Windows: A Book About Stained & Painted Glass

by Lewis F. Day

182. Figures, Duomo, Florence.

In the lower series the arrangement is the same, except that the upper compartment contains a single figure, larger in scale, and seated, under a canopy of rather more architectural pretensions. Some of the canopies have cusped arches, and some of the borders are foliated in a more or less Gothic way; but obviously the Gothicism throughout is only in deference to prevailing fashion. In feeling and effect the work is Renaissance.

The design here given shows about one half of a window; but it gives, unfortunately, no hint of the colour. The depth of it may be imagined when it is told that the only approach to white in it is in the beaded line round the nimbus of the figure to the right, and that is of the horniest character. The flesh is of a rich brownish tint.

The head on [page 270] goes nearer to suggesting colour. There again the face is brown, the hair and beard dark and bluish; against it the band round the head, which is ruby, tells light. The orange-yellow nimbus, rayed, is rather lighter still, the beaded fillet edging it bone-white. The drapery is of brightest yellow diapered with occasional blue trefoils, each of which has in its centre a touch of red. The background is of very dark blue, the architecture nearest it bright green, beyond that it is dark red.

183. Florence.

This short explanation will serve to indicate the key in which the colour is pitched. The glass itself, it has been said, is as rich as French work of the twelfth century, as deep as German of the fourteenth, but more vivid than either; there are no low-toned greens or inky blues. The blue is sapphire, the green has the quality of an emerald. In this palette of pure colour the artist revelled. Nowhere as in the Duomo at Florence is one so impressed with the feeling that the designer was dealing deliberately always with colour. Plainly that, and no other, was his impulse, colour—broad, large, beautiful, impressive, solemn colour masses. Elsewhere the story-teller speaks, or the draughtsman, here the colourist confesses himself. The grand scale of his figures allows him to treat his colour largely, and its breadth is no less notable than its brilliancy. There is infinite variety in it; but the general impression is of great masses of red, blue, yellow, green, purple, brown, and so on, held together by the same colours distributed in smaller threads and spots, as in diapers on drapery. The broad mass of any one colour is itself made up of many various tints of glass. The accidental fusion of colour, as of red and blue into purple, is guarded against by framing, say, the blue with green, or the ruby with brownish-yellow. At other times neutral tones are deliberately produced by the combination of, for example, red and green lines.

The event proves that in this way, and by the choice of deep rather than low tones, not only mellowness but sobriety of colour is to be obtained. The artist would certainly have chosen rather to be crude than dull; but it is very rarely that a false note occurs, and then most likely it is due to the decay of the brown paint upon which he relied to bring it into tone.

At Arezzo one was disposed to think nothing could be finer than the glass of William of Marseilles; at Florence one is quite certain that nothing could be more beautiful than the glass in the Duomo. Each is, after its kind, perfect. But at Florence, at all events (les absents ont toujours tort), one finds that this is not only the more decorative kind, but the more dignified. One is disposed to ask, whether it is not better that in glass there should be no deceptive pictures, no perspective to speak of, only simple and severely disposed figures, which never in any way disturb the architectural effect, which give to the least attractive interior—the Duomo is as bare as a barn and as drab as a meeting-house—something of architectural dignity.