199. Round Glass, Roundels, or Bull’s-Eyes.
“Photo-Tint” by James Akerman, London, W. C.
The occasional endeavours to get stronger and bolder effects in quarry work were not very successful. At Evreux and at Rouen there are some late quarries painted more after the fashion of bold mosaic diaper; but the effect, though satisfactory enough, is not such as to convince one that that is the better way.
200. Heraldic Glass.
To heraldry, and especially to shields of arms surrounded by mantling ([page 293]), quarries form an excellent background, but only in the event of there being enough of them left free to show that it is a quarry window upon which the heraldry is imposed, or rather into which it is inlaid. Odds and ends of quarries want to be accounted for, as forming the continuation of the glass above and below. In the case of a window not a quarry window, it is a mistake to break up the background, as was sometimes done, into quarries, or rather into fragments of quarries. The object of the square or diamond shape is to break up a plain surface. If the ground is naturally broken up by figures, foliage, mantling, or what not, why introduce further quarry lines? They are not in themselves interesting. Their great value is in that they give scale to a window; but that is only on condition that they are seen in their entirety.
201. Quarry from Chetwode Church.
In Germany the place of quarries was supplied by roundels ([page 292]) unpainted. What applies to quarries applies in many respects to them; and they have a brilliancy which flat glass has not. They were usually enclosed in painted borders of white and stain, and have a very delicate and pearly effect; but where (as at S. Peter’s, at Cologne) they occur in great quantity as compared with coloured subjects, these appear to be floating rather uncomfortably in their midst. The Italians, who also used roundels in place of quarries, often let colour into the interstices between them, and also little painted squares or pateræ of white and stain. In the sham windows decorating the Sistine Chapel at Rome, separating Botticelli’s series of Popes, the pointed spaces between the rounds are coloured diagonally in successive rows of red, yellow, and green; but the result is most pleasing where, as at Verona and elsewhere, the little triangular spaces are neither of one tint nor yet symmetrically arranged, but distributed in a quasi-accidental and unexpected way. Sometimes it was the little pateræ that was in colour and the rest white. In any case, the effect is refined, as it is at Arezzo also, where the monotony of roundels, in sundry clerestory windows, is broken by figure medallions and other features in white and colour. The adaptation of roundels to the circular shape is shown in the portion of a round window from Santa Maria Novella. What more remains to be said about roundels and quarry windows is reserved for the chapter on “[Domestic Glass].”