82. French Mosaic Diaper.
Instances of this unpleasant cast of colour are of continual occurrence, but they are never otherwise than crude and plummy in effect. The rather unusual combination of red and green mosaic diaper occurs, however, pretty frequently at Carcassonne. The diapers illustrated indicate the variety of geometric pattern to be found at Bourges, Chartres, Le Mans, and Notre Dame at Paris, and elsewhere. In proportion as there is in them a preponderance of blue and ruby the effect is that of an aggressive purple. The safest plan seems to be in associating with the blue plenty of green, or with the ruby plenty of yellow glass; or a similar result may be obtained by the choice of a deep neutral blue and of an orange shade of red, taking care always that the two contrasting colours shall not be of anything like equal strength.
At the best these diapers compare very unfavourably with scrollwork. They are, in the nature of things, more monotonous and less interesting than a growth of foliage; they are apt also to run to gaudy colour, which by its mass overpowers the pictures set in it. Compare, in any French church, the windows in which there is geometric mosaic and those in which there is scrollwork; and, though they may be all of the same period, and presumably the work of the same men, you will almost certainly have to marvel how artists who at one moment hold you spellbound by the magic of their colour can in the next disturb your eyesight with a glare of purple produced by the parody of a Scotch plaid. Many of these diapers are very minute in scale; the smaller the scale on which they are designed the greater the certainty of the colours running together.
83. S. Peter delivered from Prison, Lyons.
It is to the very small scale of the figures, also, that the confusion of effect in medallion subjects, in spite of their comparatively flat treatment, is to be attributed. At Bourges, at Canterbury, everywhere, the medallion subjects are on far too minute a scale to be made out by mortals of ordinary patience, or, to speak accurately, impatience. Often, even in windows which come close enough to the eye for study, it is only the more conventionally familiar pictures which explain themselves readily; and those you recognise almost by anticipation. You have no difficulty in deciphering the Nativity, the Crucifixion, the Ascension, and so on, because you expect to find them. A certain muddle of effect must be accepted as characteristic of medallion windows.
It is not to be wondered at, that, considering the difficulty of making out the ordinary medallion subjects in the lower windows, where they are usually found, some other scheme of composition should have been adopted for clerestory windows where those would have been more than ever unintelligible. Accordingly, in that position, the single figure treatment was adopted, and carried further than in the preceding century. The figure was now, not for the first time, but more invariably, enclosed in something like an architectural niche—a practice borrowed from the sculptor, who habitually protected the carved figures enriching the portals of great churches by a projecting canopy, giving them at the same time a pedestal or base of some kind to stand upon.
In glass there was clearly no occasion for such architectural shelter or support; but the pretended niche and base offered a means of occupying the whole length of the space within the border, which, without some additional ornament, would often have been too long in proportion to the figure, the mere band of inscription under its feet not being enough to fill out the length. These very rudimentary canopies, specimens of which are given here, are usually very insignificant. It takes sometimes an expert to realise that the broken colour about the head of the saint ([page 46]) stands for architecture. The forms, when you come to look at them closely, may be ugly as well as childish, but they go for so little that it seems hardly worth while to take exception to them. It is only as indication of a practice (later to be carried to absurd excess) of making shift with sham architecture for the ornamental setting necessary to bring the figure into relation and into proportion with the window it is to occupy, that the device of thus enshrining a figure as yet deserves attention. As the beginning of canopy work in glass it marks a very eventful departure in design. All that need here be said about the Early Gothic canopy is that it would have been easy to have devised decorative forms at once more frankly ornamental, more interesting in themselves, and more beautiful, not to say less suggestive of a child’s building with a box of bricks.