Even earlier than that the canopy was already sometimes of very considerable extent. At S. Sebald’s, Nuremberg, there is a great altar-like canopy ending in a pediment about two-thirds of the way up the window, with plain white glass above, in which the shafting at the side takes up practically the entire width of the two outer lights, as here shown in the diagram of a portion of the glass. Yet this window is as early as the year 1515, and before the period when masses of deep shadow were represented by paint. Accordingly the canopy in this instance is glazed in pot-metal of steely grey-blue, which, with the little figures, mainly in steely grey armour against a white ground, and the heraldic shields at the side, mainly in red and white, all very slightly shaded, has a singularly fresh, bright, and delicate effect.
Another instance of preponderating architectural work occurs also at Nuremberg in the choir of the church of S. Lorenz, and though it belongs to the beginning of the seventeenth century, that too is leaded up much as it might have been in the fifteenth. But the great clumsy column, [opposite], with its clumsier figure of Fame, against a ruby background extending right up to the stonework of the window, is not a satisfactory filling to the outer light of a big window.
The last thing to expect of late Renaissance work is modesty in the use of architectural accessories, whether in the form of frame or background. Frame and background they are not; they claim to be all or nothing. Just as ornamental design was gradually pushed out of use by figure work, so the picture was in time overpowered by its frame. And the frame was in the end such that, when it came to be discarded, it was not much loss.
164. S. Lorenz, Nuremberg.
In the latter half of the sixteenth century and thenceforward design continued to travel in the direction of what was meant for a sort of realism. If the more or less altar-like canopy was retained, it was meant to appear as if it stood bodily under the arch of the window; if it was abandoned, you were supposed to see more or less through the window, perhaps into distant country, perhaps into receding aisles of the church.
It formed part of the canopy scheme, that the structure should end before it reached the top of the window, so that you could see beyond it into space. The designers would have been only too happy if they could have done away with the glass above that. If they had had big sheets of plate glass, they would certainly have used them to produce the effect of out of doors—there was already a plein air school in the eighteenth century—as they had not, they were obliged to accept the inevitable, and lead up their white glass; but they went as far as they could to doing away with its effect, using thin, transparent material, which was not meant to appear as though it formed part of the composition. Occasionally they would use pale blue glass, or tint it in a blue enamel, further to suggest the sky beyond. This ([page 222]) would commonly be glazed in squares. The pure white glass also was often glazed in square or, as at Brussels, diamond quarries ([page 71]).
Subjects themselves, it has been explained, came to be glazed as much as possible in rectangular panes; but it marks, it may here be mentioned, a decline of design, as well as of technique, when these came to interfere in any way, as they did, with the drawing. Having made up his mind that his design is to be glazed in rigid square lines, the artist should logically have designed accordingly. He had only to mark off the glazing lines on his cartoon, and scheme his composition so that it was not hurt by them. Towards the seventeenth century the plain glass, the extra part beyond the canopy or beyond the picture, would often be glazed in some simple pattern. That, you might imagine, stood for the window behind the picture or the monument. At the church of S. Jacques, Antwerp, above a picture of the Circumcision, is a canopy leaded in squares and painted to look like falsehood, beyond which clear glass is glazed in a pattern.