159. S. GEORGE’S, HANOVER SQUARE, LONDON.
The most important series of Renaissance windows in this country is in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. “Indentures” still remain to tell us that these were contracted for in 1516 and 1526. Apart from some strikingly English-looking figures in white and stain upon quarry backgrounds in a side chapel, and other remains of similar character, and from a very beautiful window almost opposite the door by which one enters—differing in type, in scale, in colour, altogether from the other windows—the glass throughout the huge chapel was obviously planned at the time of the first contract, and there is a certain symmetry of arrangement throughout which bespeaks the period of transition. The windows consist each of two tiers of five lights. A five-light window offers some difficulty to the designer if he desire (as in the sixteenth century he naturally did) to introduce subjects extending across more than one light. A subject in two lights does not symmetrically balance with a subject in three. He might carry his subject right across the window, but that might give him very likely a larger space to fill than he wanted; and besides, the time was hardly come for him to think of that. He might carry it across the central group of three; but that would leave him a single light on each side to dispose of. Remains the idea of a subject in two lights at each side of the window, and a central composition occupying only one light. That was not a very usual plan, although it was adopted, at Fairford for example, where the side subjects in two lights under a canopy are effectually separated by a central subject which has none. At King’s the sidelights have no canopies further than such as may be accepted as part of the architecture proper to the subject, schemed more or less to frame the picture (as in the case of the window at Montmorency, [page 213]); it is only in the centre lights that the figures (two in each light, one above the other) are enclosed in canopy work. These figures (described as “messengers”), with elaborately flowing scrolls about them inscribed with texts of Scripture, are many of them quite Gothic in character, even though they have Renaissance canopies over them. The designs of these mostly do duty many times over, as if this merely decorative or descriptive work were not of much account; and the same figure occurs, here well painted, there ill done, or painted perhaps in a late, loose way, quite out of keeping with the drawing: there is no sort of sequence in them. The notion of these intermediate figures, at once distinguishing the subjects one from the other, and throwing light upon their meaning, is good. But in effect it fails of its object, thanks to the independent spirit of the later painters, who thought more of their pictures than of architectural restraint.
160. THE STORY OF PSYCHE, CHANTILLY.
“Photo-Tint” by James Akerman, London, W. C.
The subjects on each side of the window are very large in scale, very pictorially and very freely treated, very finely designed at times, and very splendid in effect; but they are most unequal, and they are all more or less of a tangle. Their confusion is the greater inasmuch as there is no attempt to balance one picture with another. A landscape background on one side of the window answers to an architectural background on the other. On one side the interest of the subject is towards the top of the lights, on the other to the bottom, and so on. Either subject or both may be so merged with the “messengers” that a casual observer would hardly be aware of the existence of such personages.
All this makes it difficult to trace the subject; and yet the windows are in a certain pictorial way the more effective. In fact the unity of the window has been preserved: the white landscape on one side, and the white architecture on the other, make equally a setting for the colour, and form, with the “messengers” and their little canopies, one framing, not several frames. Right or wrong, the artist has done what he meant to do, and done it oftentimes very cleverly, though not with uniform success. The inequality spoken of is not only in workmanship but in design. Some of these pictures have characteristics, such as the needless evasion of leading, which one associates rather with quite the end of the century than with anything like the date of the second contract: possibly the execution of the work extended over a longer period of time than is generally supposed. However that may be, the windows generally, remarkable as they are, are not markedly enough of a period to serve as an object lesson in glass design. They are neither quite late enough to illustrate the decline of art, nor workmanlike enough to show the culmination of sixteenth century design—painter-like and pictorial, but in which the designer knew how to make the most of the glass in which it was to be wrought.
That is best seen in some of the French and Flemish work above referred to, in the work, for example, at Ecouen and Montmorency, so fully illustrated in Monsieur Magne’s most admirable monograph. The figure, for example, of William of Montmorency ([page 66]), the father of the great Anne, might serve for a votive picture of the period; but it is designed, nevertheless, as only a man careful of the conditions under which glass painting was done could design. Careful of conditions! That is just what the designers of the King’s College glass were not, or not enough. And so begins the end.