In the cathedral at Pisa are some windows with little subjects, framed in ornament, all in richest and most brilliant colour, which are at first sight extremely perplexing. The leading is elaborately minute, and there is no modelling in the figures, which yet have nothing of archaic or very early character. It turns out that the paint upon the glass has perished, and there is hardly a vestige of it left to show that this was not intended for mere mosaic. The effect, nevertheless, is such as to prove how much can be done in pot-metal glass, and how little it depends upon the painting on it.
177. Assisi.
Elsewhere, as at Arezzo (in work earlier than that of William of Marseilles), the paint has often peeled off to a very considerable extent, revealing sometimes patches of quite crude green and purple, which go to show that the Italians habitually used glass of a raw colour, where it suited their convenience, and just toned it down with brown enamel. The result proves that it was a dangerous practice; but, where the paint has held, the effect is not dull or dirty, as with us it would be. The Italian sun accounts probably both for the use of this scum of paint and for its not injuring the effect of colour.
The same quality of deep rich pot-metal colour associated with Renaissance design, is the first thing that strikes one in the windows at Bologna, in the cathedral at Milan, and in Florence everywhere. At Milan in particular there are compositions, in which blue and red predominate, magnificently rich and deep, in spite of recent cleaning. The cunning way in which green is occasionally used to prevent any flowing together of red and blue into purple, is a lesson in colour. Two schemes of design prevail in the nave windows (the old glass in the choir is so mixed up with new that it does not count), both equally simple. In the one the rectangular divisions formed by the mullions and the stouter bars are accepted, without further framing, as separate picture spaces; in the other the main form of the window is taken as frame to a single picture, the mullions being only so far taken into account that the prominent figures are designed within them. Some of these windows are late enough in the century to show a falling off in treatment. In the Apostle window (attributed to Michel Angelo?) the white glass is all reduced to a granular tint of umber; and in the one illustrating the Life of the Virgin there is a most aggressively foreshortened figure, which may have been effective in the cartoon, but is absurd in the glass. It is not, therefore, at Milan that typically Italian glass is best to be studied, though there is enough of it to startle the student of glass whose experience had not hitherto extended so far as Italy. Neither is Italian glass at its best at Bologna, though the city was noted for glass painting, which was practised there by no less a person than the Blessed James of Ulm. But, truth to tell, the best windows at Bologna (they are most of them fairly good) are not those of the Saint but of Pellegrino Tibaldi and Lorenzo Costa. It is at Florence that the distinctive quality of Italian glass is best appreciated. There is a vast quantity of it, varying in date from the early part of the fifteenth to the latter part of the sixteenth century, but it is uniformly Italian, and, with few exceptions, it is extremely good.
Figures under canopies are of common occurrence in Florentine windows; but the canopies differ in several respects, both from the ordinary Gothic canopy and from the shrine-like structure of the later Renaissance. In the first place, the canopy returns in Italy to its primitive dimensions. It may or may not be architecturally interesting, but there is in no case very much of it. The Italians never went canopy-mad; and they kept the framework of their pictures within moderate dimensions. The Italian canopy of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, then, was just a niche, sometimes of Renaissance design, sometimes affecting a more Gothic form with pointed or cusped arch and so on, under which, or in front of which, the figures stood. It bore definite relation to the figures, and it was neither impossible of construction nor absurd in perspective. Occasionally, in later work, as at the Certosa at Pavia, it was delicate in colour, but, as a rule, it was strong and rich. It was not merely that the shadowed portions were glazed in pot-metal, as when, at Santa Croce, the coffered soffits of the arches are one mosaic of jewellery, but that the canopy throughout was in colour.
178. S. Maria Novella, Florence.