Alas!—or happily?—alas for what might have been, happily for our wavering allegiance to sterner principles of design, it is seldom that the glass painter so perfectly tunes his work to the key of glass. In particular, he finds it difficult to harmonise his painting with the glazing which goes with it. He is incapable in the early sixteenth century of the brutalities of his successors, who carry harsh lines of lead across flesh painting recklessly; but the very association of ultra-delicate painting with lead lines at all demands infinite tact. An idea of the point to which painting is eventually carried may be gathered from the representation of little nude boys blowing bubbles in which are reflected the windows of the room where they are supposed to be playing. That is an extreme instance, and a late one. Short, however, of such frivolity, and in work of the good period, painting is often so delicate that bars and leads unquestionably hurt it. It is so even in the very fine Jesse window at Beauvais ([page 368]).
Occur where it may it is a false note which stops our admiration short; and, after all our enthusiasm, we come back heart-whole to our delight in the earlier, bolder, more monumental, and more workmanlike mosaic glass. The beautiful sixteenth century work at Montmorency or at Conches does not shake the conviction of the glass-lover, that the painter is there a little too much in evidence, that something of simple, dignified decoration is sacrificed to the display of his skill. The balance between glass decoration and picture is perhaps never more nearly adjusted than in some of the rather earlier Italian windows.
CHAPTER XX.
LANDSCAPE IN GLASS.
At once a distinguishing feature of picture-glass, and a characteristic of later work generally, is the mise-en-scène of the subject.
173. From The Entry into Jerusalem, Fairford.
In quite the earliest glass the figures, it was shown, were cut out against a ground of plain colour ([pages 33], [127]), or diapered perhaps with a painted pattern, or leaded up in squares, or broken by spots of pot-metal ([page 37]), which, by the way, being usually of too strongly contrasting colour, assert themselves instead of qualifying its tone. Sometimes the ground was leaded up in the form of a more or less elaborate geometric diaper ([page 336]). Occasionally it was broken by the simplest possible conventional foliage. The figure stood on a cloud, an inscribed label, a disc or band of earth. In the fourteenth century spots breaking the ground took very often the form of badges, fleurs-de-lys, heraldic animals, cyphers, and so on ([page 156]), and even in the fifteenth it was quite common to find figures against a flat ground, broken only by inscription, either on white or yellow labels ([pages 186], [339]), or leaded in bold letters of white or yellow into the background itself ([page 196]). But simultaneously with this the figure was frequently represented against a screen of damask ([page 191]), above which showed the further background, usually more or less architectural in character. In the Fairford windows ([page 187]) is shown this treatment together with the label which helps to break the formality of the horizontal line. Sometimes the line is curved, as though the figure stood in a semicircular niche, or broken, as though the recess were three-sided. Sometimes the figure stood upon a pedestal ([page 391]), but more usually, as time went on, upon a pavement. Certain subjects were bound to include accessory architecture, but at first it was as simple as the scenery in the immortal play of Pyramus and Thisbe. But even in the fifteenth century it was rendered, one may judge how naïvely, from the little Nativity on [page 54], a subject hardly to be rendered without the stable. Again, the quite conventional vinework, also from Malvern, shown in the upper part of [page 345] (a jumble of odds and ends), forms really part of the scene depicting Noah in his vineyard—see the hand holding the spade handle. The Fairford scenery ([pages 251], [372]), quaint as it is, goes much nearer to realism than that; and towards the sixteenth century, and during its first years, there was a good deal of landscape in which trees were leaded in vivid green against blue, with gleaming white stems suggestive of birch-bark, always effective, and refreshingly cool in colour. There is something of that kind in the window facing the entrance to King’s College, Cambridge; but the more usual English practice in the fifteenth century was to execute the landscape in white and stain against a coloured ground. That is the system adopted in the scene of the Creation at Malvern ([page 252]), where trees, water, birds, fishes, are all very delicately painted and stained. In the left-hand corner it will be seen that solid or nearly solid brown is used for foliage in order to throw up the white and yellow leafage in front of it. There is some considerably later work very much in this manner at S. Nizier, Troyes. But that kind of thing was not usual in French glass.