239. François Ier Canopy, Lyons.
The grey-blue distance has often figures as well as landscape and architecture painted upon it; to represent verdure it is stained green. Blue is more usual than white as a ground; but that also occurs, similarly painted. The not very usual landscape in white, with a blue sky above, in the windows of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, belongs to the early part of the century.
Tracery.—In small windows the subject, or its canopy, is often carried up into the tracery lights ([page 368]), or the architecture ends abruptly and horizontally at the springing of the arch, and the heads of the lights are treated as part of the tracery.
Tracery lights often contain figure subjects. Very commonly they are occupied by figures of angels robed in white and stain, or in rich colour, or with colour only in their wings, playing upon musical instruments, bearing emblems, scrolls, and so on, all on a coloured ground ([page 280]). There occur also, but less frequently, cherubic heads, portrait medallions, badges, twisted labels, or other devices, upon a ground of ruby, pale blue, purple, or purple-brown. A purple or purplish background is of the period.
Coloured grounds are used without borders. White grounds are usually diapered with clouds.
There is no very distinctive treatment of rose windows. They are filled as pictorially as they well can be. They contain, perhaps, a central subject and in the outer lights angels, cherubs, and the like, much as in other tracery lights.
Ornament.—The detail of their ornament is a ready means of distinguishing Renaissance windows. In place of Gothic leafage we have scrollwork of the marked arabesque or grotesque character derived from Italy. It needs no description.
Screens and draperies have often patterns in white and stain on ruby and other coloured grounds, produced by abrading the red and painting and staining the white thus exposed. The process may be detected by the absence of intervening lead between the white or yellow and the deep ground.