The brown tracing and painting colour was originally a hard metallic colour which required intense heat to make it flow. The glass had to be made almost red-hot, at which great heat there was always a possibility that the pigment might be fired away altogether, and the painter’s labour lost. In the case of the thirteenth century painter’s work the danger was not very serious. Thanks to the downright and sometimes even brutal way in which he was accustomed to lay on the paint, solidly and without subtlety of shade, his work was pretty well able to take care of itself in the kiln. It was the more delicate painting which was most in danger of being burnt away; and in proportion as men learnt to carry their painting further, and to get delicate modelling, they became increasingly anxious to avoid all possibility of any such catastrophe. The easiest way of doing this was (as in the case of transparent enamel) to soften this colour with flux. That enabled them to fire their glass at a much lower heat, at which there was no risk of losing the painting, and they were able so to make sure of getting the soft gradations of shade they wanted; and the more the painter strove to get pictorial effects the more he was tempted to soften his pigment; but, according as the flux made the colour easier to manage in the fire, it made it less to be depended upon afterwards; and the later the work, and the more pictorial its character, the more surely the painting proves at this date to have lost its hold upon the glass. In many a seventeenth century window the Donors were depicted in their Sunday suits of black velvet and fur, the texture quite wonderfully given; now their garments are very much the worse for wear, more than threadbare. The black or brown is rich no longer, it is pitted with specks of raw white light; sometimes the colour has peeled off en masse. Time has dealt comparatively kindly with the gentlemen on [page 81], but in the glass there is an air of decay about their sable cloaks which takes considerably away from their dignity. It is one characteristic of enamelled windows that they do not mellow with age, like mosaic glass, but only get shabby.
Any one altogether unacquainted with the characteristics of style is apt to be very much at fault as to the date of a window. The later windows are in so much more dilapidated a condition than the earlier that they are quite commonly mistaken for the older.
It has to be borne in mind that most of the devices adopted by the glass painters—the use, namely, of large sheets of fragile glass, and the avoidance of strengthening leads, no less than the resort to soft enamel, whether for colour or for shading—all go to make it more perishable.
It may be said that the decay of the later painting is due not so much to the use of enamel as to the employment of soft flux. That is true. But when it comes to the painting of texture and the like, the temptation to use soft colour has generally proved to be irresistible. One is forced to the conclusion that the aim of the later glass painter was entirely wrong; that for the sake of pictorial advantages—which went for very little in a scheme of effective church decoration, even if they did not always detract from the breadth of the work—he gave up the qualities which go at once to make glass glorious, and to give it permanence. Whatever the merits of seventeenth century glass painting they are not the merits of glass; there is little about it that counts for glass, little that is suggestive of glass—except the breakages it has suffered.
What is said of seventeenth century glass applies also to that of the eighteenth century, only with more force. Sir Joshua and Benjamin West were quite helpless to raise the art out of the slough into which it had fallen, for they were themselves ignorant of its technique, and did not know what could be done in glass. It was not until the Gothic revival in our own century, and a return to mosaic principles, that stained glass awoke to new life.
CHAPTER IX.
THE NEEDLE POINT IN GLASS PAINTING.
Allusion has been made to the glass painter’s use of the point for scraping out lights, and especially diapers upon glass coated with pigment. These are often quite lace-like in their delicacy. That would be a poor compliment if it meant that the glass painter had had no more wit than to imitate the effects produced in a material absolutely unlike glass. But it is not merely for want of a better word that the term lace-like is used. It is strictly appropriate, and for a very good reason. It was explained how from the first the glass painter would use the stick end of his brush to scrape out sharp lights in his painting, or even diaper patterns out of a tint. The latest glass painters made more and more use of the point, and of a finer point than the brush end, until, in Swiss work, they adopted the pen and the needle itself. It is not surprising, then, that point-work should resemble point-work, though the one be in thread and the other on glass. The strange thing would have been if it were not so. Thus it comes about that much of the Swiss diaper work is most aptly described as lace-like in effect.
The field of a small shield is frequently diapered with a pattern so fine that it could only have been produced with a fine point. Some of the diapers [opposite] may be identified as portions of heraldic shields. On a shield it may be taken to represent the engraving of the metal surface of the thing itself; and, indeed, here again is a significant resemblance between two technical processes.