Many of the medallions are interesting from their deeply symbolical character. In one, for instance, is Christ, with the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, represented, as in the Jesse tree, by doves, each contained in a circle and connected with His breast by rays. With His left hand He unveils a figure labelled "Synagoga," and with His right He crowns another figure labelled "Ecclesia."
Another very curious medallion represents the fœderis arca, "ark of the covenant." A figure of the Almighty supports a crucifix which rises from the ark,—a square box on four wheels,—while round about are the four symbols of the Evangelists. The cross is thus shown as the symbol of God's new covenant with man as the ark was that of the old. A quaint feature is that the artist, while feeling that all four wheels had got to be shown somehow, has been in some difficulty as to how to show the farther pair, and has therefore placed them above the ark, as if resting on it, as an ancient Egyptian artist might have done in his place.
In most of the medallions the teaching of the subject is emphasized and the application pointed out by rhyming Latin hexameters, doggerel in style and innocent of prosody, such as:
Quod Moyses velat, Christi doctrina revelat.
The same feature is found in the glass at Canterbury. None of the verses are identical, but the literary style is the same.
Angers and Chalons.
At Angers there are some remains of twelfth century windows which are thought to be about the same date as those of Chartres and St. Denis, or even a little earlier, and there are some at Chalons, but they cannot be dated with any exactitude, and I have had no opportunity of examining them. Next after these in point of date should, I think, come the earliest of the windows at Canterbury, though nearly thirty years must separate the two.
Fragments at York.
A few fragments in York Minster, however, show where the artists may have been occupied meantime. There are some scraps in the clerestory—scraps of a Jesse window of which the details are almost identical with the St. Denis work—and a medallion representing Daniel in the Lion's Den, which is glazed into the foot of the centre light of the great thirteenth century grisaille windows in the north transept, known as "the Five Sisters." It is a circular medallion filled out to a square form with ornament, no doubt to fit a square of the iron-work, and strongly resembles the St. Denis work.
Canterbury choir.