There is a quite charming effect of colour in a Jesse window at S. Maclou, Rouen, where the tracery lights are inhabited by little cherubs, in ruby on a grey-blue ground, in grey on deeper grey-blue, and in emerald-like green upon the same.
The scroll without the angel was a very convenient filling for smaller openings. Some elaborately twisted scrolls, in white and stain on purple, occur at Moulins.
Larger and more prominent lights often contain a separate picture, or one picture runs through several lights, or perhaps all through the tracery. Worse than that is, where the picture runs through from the lights below; as at Alençon, where the trees grow up into the blue of the tracery, broken otherwise only by white clouds; or at Conches, where the architecture from the subject below aspires so high. It is almost worse still where, as at Alençon again, and at the chapel at Vincennes, it is the canopy which so encroaches. In the exceptional case of a Jesse window there seems less objection to accepting the whole window as a field through which the tree may grow; yet the tracery is not the happiest part of the Beauvais window ([page 368]). Sometimes the heads of the lower lights are made to appear as though they were part of the tracery.
A happier form of Renaissance tracery design is where medallion heads in white and stain are introduced upon a ground of plain colour—blue at Châlons, purple-brown at Montmorency. These are sometimes most beautifully painted, as are the Raffaellesque little cherubs amidst white clouds, also at Montmorency; but they are much more delicately done than they need have been, and less effective than they might. Very delicate painting upon white does produce an effect even at a distance; at least it gives quality; but there should be some relation between effort and effect; and here the effect is weak as compared with the expenditure of art. In the tracery on [page 213], fairly effective though monotonous, the birds are glazed in with such unnecessary avoidance of lead, that the cutting of the ground must have been a work of great difficulty. In glass of every period it has been the custom to put too much into tracery; in Early work too much detail, in Later too much finish. What is wanted is breadth.
CHAPTER XXIII.
QUARRY WINDOWS.
The very simplest form of window glazing, the easiest and the thriftiest thing for the cutter to do, and the most straightforward for the glazier, is to frame together parallel-sided pieces of glass in the form of a lead lattice.
