XV
FIFTEENTH CENTURY GLASS
IN FRANCE
XV
FIFTEENTH CENTURY GLASS
IN FRANCE
The influence of pictorial art.
The French school, when it revived in the second half of the fifteenth century, came, as I have said, almost at once, and far earlier than the English school, under the influence of the schools of painting which had been developed in the Netherlands (where the Van Eycks were working as early as 1420), and also, to an extent which has only been realized comparatively recently, in France itself.
There was both advantage and disadvantage in this. The drawing of the French is generally a little better than our own, and there is more variety and enterprise in their colour schemes than in our later Perpendicular work. On the other hand, it seems to me that almost from the beginning they were hampered, if ever so little at first, by the desire to apply to glasswork the standards of a different medium.
The difficulty had not arisen before. The illumination or wall painting of the thirteenth and early fourteenth century in England and the north of France could be translated into glass with little change, but, in the fifteenth century, the painters of illuminations and panel pictures had learnt all sorts of things about light and shade and landscape and flesh painting that did not come at all easily to the worker in glass and lead, and were of no help to him in his task of beautifying windows. It was inevitable that he should make some attempt to follow in the cry, and the extent to which he succeeded is amazing; but from henceforth, even where he most succeeds, it is to some extent by a tour de force, by a compromise between incompatibilities.
PLATE XLVII
DRAPERY FROM SLEEVE OF VIRGIN,
FROM WEST END OF ST. VINCENT'S, ROUEN
Fifteenth Century