The Story of Chartres

by Cecil Headlam

The reds, like those at Reims, are everywhere wonderful; the saffron also and the citron yellows, the brown and the emerald green; but most superbly beautiful of all are the blues, the lucid transparent azure of the twelfth-century lancets, and the deep sapphire, the blue of Poitiers, which fills the lower windows of the nave. The secret of its manufacture is lost, but you can understand, when you behold it, how easily that story was believed which said that in order to secure this depth of blue the monkish glaziers used to grind sapphires to powder and mix them with their glass. There is only one thing that can be compared with the stained glass of the North, and that is the mosaics of the South, of Ravenna, Palermo, San Sofia.

You ‘gaze round on those windows, the pride of France,’ and as you feast your eyes upon the sparkling azure and the blood-red rays that stream from the rose, you understand also how easily the lad who saw it for the first time was led to say, when suddenly above him the organ burst forth into music, that it seemed to him as if the window spoke!

The Cathedral offers to the student of glass a perfect model, not indeed of detail, for upon the path which leads to the perfection of detail the thirteenth-century glazier had still many steps to take, but of effects in decorative colouring. In the rose you have a confused effect of colour, in which there is not any too definite form to spoil the charm of the broken bits of colour upon the senses. The meaning is there, too, as we shall see, many meanings, simple and elaborate, direct and mystical. But it is in the lancet windows of the nave that the row of otherwise (let it be confessed) ungainly figures supplies us at once, by means of the drapery, cloaks and borders, with that mixture of colour and shade that makes colour beautiful, and with those broad masses of stain combined with absolute simplicity and severity of design which should be the ideal of the glazier. And they are not crowded with too much story.

The lesson of the army of saints and martyrs which they represent is printed in large type, so that it may be easily read and understood from the distant level of the nave. Each light exhibits one enormous figure of a saint, with features strongly marked, clad in bright robes of blazing colour, set off by a border that is more sober in tone and opaque. The fire dies out of these broad patches of limpid blue and emerald green, of flaming red and saffron yellow, as they approach the deep, cool borders of brown and black, violet and grey, mingled with lower tones of red and green. You see, then, the object and the successful result of these bold designs of huge saints. The mediæval glaziers had considered the position which their glass was to occupy in the Cathedral. They did not merely design it with a view to its being effective in the studio. There is another point to be noted. Working, as they did, with small fragments of the precious glass as it came out of the melting-pot, and binding each fragment in lines of lead till the whole formed a pattern or drawing in a leaden framework, they were able to watch and test their work in its progress. Thus, watching and testing, they were able also to arrange for the proper mingling of the rays diffused on all sides by each piece of the mosaic. They did not aim so much at painting a good preliminary design upon paper as at producing a fine effect of colour in glass. When in succeeding centuries painters invaded the realms of glass they would appear to have ignored the obvious requirements of the new medium in which they were to work. Experimentally and intuitively the mediæval glazier, on the other hand, must have studied the whole question of radiation as it affected his task. And the result is, that for the most superb effects of stained glass we have to go, not to the pictures burnt on the large sheets of glass by famous painters, but to the designs of the thirteenth-century anonymous monkish craftsmen. In the matter of stained glass the latter had this advantage also in their favour. They had to work with a material which, being less scientifically compounded, was artistically immensely superior. In the manufacture of the old pot-metal something was left to Nature, much, that is to say, to accident. The colour, in other words, was not so evenly and exactly spread as by more modern processes. Being more unevenly distributed, it would frequently tone off at the edges, and the rays diffused from it would mingle in a softer harmony with those of the neighbouring coloured fragments. And greater variety was obtained, because a chemically imperfect process never gives two batches of glass from the pot quite alike. In early work, again, the fact that large pieces of glass could not be made was also on the side of the craftsmen. Perfect colour is the product of varied colours; the multiplicity of small pieces of glass set in deep black lines of lead yielded a result of rich, deep colouring, which is in the nature of things not to be obtained from one large sheet, however fine.

But though the palette of the early glazier was so rich in quality with those splendid reds and ineffable blues, the secret of which has long been lost, and other primary colours, it was poor in extent. To this poverty must be ascribed the curious colouring of many details. Beards are often painted blue, and faces usually brown. Some shade of a rich purplish brown was in fact the ordinary flesh tint of the early glazier. In the window of the north transept, where S. Anne is portrayed, we have a very striking example of this. The brown face of S. Anne is there so large (it must be at least 2 feet in length), that the craftsman has been able to glaze it in several pieces. The eyes are of white, and so strongly leaded that they seem to stare out of the picture.

The sunburnt effect of their brown visages only accentuates the Oriental aspect of many of these glass figures. As at Bourges, so here, the influence of the East is plainly visible, not only in the hieratic type of the personages and their sumptuous apparel, but also and still more undoubtedly in the mosaic borders by which they and the medallions beneath are framed. The tones are rich and soft as those of a Persian rug; the patterns and devices are clearly related to those in Byzantine ivories and enamels. Nor will the simile I have used seem inept when it is remembered that at this very time imitations of the Persian rugs brought home by the Crusaders were being deliberately manufactured in Paris.

The enjoyment of colour is one of the finest of pleasures, but it was not merely to give pleasure that this glass was stained, and these figures drawn in lead. There is a reasoned aim, a definite symbolic purpose in all mediæval art, and not least in the art of stained glass.

We have seen how the huge figures of the guardian saints in the nave are made to stand out from their borders and tell, in spite of the height at which they are placed, their story, plain for every eye to see. If you now look at the windows of the lower row, of the aisles that is, you will notice that the breadth and importance of the borders which form the framework of the circular and quatrefoil medallions are striking. They are not, however, intended to make the medallions stand out—if they were, they would fail in their object—but to give the effect of an immense blaze of subdued, indeterminate colour.

That effect is reasoned: the light in the nave is subdued for a mystic purpose. It is not the chance result of light playing upon a fortuitous collection of coloured fragments of glass. It is a result knowingly and scientifically produced by the artist. The dim religious light which fills the threshold of the temple grows less dim as it approaches the centre of the Cross; it borrows still more transparent colours from the painter’s palette as it circles round the choir, and in the sanctuary gives place to the most lively and brilliant tones, which pour in from above. ‘What poetry is there,’ exclaims M. Ferdinand de Lasteyrie,[70] ‘in this immense gamut of tones, so cleverly arrayed. It is an admirable symbol of the light of Christianity escaping in great floods from the summit of the Cross, but throwing a lesser brillance upon those who stand afar off.’

To produce this striking effect the artist has availed himself of very simple means. In the aisles the windows are cold in tone, and the medallions,[71] as we have said, set in very broad borders. And these borders themselves, filled with a variety of patterns and ornaments, are composed of an infinite number of pieces of glass, mosaic work, the leaden frames of which contribute to the desired gloom. It is a clever application of the ‘legendary’ style, and the very choice of subjects here is in keeping with the place they occupy. The same tones prevail in the lofty windows of the nave, but there the figures are larger; huge saints and tall apostles look down from their posts upon the Cross of Christ and guard His church, S. Piat at their head; and the broad bands of colour give more access to the light. Advancing to the centre of the Cross, you perceive that the aisles are still plunged in a gloom, which is rendered yet more obscure by the unlit spaces of the great transept doors. But the roses set on high throw rainbow lights aslant the transepts, which mingle at the entrance of the choir with the mysterious tints of the nave, and the gallery of lights beneath these roses seem intended to effect the needed transition between their transparent loveliness and the opaque mass of stone beneath. In the apse, again, with its unique double aisles and the series of chapels, which form, as it were, the crown of thorns about the head of Christ upon the Cross, symbolised by the Church, there reigns a luminous obscurity. Here we have once more storied windows with medallion subjects and broad borders of topaz, emerald and ruby, rich and deep, and warmer in tone than were those of the nave. And in the centre of this sacred aureole of chapels rises the sanctuary in a blaze of light, like Jesus in the midst of His Apostles, and floods of warmly-coloured light pour down into the choir through the huge figures which fill the windows. ‘It seems,’ says M. Lasteyrie, ‘that the artist has borrowed a ray of light divine to animate his work, a ray which is brilliant at first but dies away at the entrance of the sanctuary, as if to indicate the spot in which the Christian enters into communion with his God.’