Windows: A Book About Stained & Painted Glass

by Lewis F. Day

248. The Temptation, Fairford.

The daring of the man may be taken as evidence of his sincerity. If he had not believed absolutely in the things he tried to pourtray, he could not have set them forth so simply as he did, not only in the quite archaic medallions of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but even in pictures conceived at the end of what we call the Middle Ages. It would be impossible nowadays to picture Paradise, as in the scene of the Temptation at Fairford ([overleaf]), with its bald architecture and little Gothic fountain, to say nothing of the serpent. But down to the sixteenth century no subject was impossible to the designer. Even the Creation did not deter him; on the contrary, it was a favourite subject in old glass, throughout the mediæval period ([page 252]): there is no shirking the difficulty of rendering the division of light from the darkness, or the separation of the waters from the dry land. Indeed, problems such as these are sometimes solved with very remarkable ingenuity, if not quite in a way to satisfy us: the Creator in the likeness of a Pope, triple crown and all, as at Châlons-sur-Marne, was pictured no doubt in all good faith and reverence.

Perhaps one of the most daring notions ever put into stained glass occurs in a window in All Saints’ Church, North Street, York. The design illustrates an old Northumbrian legend called “The Pryck of Conscience,” and boldly sets out to show—the fishes roaring, the sea a-fire, a bloody dew, and, as a climax, the general conflagration of the world. “Of heaven and hell I have no power to tell,” wrote the “idle singer” (as he most wilfully miscalled himself) of this perhaps “empty day.” It was left to the modern artist to discover that.

The subject most frequently affected by the designer of the West window of a Gothic church was “The Last Judgment,” in which appeared our Lord in Majesty, St. Michael weighing human souls, angels welcoming the righteous into heaven, and fiends carrying off the doomed to hell. These “Doom” windows, as they are also called, are not, to the modern mind, impressive—not, that is to say, as the pictures of reward and punishment hereafter they were meant to be. The scene strikes us invariably as grotesque rather than terrible, actual as it may have been to the simple artist, who meant to be a sober chronicler, and to the yet simpler worshippers to whom he addressed himself.

Apart from that, “Last Judgment” windows are among the most interesting in the church. The portion of the window, in particular, which is devoted to perdition is most attractive. Hell flames offered to the artist a splendid opportunity for colour, upon which he seized with delight. And the fiends he imagined! Doubtless those crude conceptions of his were very real to him, convincing and terror-striking. The grim humour which we see in them may be of our own imagining; but that the draughtsman enjoyed his creations no artist will doubt.

249. PART OF LAST JUDGMENT, FAIRFORD.
J. Akerman, Photo-lith, London, W. C.

That is easy to understand. His subject allowed him freedom of imagination, gave him scope for fancy, humour, colour; and all his faculties found outlet. No wonder his would-be fiends live beautiful in our recollection! In the midst of ruby flames dance devils, purple, black, and brown, gnashing carnivorous teeth or yellow fangs, their beady, white eyes gleaming with cruelty. Devils there are apparently red-hot; others green and grey, with a beautiful but unholy kind of iridescence about them. As for the blue devils, they are beautiful enough to scare away from the beholder blue devils less tangible, which may have had possession of him. There is a great white devil in a window at Strassburg, who has escaped, it seems, from the Doom window near by, but not from the flames about him, a background of magnificent ruby. The drawing of a part of the Last Judgment from Fairford ([page 373]) gives only the grotesqueness of the scene, the quaintly conceived tortures of the damned; but that division of the glass is in reality a glory of gorgeous colour, to which one is irresistibly attracted. For that, as ever, the designer has reserved his richest and most glowing colour.