(3) The more Advanced Style of Drawing.—The older conventions in drawing had, as we have seen, become outgrown and abandoned, and all through the last part of the fourteenth century there is a steady struggle for a more advanced method of expression. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, drawing, in England at least, crystallized once more into a convention satisfying to the mind of the time, which left the artist free to tell his story. Plates [XXXIX.] to [XLIII.] are examples of it as found at York, and [Plate XLIV.] from Canterbury does not greatly differ in method. The drawing still depends chiefly on line work, but the line work is far finer than before and is used to express modelling with the help of the matt shading. This last is the form of shading which has survived to modern times, and is done by laying a flat semi-transparent coat or "matt" of enamel over the whole surface of the glass, and, when it is dry, and before it is fired, brushing out graduated lights and half tones with a small stiff hog's-hair brush. Sometimes, but not always, the matt was stippled when wet, as may be seen in [Plate XLII.] In later times the matt shading was, and sometimes still is, abused in the attempt to give modelling in high relief by its means alone, a method which results in the loading of the glass with opaque muddy brown, while the modelling becomes untrue with changing lights. This, however, was hardly done within the limits of the period I am writing about in this book, in which the drawing of form is still principally dependent on line work, and is merely helped and softened with the matt.
PLATE XLI
HEADS, FROM ALL SAINTS', NORTH STREET, YORK
Fifteenth Century
The type of figure.
The figures themselves in contrast to those of the previous period are rather short and ungraceful, but, in the best work at least, very much alive. The quaint nose of which [Plate XLII.] is an extreme type is curiously universal throughout English work of the time, and was, I suppose, the accepted type of beauty.
Forms used in the ornament.
(4) The Abandonment of Natural Plant Forms in Ornament.—The natural plant forms, which were so universally used in fourteenth century ornament, were abruptly abandoned at the beginning of the fifteenth. Their place is taken, in the diapered backgrounds to the figures, by a curious long serrated leaf, rather like certain kinds of seaweed, which may be seen in Plates [XXXVII.] and [XXXVIII.] Borders become less frequent, and when they occur generally consist of a leaf of something the same sort, in white and stain, wrapping round a central stem, sometimes with and sometimes without a coloured background. Later on, the conventional pomegranate pattern is occasionally introduced in vestments and hangings, but it is the exception for coloured garments to be ornamented except with an edging. White garments are sometimes powdered with little devices in yellow stain, as in [Plate XXXIX.] The edgings to bishops' copes are often of white set with coloured jewels, which are sometimes let into the middle of a piece of glass without its being cut across—a tour de force of glazing very difficult to accomplish and not worth the trouble when done.
(5) Supersession of Other Forms of Grisaille by Regular Quarries.—The "bulged" quarries disappear by the middle of the fourteenth century and the ordinary straight-sided, diamond-shaped quarry is henceforth the rule. By the end of the century the continuous flowing pattern running through them is abandoned also. There had been a tendency towards the end, as may be seen in [Plate XXVI.], for the pattern to be so disposed that a flower, or other feature, was repeated in the middle of each quarry—in a transitional window at York, which I have referred to elsewhere, there is a continuous pattern with a bird in the centre of each quarry perching upon a branch of it. In the fifteenth century the connecting pattern was left out, and quarries are decorated solely by a little device in the centre of each. Sometimes these are purely conventional, but often they are the occasion for delightful exercise of fancy on the artist's part and form an exception to the general rule of the disuse of natural ornament. Birds, insects, flowers, and leaves are used, as well as heraldic devices and monograms, all expressed very simply in firm pure line work touched with the yellow stain.
The change in material.
Flashed ruby.