It is matter for regret that the French did not accept the full shape of even the largest medallion, and fill it with one bold subject; over and over again one feels that the subjects in medallion windows are not only too small to be readable, but so small that the figures are out of scale with the ornamental detail. The scale of the church has, of course, to be taken into account; but the French churches are big enough to warrant figures thrice the size of those which ordinarily occur in medallions. In our narrower “Early English” lancet windows the medallions naturally came small.
To divide a window into eccentric divisions (halves or quarters of circles, quatrefoils, and the like) and then to take these awkward shapes as separate picture frames, is an archaic method of design much in need of excuse. The more reasonable thing to do would have been to make use of such incomplete forms only in some secondary position, and as framework for ornament, or at least quite subsidiary figures.
71. The Dream of Charlemagne, Chartres.
Apart from shapes which are really only segments of medallions, the only awkward medallion shapes occurring in Early glass are those which are broader than they are high, such as occur, for example, at Soissons. These have always the uncomfortable appearance of having been crushed.
How the iron skeleton of a medallion window is filled out with leaded glass; how the border and the medallion shapes are strengthened by bands of colour; how the medallions themselves are occupied with little figure subjects, and how the interspaces are filled in with ornament, is indicated [opposite] and on [pages 132], [325].
By way of variation upon the monotony of design, the designer will sometimes reverse the order of things. At Bourges, for example, you will find the centre of a light devoted to insignificant and uninteresting ornament, whilst the figure subjects are edged out into half quatrefoils at the sides of the window; and, again, at Chartres and Le Mans you may occasionally see the pictures similarly ousted from their natural position by rather mechanical ornament. One can sympathise with an artist’s impatience with the too, too regular distribution of the stereotyped medallion window. There is undoubtedly a monotony about it which the designer is tempted to get rid of at any price; but consistency is a heavy price to pay for the slight relief afforded by the treatment just described.
This striving after strangeness results not only in very ugly picture shapes—no one would deliberately design such a shape as that which frames the picture of the Dream of Charlemagne ([overleaf])—but it produces a very uncomfortable impression of perversity. It is quite conceivable that ornament may be better worth looking at than some pictures; but a picture refuses to occupy the subordinate position; it will not do as a frame to ornament. There is no occasion to illustrate very fully the design of Early figure medallions; they are often of very great interest, historical, legendary and human, but there is little variation in the system of design. The picture is of the simplest, perhaps the baldest, kind. The figures, as before stated, are clearly defined against a strong background, usually blue or ruby; a strip or two of coloured glass represents the earth upon which they stand; a turret or a gable tells you that the scene is in a city; a foliated sprig or two indicate that it is out of doors, a forest, perhaps; a waving band of grey ornament upon the blue tells you that the blue background stands for sky, for this is a cloud upon it. The extremely ornamental form which conventional trees may assume is shown in Mr. T. M. Rooke’s sketch from a medallion at Bourges, [opposite]. In the medallions from Chartres ([page 325]) are instances of simpler and less interesting tree forms, and in the upper part of the larger of the two, a bank of conventional cloudwork. Explanatory inscriptions are sometimes introduced into the background, as in the dream of Charlemagne ([above]), or in the margin of the medallions, as in the Canterbury window on [page 132], fulfilling in either case an ornamental as well as an elucidatory function.