, balanced, in the other, by the white horse of the convert: the note of white is repeated in the lithe hounds running through the three lights, and, with the silvery trunks of the trees, holds the composition together. This subject of the Conversion of S. Hubert was rather a favourite one in glass, and was usually well treated. The stag is invaluable. At Erfurth he stands against the green, a mass of yellow, with purple antlers, which form a vesica-shaped frame for the fabled vision.
The use of white, by the way, as a means of holding the window together is remarkable throughout Later glass, even apart from white canopy work. In the cathedral at Perugia there is a window in which a stream of white pavement flows, as it were, down through the groups of richly coloured figures, emphasising them, and at the same time connecting them with the canopy.
There is no end to the interest of subject in glass; but the subject would lead us too far astray from the purpose of this book. Enough has been said to indicate the kind of interest which each of us best finds for himself in glass hunting.
CHAPTER XXXI.
HOW TO SEE WINDOWS.
The just appreciation of stained glass is more than difficult, and judgment with regard to it more than ordinarily fallible. It is too much to expect of a window that it should stand the test of a light for which it was not designed. The most conscientious artist can do no more than design it for the light by which he imagines it is most likely to be seen. There must inevitably be times of day, when the sun is in a position not favourable to it, and many days when the intensity of the light, even though it come from the right quarter, is not what he relied upon. It happens, of course, that glass is often seen under such conditions that the brilliancy of the windows on one side of the church is literally put out by a flood of light poured in upon them through the windows (brilliantly illuminated by it) on the opposite side. The best of critics could not appreciate the best of glass under circumstances like that.
Suppose the windows north and south of a church to be of equal merit, one’s appreciation of them, at first sight, would depend upon the time of day; and the light which did most justice to the northern windows would do least to the southern, and vice versâ. Experience teaches a man to make allowances, but he can only judge what he has seen; and it is only with the light shining through a window that he can see its colour or judge of its effect.
The wonderful difference which the strength of the light makes in the appearance of a window, is nowhere quite so obvious as in the case of windows, not of glass, but of translucent alabaster—as, for example, at Orvieto, in the lower lights on either side of the nave, or, framed in black marble mullions, at the West end of the cathedral. The more or less square-shaped slabs of which they are formed are, in very many cases, made up of a number of pieces cemented together in lines which take very much the place of lead lines, and suggest, with the bars holding them in place, the practice of the glazier; but the effect is much less that of glass than of deepest amber in the unbroken panels, of gorgeous tortoise-shell in those that are patched and pieced together. These last are, if not the more beautiful, certainly the more interesting. The brown and gold and horny-white grow murkier when the light does not shine full upon the windows; but there is a mystery about the colour still, which makes up for the loss of brilliancy. If your mood is that way, you may find in the curious marbling of the stone strange pictures of cloudland and fantastic landscape. It is partly the shape, no doubt, of a circular slab high above the western door, which calls to mind the image of the moon with its mysterious mountains.
A more delicate, if not always so rich an effect, is to be seen in the great monolithic slabs which fill the five square-headed windows in the apse of the upper church at S. Miniato. Effect, did I say? Nay, rather effects, for they change with every gradation in the light. You may see at first little more than flat surfaces of pleasantly mottled white and purple-grey, translucent, but comparatively dull and dead. Then, as the sun creeps round the corner, a strange life comes into them. The white and palest greys begin to glow, and turn by slow degrees to pearly-pink, which kindles into gold, and deepens in the duskier parts to copper-red. The stronger markings of the stone now show out in unsuspected strength, and the lighter veins take on by contrast a greenish tint, so that the warm colour is subtly shot with its cool counterpart. If, when you first see the windows, the sun illumines them, the effect is less magical; you get your strongest impression first; but in the course of an hour or so a great change may take place—when, for example, towards noon the light passes away; but for a long while the stone remains luminous. Your eyes are open now, and in the delicate ashen-grey you see—or is it that you feel it to be there?—a tint of rose.
In proportion as it is less opaque than alabaster, glass is less perceptibly affected by changes of light; but, whether we perceive it or not, it owes all its effect to the light shining through it. The most fair-minded of us misjudge windows because we cannot see them often enough to be quite sure we have seen them at their best—that is to say, on the right day, and at the right time of day.
In comparing one window with another we are more than ever likely to do injustice. Even if they happen to be both in the same church, the light most favourable to the one may, as just said, be quite the least favourable to the other. Each must in fairness be judged at its best; and it is no easy matter to compare to-day’s impression with yesterday’s, or it may be last week’s—more especially when a newer impression of the same thing, staring you in the face, will stamp itself upon the vision. When years, instead of days, intervene, the justice of even the most retentive memory is open to gravest doubt.
Go to the church of S. Alpin, at Châlons, and in the morning you will find the East windows brilliantly rich: in the early afternoon, even of a bright day, they will be lacking in transparency, dull, ineffective. So at S. Sebald’s, Nuremberg, the splendid fourteenth century glass on the north side of the choir proves absolutely obscure in the late afternoon. Grisaille, which was delicate under a moderately subdued light, will appear thin and flimsy with a strong sun behind it. It has happened to me to describe the same glass on one occasion as too heavily, on another as too thinly painted; and, again, to describe a window as warm in tone which memory (and my notes) had painted cool. On another occasion, well-remembered windows were not to be identified again. It seemed that in the course of a few intervening years they must have been restored out of all knowledge; a few hours later in the day there was no mistaking them, though they had, indeed, lost something by restoration.
When the most careful and deliberate notes tell such different, and indeed quite opposite, stories, notes made at times not far enough apart to allow for anything like a complete change of opinion on the part of the critic, it is clear that conditions of light go so far towards the effect of glass, that it is quite impossible to appraise it fairly the first time one sees it. The more momentary the impression on which one has to found an opinion, the more essential it is that we should choose the moment. The strongest light is by no means the most favourable to glass. In a glare of sunlight it is quite probable that some unhappy windows will have more light shining upon than comes through the glass. Happiest are the windows seen by “the subdued light of a rainy day.” Occasionally a window, so deep that under ordinary conditions of light it is obscure, may need the strongest possible illumination; but even in the case of very deep-toned windows—such, for example, as those in the transepts of the Duomo at Florence—the glass, as a whole, is best seen by a sober light. You get the maximum of colour effect with the minimum of hurt to any individual window, if there be any hurt at all. A really garish window may be beautiful as the light wanes. The great North Rose at Notre Dame (Paris) is impressive at dusk.
Other conditions upon which the effect of glass largely depends are quite beyond our control. As a matter of fact, we rarely see it at its best. For one thing, we do not see it in sufficient quantity. We find it in here and there a window only, white light shining unmitigated from windows all round. Perhaps in the window itself there is a breakage, and a stream of light pours through it, spoiling, if not its beauty, all enjoyment of it. It is not generally understood how completely the effect of glass depends upon the absence of light other than that which comes through it. Every ray of light which penetrates into a building excepting through the stained glass does injury to the coloured window; more often than not, therefore, we see it under most adverse circumstances. It is worse than hearing a symphony only in snatches; it is rather as if a more powerful orchestra were all the while drowning the sound. It takes an expert to appreciate glass when light is reflected upon it from all sides. The effect of some of the finest glass in Germany, as at Munich and Nuremberg, is seriously marred by a wicked German practice of filling only the lower half of the window with coloured glass and glazing the upper part in white rounds. That enables folk to read their Bibles, no doubt; but the volume of crude white light above goes far to kill the colour of the glass. In such case it is not until you have shut off the offending light that it is possible to enjoy, or even to appreciate, the windows.
A comparatively dark church is essential to the perfect enjoyment of rich glass. The deep red light-absorbing sandstone of which Strassburg and Shrewsbury Cathedrals are built, adds immensely to the brilliancy of their beautiful glass.
White light is the most cruel, but not the only, offender. Old glass sometimes quarrels with old glass. An Early window is made to look heavy by a quantity of Late work about it, and a Late window pales in the presence of deep rich Early glass. As for modern work, it is that which suffers most by comparison with old; but it arouses often a feeling of irritation in us which puts us out of the mood to enjoy.
Worst offence of all is that done in the name of restoration, where, inextricably mixed up with old work, is modern forgery; not clever enough to pass for old, but sufficiently like it to cast a doubt upon the genuine work, at the same time that it quite destroys its beauty.
Something of our appreciation depends upon the frame of mind in which we come to the windows. They may be one of the sights of the place; but the sight-seeing mood is not the one in which to appreciate. How often can the tourist sit down in a church with the feeling that he has all the day before him, and can give himself up to the enjoyment of the glass, wait till it has something to say to him? A man has not seen glass when he has walked round the church, with one eye upon it and the other on his watch, not even though he may have made a note or two concerning it. You must give yourself up to it, or it will never give up to you the secret of its charm.
CHAPTER XXXII.
WINDOWS WORTH SEEING.
The course of the glass hunter seems never yet to have been clearly mapped out for him. Nor can he depend upon those who pretend to direct his steps. The enthusiastic description of the monograph proves in the event to have very likely no warrant of art; the paragraph in the guide-book is so cold as to excite no spark of curiosity about what may be worth every effort to see. Between the two a beginner stands uncertain which way to turn, and as often as not goes astray.
The question which perplexes him on the very outskirts of the subject is: Which are the windows to see? That depends. Some there are which every one who cares at all about glass should certainly see, some which the student who really wants to know should study, some which the artist should see, if merely for the satisfaction of his colour sense. To enumerate only a single class of these would be to write a catalogue; but catalogues are hard reading; the more interesting and more helpful course will be, to tell shortly of some of the windows best worth seeing, and why they should be seen. And if choice be made of instances typical enough to illustrate the history of glass, the list may serve as an itinerary to such as may think it worth while to study it, as it should be studied, not in books, but in churches.
251. GRISAILLE PATTERNS, SALISBURY.
“Photo-Tint” by James Akerman, London, W. C.
Churches favourable to the study of Early glass in England are not very many. A series of thirteenth century windows is rare; and good examples, such as the fragments from the S. Chapelle, at South Kensington, are few and far between. The one fine series of medallion windows is at Canterbury Cathedral, in the round-headed lights of the choir. In the clerestory also is some figure work, on a larger scale, but less admirable of its kind. For good thirteenth century grisaille in any considerable quantity one must go to Salisbury, where, fortunately, the aisle windows are near enough to the eye to show the very characteristic patterns of the glass. To sit there in the nave and wait until service is over, is no hardship even to the most ardent glass hunter. The silvery light from the windows facing him at the East end of the aisles is solace and delight enough. Yet more enchanting is the pale beauty of the Five slim Sisters, in the North transept of York Minster; that, however, is gained, to some extent, by the confusion of the pattern, which is not quite typically Early, but begins to show symptoms of a transition stage in design.
To appreciate at its full value the stronger colour of the Early mosaic glass one must cross the Channel. We have nothing in this country to compare in quantity, and therefore for effect, with the gorgeous glass illuminating the great French churches. Reims, for example, Bourges, Le Mans, are perfect treasure houses of jewelled light. But richer than all is Chartres. The windows there are less conveniently placed for study than at Le Mans, but they are grander, and more in number. At Reims the art is coarser, though the magnificence of certain red windows there lives in the memory. Emphatically Chartres is the place to know and appreciate thirteenth century glass. No other great church of the period retains so much of its original glazing; and since it is one of the largest, and the glass is very much of one period, it follows that no church contains so much Early glass. The impression it produces is the more pronounced that there is little else. Except for a modern window or two, one Late Gothic window, and some four or five lights of grisaille, which belong to the second period, the glass throughout this vast building is typically Early. It is well worth a pilgrimage to Chartres only to see it. You may wander about the church for hours at a time, unravelling the patterns of the windows, and puzzling out the subjects of the medallion pictures. To sit there in more restful mood upon some summer afternoon, when the light is softened by a gentle fall of rain, is to be thrilled by the beauty of it all. It is as though, in a dream, you found yourself in some huge cavern, lit only by the light of jewels, myriads of them gleaming darkly through the gloom. It is difficult to imagine anything more mysterious, solemn, or impressive. Yes, Chartres is the place in which to be penetrated by the spirit of Early mediæval glass. There is a story told of a child sitting for the first time in his life in some French church, awed by the great Rose window facing him, when all at once the organ burst into music; and it seemed to him, he said, as if the window spoke. Words could not better express than that the powerful impression of Early mosaic glass, the solemnity of its beauty, the way it belongs to the grandeur of the great church, the something deep in us vibrating in answer to it.
Exceptionally interesting Early glass is to be found in the cathedral of Poitiers; but it is hurt by the white light from other windows. In the case of Early coloured windows it is more than ever true that their intensity can only be appreciated when all the light in the building comes through them. That intensity, as was said, is deepened where, as at Strassburg, the colour of the walls absorbs instead of reflecting light. There the red sandstone of which the church is built gives back so little light that, as you enter the door, you step from sunshine into twilight, in which the glass shines doubly glorious. Some of these (certain of the Kings, for example, on the north side of the nave, each with its huge nimbus eddying, as it were, ring by ring of colour, out to the margin of the niche) are of the thirteenth if not of the twelfth century; but they are typical of no period. The borders framing them are perhaps a century later than the figures. Indeed, the period of this glass is most perplexing to the student of style, until he realises that, after the great fire at the very end of the thirteenth century, remains of earlier glass, spared from the wreck, were incorporated with the newer work. And, not only this, but, what was rare in mediæval days, the fourteenth century designer, in his endeavour to harmonise, as he most successfully did, the old work with the new, gave to his own work a character which was not of his period,—much to the mystification of the student, who too readily imagines that he cannot go far wrong in attributing to the glass in a church a date posterior to its construction.
The cathedral at Strassburg is rich also in distinctly Decorated glass, to all of which the tourist pays no heed. He goes there to see the clock. If he should have a quarter of an hour to spare before noon—at which hour the cock crows and the church is shut—he allows himself to be driven by the verger, with the rest of the crowd, into the transept, and penned up there until the silly performance begins. To hear folk talk of the thing afterwards at the table d’hôte you might fancy that Erwin Von Steinbach had built his masterpiece just to house this rickety piece of mock old mechanism.
252. 14th Century German Glass.
Some of the most interesting glass of the Middle Gothic period is to be found in Germany, for tradition died hard there; and, whilst thirteenth century glass was more often Romanesque than Gothic in character, that of the fourteenth often followed closely the traditions of earlier Gothic workmanship. The Germans excelled especially in foliage design, which they treated in a manner of their own. It was neither very deep in colour nor grisaille, but midway between the two. The glass at Regensburg is an exceedingly good instance of this treatment; but instances of it are to be found also in the Museum at Munich, very conveniently placed for the purposes of study. The windows at Freiburg in the Black Forest should also be seen. But some of the very richest figure work of the period is to be found in the choir windows of S. Sebald’s Church, at Nuremberg. Except for the simplicity of their lines these are not striking in design; but the colour is perhaps deeper in tone than in the very richest of thirteenth century glass. The first impression is that the composition is entirely devoid of white glass; but there proves to be a very small amount of horny-tinted material which may be supposed to answer to that description. As the light fades towards evening these windows become dull and heavy; but on a bright day the intensity of their richness is unsurpassed. They have a quality which one associates rather with velvet than with glass.
Excellent Decorated glass, and a great quantity of it, is to be found at Evreux, and again at Troyes. The clerestory of the choir at Tours is most completely furnished with rich Early Decorated glass of transitional character—interesting on that account, and, at the same time, most beautiful to see. There is other Decorated work there with which it is convenient to compare it, together with earlier and later work more or less worth seeing. Again most interesting work, but not much of it, and that rather fragmentary, is to be found at the church of S. Radegonde, at Poitiers; but there was in France at about that time rather a lull in glass painting. In England, on the contrary, there is an abundance of it. There is good work in the choir of Wells Cathedral. Part of it is in a rather fragmentary condition, but it is all very much of a period; and there is enough of it to give a fair idea of what English Decorated glass is like. York Minster is rich in it. It is quite an object lesson in style to go straight from the contemplation of the Five Sisters, which belong to the latter part of the Early period of glass painting, into the neighbouring vestibule of the Chapter House, where the windows are of the early years of the Second Period, and thence to the Chapter House itself, where they are typically Decorated. The study of Decorated glass can be continued in the nave again, which is filled with it. Entering, then, the choir, you find mainly Perpendicular glass, much of it typical of English work of the Late Gothic period.
Other very beautiful Late Gothic work is to be found in some of the smaller churches of York, such as All Saints’. There is a window there made up of fragments of old glass, among which are some very delicately painted and really beautiful heads. This work is all characteristically English. English also is the glass in the Priory Church at Great Malvern. There is a vast quantity of it, too, which adds to its effect; but unfortunately, a great part of it now fills windows for which it was obviously not designed. This is the more unfortunate because, where it has not been disturbed, it shows unmistakable evidence of having been very carefully designed for its place. The tracery of the great East window is, for example, an admirable instance of the just balance between white and colour so characteristic of later Gothic glass. Again, the Creation window, amongst others, is a lesson in delicate glass painting.
253. Fairford.
Distinctly English in the delicacy of their painting are, again, the windows in the church of S. Mary, Ross. The far-famed windows of Fairford are, of course, not English. They were captured, the story goes, at sea, and brought to Gloucestershire, where a Perpendicular church was built to accommodate them. English antiquaries make claim that they are English, but internal evidence shows them to be Flemish or German. Considerable notoriety attaches to the Fairford windows owing to a theory which was at one time propounded to the effect that they were designed by Albert Dürer. The theory is now as dead as a back number, but the notoriety remains—and not undeservedly; for although this glass stands by no means alone, and is distinctly second to some contemporary work (such, for example, as that on the north side of the nave of Cologne Cathedral, which Dürer might conceivably have designed), it is remarkably fine; and it enjoys the comparatively rare distinction of practically filling the windows of the church. You not only, therefore, see the colour (which, rather than the painting, is its charm) at its best, but you have a complete scheme of decoration—Type answering to Anti-type, the Twelve Apostles corresponding to the Prophets, the Evangelists to the Four Fathers, and again
the Saints opposed to the Persecutors of the Church. Most old glass owes something to the disintegration of its surface, and the consequent refraction of the light transmitted through it. In the Fairford glass the colours are more than usually mellow. The white, in particular, is stained to every variety of green and grey—the colour, as it proves, of the minute growth of lichen with which it is overgrown. It is said that, when the fury of iconoclasm was abroad, this glass was buried out of harm’s way; which may possibly have hastened the decay of the glass, and so have given root-hold for the growth which now glorifies it.
It would not be easy to find finer instances of Late Gothic German work than the five great windows on the North side of Cologne Cathedral. There, too, one has only to turn right-about-face to compare early sixteenth century with nineteenth century German practice, and on precisely the same scale, too. Any one who could hesitate for an instant to choose between them, has everything yet to learn in regard both to glass and to colour. The garish modern transparencies show, by their obvious shortcomings, the consummate accomplishment of the later Gothic glass painters.
There is a very remarkable late Gothic Jesse window in the Lorenz Kirche at Nuremberg, and another almost equal to it in the cathedral at Ulm. The Tree of Jesse is very differently, but certainly not less beautifully, rendered in the fine West window at Alençon.
In most of the great French churches, and in many of the smaller ones, you find good fifteenth century work. At Bourges you have seven four-light windows and one larger one, all fairly typical. The best of them is in the chapel of Jacques Cœur, the Jack that built at Bourges quite one of the most remarkable of mediæval houses extant. But there is no one church which recurs before all others to the memory when one thinks of Late Gothic glass in France. One remembers more readily certain superlative instances, such as the flamboyant Rose window at the West end of S. Maclou, at Rouen, a wonder of rich colour, or the Western Rose in the cathedral there. The fact is, that the spirit of the Renaissance begins early in the sixteenth century to creep into French work; and, as glass painting arrives at its perfection, it betrays very often signs of going over to the new manner. This is peculiarly the case in that part of France which lies just this side of the Alps; so much so, that a markedly mixed style is commonly accepted as “Burgundian.” This is most apparent in the beautiful church of Brou, a marvel of fanciful Gothic, florid, of course, after the manner of the Early sixteenth century, extreme in its ornamentation, but, for all but the purist, extremely beautiful. The church itself is as rich as a jewel by Cellini, and infinitely more interesting; and the glass is worthy of its unique setting.
There is a very remarkable series of windows to see in the cathedral at Auch, all of a period, all by one man, filling all the eighteen windows of the choir ambulatory. Transition is everywhere apparent in them, though perhaps one would not have placed them quite so early as 1513, the date ascribed to them. A notable thing about the work is its scale, which is much larger than is usual in French glass of that period. Nowhere will you find windows more simply and largely designed or more broadly treated. Nowhere will you find big Renaissance canopies richer in colour or more interesting in design. The fifty or more rather fantastically associated Prophets, Patriarchs, Sibyls, and Apostles depicted, form, with the architecture about them and the tracery above, quite remarkable compositions of colour. And it is very evident that the colour of each window has been thought out as a whole. There is not one of these windows which is not worth seeing. They form collectively a most important link in the chain of style, without, however, belonging to any marked period. Indeed, they stand rather by themselves as examples of very Early Renaissance work, aiming at broad effects of strong colour (quite opposite from what one rather expects of sixteenth century French work), and reaching it. And though the artist works almost entirely in mosaic—using coloured glass, that is to say, instead of pigment—and depends less than usual upon painting, he yet lays his colour about the window in a remarkably painter-like way.
There are noteworthy windows at Châlons-sur-Marne, in the churches of SS. Madelaine and Joseph, which can be claimed neither as Gothic nor Renaissance, details of each period occurring side by side in the same window. At the church of S. Alpin at Châlons is a series of picture windows in grisaille, not often met with, and very well worth seeing.
Early sixteenth century glass is so abundant that it is hopeless to specify churches. Nowhere is the transition period better represented than at Rouen, and, for that matter, the Early Renaissance too. The church of S. Vincent contains no less than thirteen windows, with subjects biblical or allegorical, but always strikingly rich in colour. The choir is, you may say, an architectural frame to a series of glass pictures second to few of their period, and so nearly all of a period as to give one an excellent impression of it: the brilliancy of the colour, the silveriness of the white glass, and the delicacy of the landscape backgrounds is typical. Scarcely less interesting is the abundant glass in the church of S. Patrice, which carries us well into the middle of the sixteenth century and beyond; so that Rouen is an excellent place in which to study all but Early glass: there is not much of that to speak of there. Two exceptionally fine Renaissance windows are to be found in the church of S. Godard; and there are others well worth seeing whilst you are in Rouen, if not in every case worth going there to see, in the churches of S. Romain, S. Nicaise, S. Vivien, in addition to S. Ouen, S. Maclou, and the cathedral.
Yet finer Renaissance work is to be found at Beauvais—finer, that is to say, in design. One is reminded there sometimes of Raffaelle, who furnished designs for the tapestries for which the town was famous; these may very well have inspired the glass painters; but there is not at Beauvais the quantity of work which one finds at Rouen. The very perfection of workmanship is to be seen also in the windows at Montmorency and Ecouen (both within a very short distance of Paris); but, on the whole, this most interesting glass hardly comes up to what one might imagine it to be from the reproductions in M. Magne’s most sumptuous monograph.
In a certain sense also the windows at Conches, in Normandy, are a disappointment. In a series of windows designed by Aldegrever one expects to find abundant ornament; and there is practically none. What little there is, is like enough to his work to be possibly by him; but one feels that Heinrich Aldegrever, if he had had his way, would have lavished upon them a wealth of ornamental detail, which would have made them much more certainly his than, as it is, internal evidence proves them to be. It would hardly have occurred to any one, apart from the name in one of the windows, to attribute them to this greatest ornamentist among the Little Masters. It is only the ornamentist who is disappointed, however, not the glass hunter. It is an experience to have visited a church like Conches, simple, well proportioned, dignified; where, as you enter from the West (and the few modern windows are hidden), you see one expanse of good glass, of a good period, not much hurt by restoration. The effect is singularly one. You come away not remembering so much the glass, or any particular window, as the satisfactory impression of it all—an impression which inclines you to put down the date of a pilgrimage to Conches as a red-letter day in your glass-hunting experiences.
There is magnificent Renaissance glass in Flanders, and especially at Liège, in which, for the most part, Gothic tradition lingers. Most beautiful is the great window in the South transept of the cathedral. The radiance of the scene in which the Coronation of the Virgin is laid, reminds one of nothing less than a gorgeous golden sunset, which grows more mellow towards evening when the light is low. In the choir of S. Jacques there are no less than five tall three-light windows, by no means so impressive as the glass at the cathedral, but probably only less worthy of study because they have suffered more restoration. The seven long two-light windows at S. Martin, though less well-known, are at least as good as these. In most of them may be seen the decorative use of heraldry as a framework to figure subjects, characteristic of German and Flemish work. Very much of this character is the glass from Herkenrode, which now occupies the seven easternmost windows of the Lady Chapel in Lichfield Cathedral. They are pictorial, but the pictures are glass pictures, depending upon colour for their effect; and they are really admirable specimens of the more glass-like manner of the Early Flemish Renaissance. There is in the three windows at the East end of Hanover Square Church, London, some equally admirable glass, which must once have belonged to a fine Jesse window; but it has suffered too much in its adaptation to its present position to be of great interest to any but those who know something about glass.
All this work is in marked contrast to the not much later Flemish glass at Brussels—the two great transept windows, and those in the Chapel of the Holy Sacrament at S. Gudule, to which reference is made at length in [Chapter VII]. They are windows which must be seen. They are at once the types, and the best examples, of the glass painter’s new departure in the direction of light and shade. On the other hand, the large East window at S. Margaret’s, Westminster (Dutch, it is said, of about the same date), has not the charm of the period, and must not be taken to represent it fairly.
The brilliant achievements of William of Marseilles at Arezzo, and the extraordinarily rich windows in the Duomo at Florence, have been discussed at some length ([pages 248], [268]). They should be seen by any one pretending to some acquaintance with what has been done in glass. Other Florentine windows worthy of mention are, the Western Rose at S. Maria Novella, and the great round window over the West door at S. Croce, ascribed to Ghiberti. The transept window in SS. Giovanni e Paolo at Venice does not come up to its reputation. It is in a miserable condition, and as to its authorship (whence its reputation), you have only to compare it with the S. Augustine picture, which hangs close by, to see that it is not by the same hand. One of the multitudinous Vivarini may very likely have had a hand in it, but certainly not Bartolomeo. His manner, even in his pictures, was more restrained than that. There are a number of fine windows in the nave of Milan Cathedral, two at least in which the composition of red and blue is a joy to see. Earlier Italian glass is of less importance; the windows at Assisi, for example, are interesting rather than remarkable. They show a distinctly Italian rendering of Gothic, which is of course not quite Gothic; but to the designer they indicate trials in design, which might possibly with advantage be carried farther.
254. RAISING OF LAZARUS, AREZZO.
By far the most comprehensive series of Renaissance windows in this country is in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. In the matter of dignity and depth of colour, the small amount of rather earlier glass in the outer chapel holds its own; but the thing to see, of course, is the array of windows, twenty-three of them, all of great size, within the choir screen. It flatters national vanity, though it may not show great critical acumen, to ascribe them to English hands. Evidently many hands were employed, some much more expert than others. It seems there is documentary evidence to show that the contracts for them (1516-1526) were undertaken by Englishmen. Very possibly they were executed in England, and even, as it is said they were, in London. That they were not painted by the men who drew them, or even by painters in touch with the draughtsmen, is indicated by such accidents as the yellow-haired, white-faced negro, of pronounced African type, among the adoring Magi. It is as clear that the painter had never seen a black man as that the draughtsman had drawn his Gaspar from the life. Certain of the accessory scroll-bearing figures, which keep, as it were, ornamental guard between the pictures, might possibly have been designed by Holbein, who is reported to have had a hand in the scheme; but they are at least as likely to be the handiwork of men unknown to fame. But, no matter who designed the glass, it is on a grand scale, and largely designed. It is not, however, a model of the fit treatment of glass, though it belongs to the second quarter of the sixteenth century. For the designers have been more than half afraid to use leading enough to bind the glass well together, and have been at quite unnecessary pains to do without lead lines. The windows vary, too, in merit; and they bear evidence, if only in the repetition of sundry stock figures, of haste in production. Still, they have fine qualities of design and colour, and they are, on the whole, glass-like as well as delightful pictures. We have nothing to compare with them in their way.
To see how far pictorial glass painting can be carried, go to Holland. No degree of familiarity with old glass quite prepares one for the kind of thing which has made the humdrum market town of Gouda famous. Imagine a big, bare, empty church with some thirty or more huge windows, mostly of six lights, seldom less than five-and-twenty feet in height, all filled with great glass pictures, some of them filling the whole window, and designed to suggest that you see the scene through the window arch. They do not, of course, quite give that impression, but it is marvellous how near they go to doing it. No wonder the painters have won the applause due to their daring no less than to what they have done. Any one appreciating the qualities of glass, and realising what can best be done in it, is disposed at first to resent the popularity of this scene-painting in glass;—one measures a work naturally by the standard of its fame;—but a workman’s very appreciation of technique must, in the end, commend to him this masterly glass painting. For the Crabeth Brothers, their pupils, and coadjutors, were not only artists of wonderful capacity, daring what only great artists can dare, but they had the fortune to live at a time when the traditions of their art had not yet been cast to the winds. Though working during the latter half of the sixteenth century, they were the direct descendants of the men who had raised glass painting to the point of perfection, and they inherited from their forbears much that they could not unlearn. Ambitious as they might be, and impatient of restraint, they could not quite emancipate themselves from the prejudices in which they were brought up. More than a spark of the old fire lay smouldering still in the kiln of the glass painter, and it flared up at Gouda, brilliantly illuminating the declining years of the century, and of the art which may be said to have flickered out after that.
This last expiring effort in glass painting counts for more, in that it is the doing not only of strong men but of men who knew their trade. It is extremely interesting to trace the work of the individual artists employed; which a little book published at Gouda, and translated into most amusing English, enables one to do. Dirk Crabeth’s work is pre-eminent for dignity of design, his figures are well composed, and his colour is rich; although in the rendering of architectural interiors he falls into the mud, that is to say, into the prevailing Netherlandish opacity of paint. His brother Walter has not such a heavy hand; he excels in architectural distance, as Dirk does in landscape; and his work is generally bright and sparkling, not so strong as his brother’s, but more delicate. Their pupils, too, do them credit, though they lack taste. Among the other more or less known artists who took part in the glass, Lambrecht van Ort distinguishes himself in canopy work, as a painter-architect might be expected to do; Adrian de Vrije and N. Johnson delight also in architecture, Wilhelmus Tibault and Cornelius Clok in landscape. Clok and Tibault compete in colour with the Crabeths, and go beyond them in originality.
Description of this unrivalled collection of later Dutch glass painting, except on the spot, is as hopeless as it would be dull. The windows must be seen. The men were artists and craftsmen, and their work is truly wonderful. Who shall attempt what these men failed to do? That is the moral of it.
255. THE VIRGIN, S. MARTIN-ÈS-VIGNES, TROYES.
“Photo-Tint” by James Akerman, London, W. C.
The only other place where later glass is of sufficient worth to make it worth seeing, the only place where Seventeenth century work arouses much interest, is Troyes. There is a quantity of it in the churches of S. Nizier, S. Pantaleon, and in the cathedral, attributed, for the most part, to Linard Gontier, who is certainly responsible for some of the best of it. But it is in the church of S. Martin-ès-Vignes, in the outskirts of the town, that it is to be appreciated en masse. There you may see some hundred and ten lights in all, executed during the first forty years of the seventeenth century. This is the place to study the decline and fall of glass painting—a melancholy sort of satisfaction. Here more thoroughly than ever must be realised how hopeless it is to evade in glass the glazier’s part of the business; how powerless enamel is to produce effect; how weak, poor, lacking in limpidity and lustre, its colour is—and this even in the hands of an artist born, one may say, after his time. Gonthier was an incomparable glass painter. He could produce with a wash of pigment effects which lesser men could only get by laborious stippling and scratching; he could float enamel on to glass with a dexterity which enabled him to get something like colour in it; but he was not a colourist, nor yet, probably, a designer. The difference in the work attributed to him, and the style of his design (which is sometimes that of an earlier and better day) lead one rather to suppose that he adapted or adopted the designs of his predecessors as suited his convenience.
To see what glass painting came to in the eighteenth century you cannot do better than go to Oxford. You have there the design of no less a man than Sir Joshua Reynolds, painted by one of the best china painters of his day. None but a china painter, by the way, could be found to do it. It is not unfair, therefore, to compare this masterpiece of its poor period with the rude work of the fourteenth century, done by no one knows whom. And what do we find? Conspicuous before us is the great West window, which might as well have been painted on linen, so little of the translucency of glass is there left in it. It in no way lessens the credit of the great portrait painter that he knew nothing of the capacities of glass; that was not his métier. And there was no one to advise him wisely in the matter. But the result is disastrous. The beauty of his drawing—and there is charm at least in the figures of the Virtues—counts for little, as compared with the dulness of it all. It has neither the colour of mosaic glass nor the sparkle of grisaille. The white is obscured by masses of heavy paint, which, when the sun shines very brightly behind it, kindles at best into a foxy-brown; and even this is in danger of peeling off, and showing the poverty of the glass it was meant to enrich. Any pictorial effect it might have had is ruined by the leads and bars, which assert themselves in the most uncompromising manner. In short, the qualities of oil painting aimed at are altogether missed, and the facilities which glass offered are not so much as sought.
It is no hardship to turn your back upon such poor stuff. And there, high up on the other side, are seven great Gothic windows. These are by no means of the best period. The design consists largely of canopy work, never profoundly interesting; the figures are, at the best, rudely drawn; some of them are even grotesquely awkward. Their heads are too large by half, their hands and feet flattened out in the familiar, childish, mediæval way. In all the sixty-four figures there is not one that can be called beautiful. Yet for all that, there is a dignity in them which the graceful Virtues lack. They are designed, moreover, with a large sense of decoration. The balance of white and colour is just perfect, and the way the patches of deep colour are embedded, as it were, in grisaille, is skilful in the extreme. To compare them with the futile effort of the eighteenth century, opposite, is to apprehend what can be done in glass, and what cannot. The whole secret of the success of the mere craftsman where the great painter failed, is that he knew what to seek in glass,—colour, brilliancy, decorative breadth. He not only knew what to do, but how to do it; and he did it in the manliest and most straightforward way. Rude though the work, it fits its place, fulfils its function, adorns the architecture, gives grandeur to it. What more can you ask?
Domestic glass, such as that in which the Swiss excelled (window panes, many of them, rather than windows), is best studied in museums, whither most of it has drifted. There is no national collection without good examples. Better or more accessible it would be difficult to find than those in the quiet little museum at Lucerne—so quiet that, if you spend a morning there, studying them, you become yourself, by reason of your long stay, an object of interest. So little attention do these masterpieces in miniature glass painting attract, that the guardians do not expect any one to give them more than a passing glance; but they leave you, happily, quite free to pursue your harmless, if inexplicable, bent.
The list of windows worth seeing is by no means exhausted. In many a town, as at York, Tours, Troyes, Evreux, Bourges, Rouen, Nuremberg, Cologne, and in many a single church, you may find the whole course of glass painting, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, more or less completely illustrated; and, where that is so, of course one period throws light upon another. But the impression is always stronger when the century has left its mark upon the church.
Not until you have a clear idea of the characteristics of style, can you sort out for yourself the various specimens, which occur in anything but historic sequence in the churches where they are to be found. Having arrived at understanding enough to do that, you will need no further guidance, and may go a-hunting for yourself. To the glass hunter there are almost everywhere windows worth seeing.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
A WORD ON RESTORATION.
If old windows have suffered at the hands of time, they have also gained, apart from sentiment, a tone and quality which the glass had not when it was new.
Their arch-enemy is the restorer, at whose hands they have suffered cruel and irreparable wrong. He is the thief who has robbed so much old glass of its glory, and a most impenitent one: there are times when any one who cares for glass could find it in his heart to wish he were crucified. So greedy is he of work, if not of gain, that restoration cannot safely be left even to the most learned of men; to him, perhaps, can it least of all be entrusted.
The twelfth century windows at S. Denis should be among the most interesting extant. They are ruined by restoration. The beauty which they may have had, which they must have had, is wiped out; and, for purposes of study, they are of use only to those who have opportunity and leisure to ferret out what is genuine amidst the sham. The S. Chapelle is cited as a triumph of restoration, an object lesson, in which we may see a thirteenth century chapel with its glass as it appeared when first it was built. If that is so, then time has indeed been kinder even than one had thought. No less an authority than Mr. Ruskin (in a letter to Mr. E. S. Dallas, published in the Athenæum) praises the new work there, and says he cannot distinguish it from the old. There is at least a window and a half (part of the East window, and the one to the left of that) in which, at all events, the old is easily distinguishable from the new. But if the new is not more obvious throughout, that is not because the new is so good, but because the old has been so restored that it is unrecognisable—as good as new, in fact, and no better. The old glass is so smartened up, so watered down with modern, that it gives one rather a poor idea of unspoiled thirteenth century work. A more adequate impression of what it must have been, may be gained from the few panels of it, comparatively unhurt by restoration, now in South Kensington Museum.
The story of destruction repeats itself wherever the restorer has had his way. Sometimes he has actually inserted new material if only the old was cracked, obscured, corroded; and has effaced the very qualities which come of age and accident. Sometimes he has indulged in a brand-new background. There, at least, it seemed to his ignorance, he might safely substitute nice, new, even-tinted, well-made glass for streaky, speckled, rough, mechanically imperfect material. Invariably he has thinned the effect of colour by diluting the old glass with new. Many quite poor new-looking windows, spick and span from the restorer (those, for example, at the East end of Milan Cathedral), turn out to contain a certain amount of old work, good perhaps, lost in garish modern manufacture. At Notre Dame, at Paris, the considerable remains of Early and Early Decorated glass go for very little. One has to pick them out from among modern work designed to deceive. Certain windows at Mantes have suffered such thorough restoration that one begins to wonder if they are not altogether new; and you have precisely the same doubt at Limoges and at scores of other places. At Lyons an Early Rose has been made peculiarly hideous by restoration. Much of the harsh purple in Early French mosaic is surely due to the admixture of crude new glass. It is needless to multiply examples; they will occur to every one. All this old work swamped in modern imitation goes inevitably for nought. If the new is good it puzzles and perplexes one; if bad, one can see nothing else. What is crude kills what is subdued. It is as if one listened for a tender word at parting, and it was drowned in the screech of the steam-engine.
Early glass was so mechanically imperfect, and age has so roughened and pitted it, that its colour has, almost of necessity, a quality which new work has not; and one is disposed, perhaps too hastily, to ascribe all garish glass in old windows to the restorer. Many a time, however, the new work convicts itself. At Strassburg it is quite easily detected. You may check your judgment in this respect by surveying the windows from the rear. It is a very good plan to preface the study of old work by examining it from the churchyard, the street, the close, or in the case of a big church from its outer galleries. The surface exposed to the weather, with the light upon it, explains often at a glance what would else be unaccountable. A vile habit of the restorer is to smudge over his glass with dirty paint, perhaps burnt in, perhaps merely in varnish colour; this he terms “antiquating.”
The worse the new work added to the old, the more thoroughly it spoils it; the better the forgery, the more serious the doubt it throws upon what may be genuine. The modern ideal of restoration is thoroughly vicious. All that can be done is mending; and it should be an axiom with the repairer, that, where glass (however broken) can possibly be made safe by lead joints, no new piece of glass should ever be inserted in its place. Better any disfigurement by leads than the least adulteration of old work.
It is absurd to set good old work in the midst of inferior reproduction of it, as the common practice is, more especially in the case of Early work. Every bungler has thought himself equal to the task of restoring thirteenth century glass. It was rudely drawn and roughly painted. What could be easier than to repeat details of ornament, or even to make up bogus old subjects, and so complete the window? To paint figures anything like those in the picture windows of the sixteenth century was obviously not so easy, and the difficulty has acted as a deterrent. Where it has not, the discrepancy between old and new is usually unmistakable. Men like M. Capronnier, however, have sometimes put excellent workmanship into their restoration of Renaissance work, to be detected only by a certain air of modernity, which happily has crept into it, in spite of the restorer. But was it not he who flattened the grey-blue background to the transept windows at S. Gudule? The fine window at S. Gervais, Paris, with the Judgment of Solomon, has lost much of its charm in restoration. To compare it with the two lights in the window to the right of it, is to see how much of the quality of old glass has been restored away. That quality may be due in part to age and decay. What then? Beauty is beauty; and if it comes of decay (which we cannot hinder), let us at least enjoy the beauty of decay.
It has been proved at Strassburg that thirteenth or even twelfth century work may be quite harmoniously worked into fourteenth century windows. And even in the sixteenth century there were artists who managed to adapt quite Early mosaic glass to Renaissance windows, in which abundant stain, and even enamel, was used. The effect may be perplexing, but it does not deceive. Why will not a man frankly tell us what is new in his work? Then we could appreciate what he had done. But it is only once in a while that he takes you into his confidence. This happens, by way of exception, in a window at S. Mary’s Redcliffe, Bristol, in the case of some figure work on quarry backgrounds, in which the new work is all of clear unpainted white or coloured glass, but so judiciously chosen that you do not at first perceive the patching. The effect is absolutely harmonious; and when you begin to study the glass, you do so without any fear that imposition is being practised upon you. Where the painting has in parts been made good, there is always that fear, as, for example, at S. Mary’s Hall, Coventry: the windows have been restored with great taste; but one cannot always be quite sure as to what is modern.
256. A Restoration at Angers.
The merest jumble of old glass, more especially if it be all of one period or quality, is far better than what is called restoration. Who does not call to mind window after window in which the glass is so mixed as to be quite meaningless, and is yet, for all that, beautiful? The Western Rose at Reims is an unintelligible jumble mainly of blue and green. It may not be design, but it is magnificent. Again, the Western lights at Auxerre, in great part patchwork, are simply glorious when the afternoon sun shines through.
At the East end of Winchester Cathedral is a seven-light window, reckoned by Winston to be one of the finest of a fine period. At the West end is an enormous window, which seems to be a mere medley of odds and ends. On examination you can trace in perhaps twelve out of forty-four lights of this last the outline of canopy-work, and in two or three that of the figure under it; but for the rest, certainly in the two lower tiers (which are best seen), it is mere patchwork, including some quite crude blue, and a certain amount of common clear white sheet. The effect, when you examine it closely, is anything but pleasing. But as you stand near the choir screen on a not very bright morning, and look from one window to the other, the effect is just the opposite of what might have been expected. For the really fine East window has been restored; and, whether to preserve it or to bring old work and new into uniformity, it has been screened with sheets of perforated zinc! On the other hand, the really considerable amount of crude white and colour with which the West window has been botched is, so to speak, swallowed up in silvery radiance. Probably it helps even to give it quality; anyway, the effect is delightful. Indeed, it recalls the impression of the Five Sisters at York, or suggests some monster cobweb in which the light is caught. Beauty, forbid that any busybody should restore it! At Poitiers (S. Radegonde) is a grisaille window of the fourteenth century, all patched, defaced, undecipherable—mended only with thick bulbous bits of green-white glass—which is quite all one could desire in the way of decoration.
257. S. Jean-aux-Bois.
In very many churches there remain fragments of old glass in stray tracery openings, not enough to produce effect. The question has been what to do with them. A common practice is to use up such scraps in the form of bordering to common white quarry glass. That is quite a futile thing to do. The effect of setting old glass amidst plain white is to put out its colour; and this, not only in the case of deep-coloured glass, but equally of Early grisaille; which when framed in clear glass, looks merely dirty. The most beautiful and sparkling of thirteenth century glass so framed would be degraded. At Angers are some windows consisting of a mosaic of scraps worked up into pattern (before the days of restoration as we know it); and the mere introduction amidst it of a strapwork of thin white sheet ([above]) is enough to take from it all charm of colour, all quality of old glass. Massed all together in one window, without such adulteration, the most miscellaneous collection of chips makes usually colour. In the hands of a colourist it would be certain to do so. What if it be confused? Mystery is, at all events, one element of charm, and even of beauty.
It is not beyond the bounds of possibility to marry old work with new; but the union is rarely happy. It wants, in the first place, good modern glass. Further than that, it wants an artist, and one who has more care for old work than for his own. There is some satisfactory eking out old glass with new at Evreux, where a number of small subjects, many of them old, are framed in grisaille, in great part new, in a very ingenious way. At Munster is a window in which little tracery lights (you can tell that by their shapes) are used as points of interest in a modern composition—with a result, only less happy than where, at S. Mary’s Redcliffe, a window is made up almost entirely of old glass, very much of one period, the more fragmentary remains forming a sort of broken mosaic background to circular medallions, heads, and other important pieces, arranged more or less pattern-wise upon it. Old glass must needs be mended sometimes, patched perhaps; new may have to be added to it; it has even to be adapted on occasion to a new window, with or without the admixture of new; but none of this is restoration of the glass in the modern sense. That implies restoring it to what once it was—which is, on the face of it, absurd.
The effect of windows made up (as at S. Jean-aux-Bois, [page 409]) of segments of two or three old windows satisfies the artistic sense perfectly. What the restorer does is to take each pattern he finds in it for what he calls “authority,” and to make two or three windows, all of which have much more the appearance of modern forgeries (which in great part they are) than of old work. The “antiquation” of the new glass in them deceives none but the most ignorant; but it does throw doubt upon the genuineness of the old work found in such very bad company.
If there remain enough old glass to make a window, let it be judiciously repaired; if there be not enough for that, let it be piously preserved, best of all, in a museum, where those who care for such scraps may see it: scattered about in stray windows in out-of-the-way churches they are practically unseen. Better than what is called restoration, the brutality of the mason who plasters up gaps in the clerestory windows of great churches with mortar, or the plumber’s patch of zinc, which temporarily at least keeps out the weather and the crude white light, leaving us in full enjoyment of the colour and effect of old glass. How grateful we are when it is only cobbled, and not restored. Restoration is a word to make the artist shudder.
In a window at Auch, representing the Risen Christ, with, on the one side, the doubting Thomas, and on the other the Magdalene, the customary inscription, “Noli me tangere,” is followed (in letters of precisely the same character) by the signature of the artist, Arnaut de Moles. It is the reverend Abbé responsible for the authorised description of the church, who suggests that it may have been with intention he signed his name just there. He has come off, as it happens, very much better at the hands of the restorer than most men. Had it been possible for him to foresee what nineteenth century “restoration” meant, well might he have written over his signature “Leave me alone”!