Another change, which was the natural result, both of the increased amount of white now used in windows and of the introduction of the silver stain, was the gradual substitution of white glass in the flesh of figures for the brownish pink formerly used. Its use afforded an opportunity for getting white in amongst the colour, and so helping to bind the design together, and the fact that the hair, crowns, and mitres of figures could now be stained yellow, rendered it on the whole the most suitable glass for the purpose, and we find it holding the field down to the late sixteenth century, when a pinkish enamel began to be used.
PLATE XXVII
BOSSES, FROM PLATE XXV
Painted diapers.
(8) The use of Painted Diaper Patterns on the Coloured Backgrounds.—The red and blue backgrounds to the figures in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries needed no further decoration. Their own depth and quality was enough in itself, but the thinner, flatter tones that succeeded them needed enriching and giving texture to, in order to throw the figures up into proper relief; or so the fourteenth century artist seems to have felt, for from the beginning we find his backgrounds usually covered with a diaper painted in enamel.
The method is always the same; the ground having been covered with an even coat of enamel, the pattern is scratched out clear with the point of a stick or a brush handle. Plates [XVI.], [XX.], [XXI.] are typical examples, and show in detail the kind of pattern that was used.
It is very rarely that we find anything of the kind in the previous period. There is, as we have seen, an isolated and early example of it at Canterbury, where a rather paler, poorer blue has been used than in the other windows, but there it is more delicate than in the fourteenth century, the pattern being scratched out of a very thin semi-transparent mat of enamel; and it is found too in some late thirteenth century windows in St. Urbain at Troyes, but in fourteenth century work it is frequently met with even at the beginning of the period, and by the end of the first quarter of the century it is the rule, and remains so throughout the succeeding century as well.
