224. S. Jean-aux-Bois.
Painting.—In Early glass painting plays a very subordinate part. Only one pigment is used, and that not by way of colour, but to paint out the light and define form.
Details of figure and ornament are traced in firm strong brush lines.
Lines mark the exaggerated expression of the face, the close folds of the spare drapery wrapped tightly round the figure, the serration of foliage, and so on ([pages 33], [37], [324]). Lines, in the form of sweeping brush strokes or cross-hatching, are used also to emphasise such shading (not very much) as may be indicated in thirteenth century work, or perhaps it should rather be said that the lines of shading are supplemented very often by a coat of thin brown paint, not always very easily detected on the deep-coloured glass of the period.
White Windows, or “Grisaille.”—Grisaille assumes in France the character of interlacing strapwork all in white. Sometimes this is quite without paint ([page 25]). Plain work of the kind occurs also with us; but it is dangerous to give a date to simple glazing. That at Salisbury ([page 26]) is probably not of the very earliest.
In France, as with us, such strapwork is associated with foliated detail, traced in strong outline upon the white glass and defined by a background of cross-hatched lines which go for a greyer tint ([above]).
After the beginning of the thirteenth century, this strapwork is sometimes in colour, or points of colour are introduced in the shape of rosettes, etc., and in the border ([pages 137], [138]).
In England there is from the first usually a certain amount of coloured glass in grisaille windows ([pages 141], [332]). Sometimes there is a considerable quantity of it (Five Sisters, York); but it never appears to be much. The effect is always characteristically grey and silvery.
