77. S. Kunibert, Cologne.
Medallions themselves may be simple or fantastic in shape. They may be devoted each to a single picture, or subdivided into a series of four or five; they may be closely packed, and supported by segments of other medallions, also devoted to figure work, or they may be separated by considerable intervals of ornament. The character of that ornament takes two distinct forms.
In the examples given ([pages 132], [325]) it takes the form of foliated scrollwork, very much of a piece with the ornament in the borders, except that there is more scope for its growth. In actual detail it varies, according to its date and whereabouts, from something very much like Romanesque strapwork to the more or less trefoiled foliage typical of Early Gothic ornament, whether French or English. Further examples of the last are shown in the borders from Auxerre and Chartres ([page 328]). The one from Chartres illustrates the transition from the Romanesque; it is intermediate between the two. The borders from S. Kunibert’s, Cologne, are quite Romanesque in character, though they are of the thirteenth century; but then it has to be remembered that the Romanesque style of architecture was flourishing on the Rhine long after the Gothic style had developed itself in France and England. Many of the details from Canterbury—which, by-the-bye, are almost identical with contemporary French ornament—show a lingering influence of the pre-Gothic period, but the scroll occupying the spandril on [page 132] is pronouncedly of Early Gothic type. Of much the same character is the detail from Salisbury on [page 117], which forms no part of a medallion window, but more likely of a tree of Jesse.
It was in this ornamental kind of design that the thirteenth century glaziers were most conspicuously successful. One no longer feels here, as one does with regard to their figure work, that they mean much better than their powers enable them to do. And it is with scrollery of this kind, either growing free or springing from the margin of the medallion, that the Early English designers occupied the intervals between the medallions in their windows. In France it became the commoner practice to substitute for it a diaper of geometric pattern. Other expedients were occasionally adopted. There is a window at S. Denis in which there is foliated scrollwork on a background of geometric diaper, although this last is so much “restored” that, for all one can tell, Viollet le Duc may be entirely responsible for it.
78. French Mosaic Diapers.
79. Canterbury.