170. St. Martin ès Vignes, Troyes.
The opposite defect of opacity reaches probably its greatest depth in the four great Rubens-like windows at S. Gudule in the chapel of Our Lady immediately opposite that of the Holy Sacrament, where Van Orley’s windows are. The design is there absolutely regardless of any consideration of glass or architecture. Each window is treated as a vast oil picture, without so much as a frame. Here is no vista of distant architecture, nor any such relief of lighter colour as you find at Gouda. Force of colour is sought by masses of deep shadow, into which the figures merge. This shadow being obtained by paint, and the glazing being in the now usual squares, there are literally yards of painted quarries, which, except when the sun is at its fiercest, are all but black. And withal the effect is not rich as compared with even the common Gothic glass, though it is not without a certain picturesqueness when perchance the sun struggles through. A painter might find it an admirable background to his picture; no architect would choose it for his building. Three of these windows were designed, it seems, by a pupil of Rubens, Van Thulden, who worked under him at the Luxembourg, and they have all the character of his work—except that the colour is dull.
At New College, Oxford, are some smaller windows with figures, also recalling the manner of the master, and said to be by pupils of his. They, too, are dull and heavy in effect. The canopies over the figures are terrible caricatures of the Gothic shrines in the ante-chapel. Better seventeenth century glass is to be found at Oxford in the work of the Van Lingen, a family of Dutchmen settled in England, who executed windows in Wadham and Balliol Colleges and elsewhere. Some of these are rich in colour. Apart from the rather interesting use of enamel made in them, they are not of great value; but they show as well as more important examples the kind of thing which did duty for design.
The windows in Lincoln’s Inn Chapel, London, illustrate not unfairly the dreary level of dulness as to colour and design to which seventeenth century glass declined. That it could fall still lower was shown, for example, by Peckitt, of York, who is responsible for the glass on the north side of New College Chapel, Oxford, facing the work of the Dutchmen. These date from 1765 to 1774.
The history of eighteenth century windows may, if one may plagiarise a famous bull, be put into the fewest possible words: there were none—worth looking at. To find pleasure even in Sir Joshua’s design at New College, you must consider it as anything but glass.
CHAPTER XIX.
PICTURE-WINDOWS.
The course of glass design was picture-ward. Picture design, however, did not stand still, and hence arises some confusion in the use of the word “pictorial.” It is time to try and clear that up. Stained glass, it may be truly said, has been from the very first pictorial. The earliest glass, therefore, and the latest, the best and the worst, may alike be termed pictorial. The difference is in the conception as to what constituted a picture, say, in the thirteenth century and the seventeenth. It all depends upon the kind of picture attempted.
Archaic art aims already at nature. We probably do not give the early painter credit enough for his intention of rendering natural things naturally. In part at least the stiffness of his design comes from lack of skill, and often where we find him quaint he meant no doubt to be perfectly serious and matter-of-fact. But it was not alone incompetence that held his hand. He was restrained always by a decorative purpose in his work. Here again he was not conscious of sacrificing to any higher rule of art; he bothered himself as little about that as a bee about the way it shall fashion its cell; he worked in the way to which he was born; but the idea had not yet developed itself that a picture could be painted quite apart from the decoration of something, and it never entered his mind to do anything but adapt himself to the decorative situation.