In a remarkable window in the choir of Chartres Cathedral ([page 150]) the design includes interlacing bands both of white and colour, the coloured ones flanked with strips of white; but the white bands are not glazed separately. They are throughout included in the same piece of glass as the cross-hatching, which defines them. This ingenious and very graceful pattern window is still of the thirteenth century, though clearly of much later date than, for example, the windows of S. Jean-aux-Bois, which might indeed almost belong to the twelfth.
99. Clerestory, Reims.
In several of the Salisbury windows ([pages 148], [386]) thin straps of colour are bounded on the outer side by broader bands of white painted with pattern. And here it should be noticed the bands no longer interlace at all; on the contrary, the ornamental forms are superposed one upon the other. This is very markedly the case on [page 148]. In the centre of the light is a series of circular discs, and at the sides of these a row of zigzags, which, as it were, disappear behind them, whilst at the edges of the window, again, is an array of segments of smaller circles losing themselves behind these. In such cases, it will be seen, the broad white bands fulfil the very useful purpose of keeping the coloured lines apart, and separating one series of shapes from the other. In this window, as in the narrow light on [page 386], where the vesica shape is occupied once more with flowing scrollwork, and as in all but one of the windows on that page, the background of cross-hatching is for the first time omitted, and the pencilled pattern is by so much the less effective. As a rule, patterns traced in mere outline like this belong to a later date; but these windows are certainly of the thirteenth century. It is seldom safe to say that this or that practice belonged exclusively to any one period. The white glass on [page 335], almost entirely without paint, might have been executed in the twelfth century, but its border indicates more likely the latter part of the thirteenth. Quite the simplest form of glazing was to lead the glass together in squares or diamonds. These “quarries,” as they are called (from the French carré) are associated sometimes with rosettes and bands of other pattern work, as at Lincoln ([pages 284], [287]); but more ordinarily the ornamental part of the window is made up entirely of them. “Quarry” is a term to be remembered. It plays in the next century an important part in the design of windows.
100. S. Jean-aux-Bois.
