[111] Señor Lázaro, who has recently made at Madrid windows for León cathedral imitating those of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, remarks that with the sixteenth century the process grew more complicated, patterns composed with pieces of a single colour being replaced by glass containing a variety of tints. He has also discovered the following usage of the older Spanish craftsmen: “By way of furnishing a key to their arrangement, all the pieces used to be marked with the point of a diamond, and this mark indicates the tone the glass requires for such and such a part of the design. The signs most often employed were three, namely X, L, and V, for red, blue and yellow respectively, intermediate tones being shown by combinations of these letters—XL, LV, XV, with “lines of unities” placed before or after to indicate the necessary gradation in the tone.”
[112] This artist painted a series of magnificent windows representing scenes from the life of San Pedro Nolasco, for the convent of La Piedad, at Valencia.
[113] Zarco del Valle, Documentos Inéditos, etc., pp. 339 et seq.
[114] According to Cean (La Catedral de Sevilla), Menandro painted in 1560 the conversion of Saint Paul on a window in the Chapel of Santiago, in 1567 another window with the scene of the Annunciation, over the gate of San Miguel, and in 1569 the companion to it, representing the Visitation, over the Puerta del Bautismo. “In all these windows,” wrote Cean, prejudiced, as was customary in his day, in favour of the strictly classic style, “the drawing, pose, and composition are good, although in the draperies and figures we observe the influence of Germany.”
In Cean's own time—that is, towards the close of the eighteenth century—the coloured windows of Seville Cathedral amounted to ninety-three, five of which were circular, and the rest with the pointed Gothic arch. The dimensions of the latter are twenty-eight feet high by twelve feet broad, and the subjects painted on them include the likenesses of prophets, patriarchs, martyrs, confessors, and virgins, or scenes from the New Testament, such as the rising of Lazarus, Christ driving the merchants from the temple, the Last Supper, and the anointing by Mary Magdalene.
[115] Zarco del Valle, Documentos Inéditos, p. 159
[116] Isidoro Rosell de Torres, Las Vidrieras pintadas en España (published in the Museo Español de Antigüedades).
[117] “Penado. A narrow-mouthed vessel that affords the liquor with scantiness and difficulty.” Connelly and Higgins' Dictionary; a.d. 1798.
[118] This machine was invented by a Catalan named Pedro Fronvila.