Christ purging the Temple172.Christ purging the Temple, Gouda.
It was unfortunate that at a critical period in the history of glass, just when great painters from the outside began to be called in to design for it, knowledge was in rather an uncertainstate. The use of enamel had been discovered; it offered undoubted facilities to the painter; it was believed in; it was the fashion. Any one who had protested the superiority of the old method would possibly have been set down as an old fogey, even by glass painters. At that moment, very likely, a glass painter, anxious of course to conciliate the great man, but flushed also with faith in his new-found method, would have said to Van Orley, in reply to any question about technique:—“Never you mind about glazing and all that; give us a design, and we will execute it in glass.” And he did execute it in a masterly and quite wonderful way. Still the success of it is less than it would have been had the designer known all about glass: in that case his artistic instinct would have led him surely to trust more to qualities inherent in glass, and less to painting upon it. Van Orley’s picture scheme depended too much upon relief to be really well adapted to glass, but it was splendidly monumental in design, and to that extent admirably decorative. Something of decorative restraint we find almost to the end in sixteenth century work; the picture had not yet emancipated itself entirely, and the pictorial ideal did not therefore necessarily go beyond what glass could do; in any case, it did not take quite a different direction.
It may be as well to define more precisely the ideal glass picture. The ideal glass picture is, the picture which gives full scope for the qualities of glass, and does not depend in any way upon effects which cannot be obtained in glass, or which are to be attained only at the sacrifice of qualities peculiar to it.
And what are those qualities? The qualities of glass are light and colour, a quality of light and a quality of colour to be obtained no other way than by the transmission of light through pot-metal glass.
Compare these qualities with those of oil painting, and see how far they are compatible. Something depends upon the conception of oil painting. The qualities of glass are compatible enough with the pictorial ideal of the oil (or more likely tempera) painters whom we designate by the name of “primitives”; and, indeed, fifteenth century Italian windows often take the form of circular pictures which one of the masters might have designed. A painting by Botticelli, Filippo Lippi, Mantegna, or Crivelli, might almost be put into the hands of a glass painter to translate. It is quite possible that some of theFlorentine windows were executed in Germany from paintings by Italian masters; the odd thing is that they are attributed sometimes to sculptors. Ghiberti and Donatello may, for all one knows, have been great colourists; but it is so universal a foible to ascribe works of decorative art to famous painters or sculptors who could never by any possibility have had a hand in them, that one never has much faith in such reputed authorship.
The severity of the “primitive” painters’ design, the firm outline, the comparatively flat treatment, the brilliant, not yet degraded, colour—all these were qualities which the glass painter could turn to account. Without firm and definite outline, of course, a design does not lend itself to mosaic. But it is especially the early painter’s ideal of colour which was so sympathetic to the glass painter. A designer for glass must be a colourist; but the colour he seeks issui generis. Not every colourist would make a glass designer. Van Thulden may not have been a colourist of his master’s stamp, but Peter Paul Rubens himself could not have made a complete success of those windows in the Chapel of Our Lady in S. Gudule. Reynolds was a colourist, but he came conspicuously to grief in glass. Velasquez was a colourist, but one fails to see how by any possibility the quality of his work could be expressed in glass.
On the other hand, colour in which the simple artist delighted, as in light and sunshine, in the sparkle of the sea, in the purity of the sky, in the brilliancy of flowers, in the flash of jewels, in the deep verdure of moss, in the lusciousness of fruit or wine, colour as the early Florentine painters saw it and sought it—this is what glass can give, and gives better than oil, tempera, or fresco, on an opaque surface. How far these early painters deliberately sacrificed to pure bright colour qualities of light and shade, aerial perspective, and so on, may be open to question. The certain thing is that, if we want the quality of glass in all its purity and translucency, we have to sacrifice to it something of the light and shade, the relief, the atmospheric effect, the subtlety of realistic colour, which we are accustomed nowadays to look for in a picture. Happy the men who could contentedly pursue their work undisturbed by the thought that there were effects to be obtained in art beyond what it was possible for them to get.
Even the Italian painters soon travelled beyond the limits of what could possibly be done in glass. Flesh-painting, as Titian understood it, or Correggio, or Bonifacio, is hopelessly beyond its range. But it was the Dutch who formed for themselves the idea most widely and hopelessly beyond realisation in glass. The Crabeths, like good glass painters, struggled more or less against it; but they could not keep out of the current altogether; and in proportion as their work aims at anything like chiaroscuro it loses its quality of glass. Rembrandt, to have realised his ideal in glass, would have had to paint out of it every quality which distinguishes it and gives it value. In proportion, as the painter’s aim was light and shade rather than colour, and especially as it was shade rather than light (or perhaps it would be fairer to say, as it was light intensified by obscuring light around it) it was diametrically opposed to that of the glass painter. His pursuit of it was a sort of artistic suicide. It led by quick and sure degrees to what was to all intents and purposes the collapse of glass painting. Realism of a kind was inevitable when once the painter gained the strength to realise what he saw, but when the glass painter, seeking the strength of actual light and shade, began to rely upon painted shadow for his effects, the case was hopeless. Glass asks to be translucent.
The point of perfection in glass design is not easily to be fixed. Glass painting, it must be confessed, as it approaches perfection of technique, is always dangerously near the border line; the painter is so often tempted to carry his handiwork a little further than is consistent with the translucency of glass. It happens, therefore, that one expects almost to find consummate drawing and painting marred by some obscuration of the glass. If on the other hand we travel back to the time when the evil does not exist, we find ourselves at a period when neither drawing nor painting were at their best. It is by no means surprising that this should be the outcome of the association of glazier and painter. According as one cares more for glass or for painting one will be disposed to shift, backwards or forwards, the date at which glass painting began to decline. It may safely be said, however, that pictorial glass painting was at its best during the first half of the sixteenth century. That is the period during which you may expect to find masterly drawing, consummate painting, and yet sufficientrecognition of the character of glass to satisfy all but the staunch partisan of pure mosaic glass—who, by the way, stands upon very firm ground.
In Flanders, as has been said, and in France, are to be found exquisite pictures in glass, admirably decorative in design, glowing with jewel-like brilliancy of colour, not seriously obscured by paint, the figures modelled with a delicacy reminding one rather of sculpture in very low relief than of more realistic painting and carving, the colour delicate and yet not thin, the effect strong without brutality.
But it is in Italy that are to be seen probably the finest glass pictures that have ever been painted; the work, nevertheless, of a Frenchman—William of Marseilles—who established himself at Arezzo, and painted, amongst other glass, five windows for the cathedral there, which go about as far as glass can go in the direction of picture. The man was a realist in his way—realist, that is, so far as suited his artistic purpose. Not merely are his figures studied obviously from the life, but they are conceived in the realistic spirit, as when, in the scene of the Baptism, he draws a man getting into his clothes with the difficulty we have all experienced after bathing, or when, in the Raising of Lazarus (page 397), he makes more than one onlooker hold his nose as the grave-clothes are unwrapped from the body. In design the artist is quite up to the high level of his day (1525 or thereabouts); but you see all through his work that it was colour, always colour, that made his heart beat (we have here nothing to do with the religious sentiment which may or may not be embodied in his work), colour that prompted his design, as in the case of so many a great Italian master.
This man possibly did in glass much whathewould have done on canvas; but he could never have got such pure, intense, and at the same time luminous, effects of colour in anything but glass, and he knew it, never lost sight of it, and tried to get the most out of what it could best give him—that is to say, purity of colour, and translucency and brilliancy of glass. Whatever amount of pigment he employed (probably more than it seems, the light is so strong in Italy) it seldom appears to do more than just give the needful modelling. Now and again, in the architectural parts of his composition, the white is lowered by means of a matt of paint,where a tint of deeper-coloured glass had better have been employed; but even there the effect is neither dirty nor in the least heavy. And in the main, for all his pictorial bias, the system of the artist is distinctly mosaic; his colour is pot-metal always or purest stain. The sky and the landscape, for example, in which the scene of the Baptism is laid, are leaded up in tints of blue and green. In the scene where Christ purges the Temple the pavement is of clear aquamarine-tinted glass, against which the scales, moneybags, overturned bench, and so on, stand out in quite full enough relief of red and yellow, without any aid of heavy shading, or cast shadow, such as a Netherlander would have used.
And, for all that, the difficulty even of foreshortening is boldly faced. Not even in the most violently shaded Flemish glass would it be easy to find a figure more successfully foreshortened than the kneeling money-changer, scooping up his money into a bag. That a designer could do this without strong shading, means that he was careful to choose the pose or point of view which allowed itself to be expressed in lightly painted glass. There is no riotous indulgence in perspective, but distance is sufficiently indicated; and the personages in the background, drawn to a smaller scale than the chief actors in the scene, keep their place in the picture. Everywhere it is apparent that the figures have been composed with a cunning eye to glazing.
These are not pictures which have been done into glass; they are no translations, but the creations of a glass painter—one who knew all about glass, and instinctively designed only what could be done in it, and best done. This man makes full use of all the resources of his art. His window is constructed as only a glazier could do it. He does not shirk his leads. He uses abrasion freely, not so much to save glazing, as to get effects not otherwise possible. Thus the deep red skirt or petticoat of the woman taken in adultery is dotted with white in a way that bespeaks at a glance the woman of the people, whilst more sumptuous draperies of red and green are, as it were, embroidered with gold, or sewn with pearls. These are the effects he aims at, not the mere texture of silk or velvet. He delights in delicate stain on white, and revels in most gorgeous stain upon stain. In short, these are pictures indeed, but the pictures of a glass painter.
Work like this disarms criticism. One may have a strong personal bias towards strictly mosaic glass, and yet acknowledge that success justifies departure from what one thought the likelier way. Things of beauty decline to be put away always in the nice little pigeon-holes we have carefully provided for them. Shall we be such pedants as to reject them because they do not fit in with our preconceived ideas of fitness?
Alas!—or happily?—alas for what might have been, happily for our wavering allegiance to sterner principles of design, it is seldom that the glass painter so perfectly tunes his work to the key of glass. In particular, he finds it difficult to harmonise his painting with the glazing which goes with it. He is incapable in the early sixteenth century of the brutalities of his successors, who carry harsh lines of lead across flesh painting recklessly; but the very association of ultra-delicate painting with lead lines at all demands infinite tact. An idea of the point to which painting is eventually carried may be gathered from the representation of little nude boys blowing bubbles in which are reflected the windows of the room where they are supposed to be playing. That is an extreme instance, and a late one. Short, however, of such frivolity, and in work of the good period, painting is often so delicate that bars and leads unquestionably hurt it. It is so even in the very fine Jesse window at Beauvais (page 368).
Occur where it may it is a false note which stops our admiration short; and, after all our enthusiasm, we come back heart-whole to our delight in the earlier, bolder, more monumental, and more workmanlike mosaic glass. The beautiful sixteenth century work at Montmorency or at Conches does not shake the conviction of the glass-lover, that the painter is there a little too much in evidence, that something of simple, dignified decoration is sacrificed to the display of his skill. The balance between glass decoration and picture is perhaps never more nearly adjusted than in some of the rather earlier Italian windows.
At once a distinguishing feature of picture-glass, and a characteristic of later work generally, is themise-en-scèneof the subject.
From The Entry into Jerusalem173.From The Entry into Jerusalem, Fairford.
In quite the earliest glass the figures, it was shown, were cut out against a ground of plain colour (pages 33,127), or diapered perhaps with a painted pattern, or leaded up in squares, or broken by spots of pot-metal (page 37), which, by the way, being usually of too strongly contrasting colour, assert themselves instead of qualifying its tone. Sometimes the ground was leaded up in the form of a more or less elaborate geometric diaper (page 336). Occasionally it was broken by the simplest possible conventional foliage. The figure stood on a cloud, an inscribed label, a disc or band of earth. In the fourteenth century spots breaking the ground took very often the form of badges,fleurs-de-lys, heraldic animals, cyphers, and so on (page 156), and even in the fifteenth it was quite common to find figures against a flat ground, broken only by inscription, either on white or yellow labels (pages 186,339), or leaded in bold letters of white or yellow into the background itself (page 196). But simultaneously with this the figure was frequently represented against a screen of damask (page 191), above which showed the further background, usually more or less architectural in character. In the Fairford windows (page 187) isshown this treatment together with the label which helps to break the formality of the horizontal line. Sometimes the line is curved, as though the figure stood in a semicircular niche, or broken, as though the recess were three-sided. Sometimes the figure stood upon a pedestal (page 391), but more usually, as time went on, upon a pavement. Certain subjects were bound to include accessory architecture, but at first it was as simple as the scenery in the immortal play ofPyramus and Thisbe. But even in the fifteenth century it was rendered, one may judge how naïvely, from the little Nativity onpage 54, a subject hardly to be rendered without the stable. Again, the quite conventional vinework, also from Malvern, shown in the upper part ofpage 345(a jumble of odds and ends), forms really part of the scene depicting Noah in his vineyard—see the hand holding the spade handle. The Fairford scenery (pages 251,372), quaint as it is, goes much nearer to realism than that; and towards the sixteenth century, and during its first years, there was a good deal of landscape in which trees were leaded in vivid green against blue, with gleaming white stems suggestive of birch-bark, always effective, and refreshingly cool in colour. There is something of that kind in the window facing the entrance to King’s College, Cambridge; but the more usual English practice in the fifteenth century was to execute the landscape in white and stain against a coloured ground. That is the system adopted in the scene of the Creation at Malvern (page 252), where trees, water, birds, fishes, are all very delicately painted and stained. In the left-hand corner it will be seen that solid or nearly solid brown is used for foliage in order to throw up the white and yellow leafage in front of it. There is some considerably later work very much in this manner at S. Nizier, Troyes. But that kind of thing was not usual in French glass.
From The Creation
174.From The Creation, Malvern Abbey.
The sky had of course from the first been indicated by a blue background; but, the blue ground being used, in alternation with ruby, for all backgrounds, except a few in white, it was not distinctive enough to suggest the heavens, without some indication of clouds, which accordingly were leaded up upon it, sometimes in mere streaks of colour, sometimes in fantastically ornamental shapes. It was a later thought, which came with the use of paler glass, to paint the blue with clouds, indicating them, that is to say, more or less in the formof diaper. As with the sky so with the sea. It was at first glazed in wave pattern; eventually the wave lines were painted on the blue.
The blue background, which had gradually become paler and paler, became soon in the sixteenth century pale enough to stand approximately for a grey-blue sky, on which was painted, with marvellous delicacy, distant landscape, architecture, or what not, always in the brown tint used generally for shading, although a tint of green was given to grass and trees by the use of yellow stain. This distant view painted upon blue was a beautiful and most characteristic feature of sixteenth century glass. The French painters adopted it, and made it peculiarly their own, though it occurs also in German and Flemish glass. Backgrounds of this kind, which in themselves suffice to mark the departure from Gothic use, are shown onpages 207,213, and on a larger scaleopposite. The wintry landscape there with the bare tree trunks against the cold grey sky, forms the upper portion of the subject shown onpage 207, in which Our Lord gives His charge to Peter; the paler grey behind the heads of the group stands for the sea. The wintry effect of the scene is not suggestive of the Holy Land, but it brings the subject innocently home to us. The leads, it will be seen, take the lines of the larger limbs of the trees, whilst the lesser branches and small twigs are painted on the glass. There is ingenuity in the glazing as well as delicacy in the painting. This is a very different thing from the landscape painted in enamel colours. The propriety, the beauty, the decorative quality of such work as this, comes of the acceptance of the necessary convention of treating the painted background, of rendering it, that is, always more or less in monochrome, and not attempting anything like realism in colour.
The painted landscapes illustrated are of the simplest. The French painters went much further than that, associating with their painting broad masses of pot-metal colour, but still keeping distinctly within the convention of deliberately simple colour. By the use of silvery-white and shades of pot-metal blue and purple and green, they produced the most pleasing and harmonious effects. There was no great variety in the tune they played, but the variations upon it were infinite. Let us picture here a few of them.
1.Ecouen.—A distant city, in white, and beyond that more distant architecture, painted on the pale blue of the sky.
2.Conches.—Against a pale blue sky, broken by cumulous white clouds, a grey-blue tower.
3.Conches.—A grey-blue sea and deeper sky beyond: from the waves rises a castle, in white, breaking the sky-line, the pointed roofs of its turrets painted in black upon the background.
Background to the Charge of S. Peter175.Background to the Charge of S. Peter, S. Vincent, Rouen. (Comp. 156.)
4.Freiburg, 1528.—A smoke-grey sea, fading away towards the horizon into pale silver, the sky beyond dark blue, its outline broken by a range of deeper blue mountains.
5.Conches.—Beyond the foreground landscape in rich green, a pale blue sea, with slightly deeper grey-blue sky beyond,a tower in darker blue against it; a strip of deep blue shore divides the sky and sea, and gives support to the dark tower; against that a smaller tower catches the light, and stands out in glittering white.
6.Montmorency.—A canopied figure subject in gorgeous colour; the foreground a landscape with rich green herbage, separated by a belt of white cliffs from buildings of pale grey, amidst trees stained greenish, backed by purple hills; further a pale blue sky; against the sky, overshadowed beneath the canopy arch by a mass of purple cloud, the stained and painted foliage of a tree, growing from this side the hill.
7.Montmorency.—S. Christopher crossing the stream; blue water painted with waves and water plants, the foliage stained.
8.S. Nizier, Troyes.—A vineyard, very prettily managed; the vines painted on the blue, their leaves stained to green, the grapes grey-blue, whilst grey stakes are leaded in pot-metal.
Sometimes, as at Ecouen, far-off architecture would be painted not upon blue but upon a pale purple hill. At Laigle figures and animals are painted upon green, but they do not hold their own. On the other hand, at Alençon, some distant figures appearing in very pale grey against a delicate greenish landscape (stained upon the grey), are charming in effect.
White backgrounds painted as delicately as the blue are not rare. At Groslay, for example, steely-white architecture is separated from white sky beyond by grey-blue hills, a church with blue steeple breaking the sky. But white does not lend itself so readily to combination with colour as blue; and, as a rule, such backgrounds are grisaille in character, relieved, of course, with stain.
The great sea-scape at Gouda (page 223), representing the taking of Dalmatia in Egypt (a very Dutch Dalmatia), is nearly all in grisaille, against quarries of clear white, with only a little stain in the flags and costumes, and one single touch of poor ruby (about two inches square), which looks as if it might be modern. The port in perspective, the ships, the whole scene, in fact, is realistically rendered, and comes as near to success as is possible in glass.
Delightful peeps of landscape are sometimes seen through the columns and arches of an architectural background. Whether the architecture be in purple of divers shades, or in white with only shadows in purple, or whether the nearer architecture be in white and the more distant in purple, in any case a distance beyond is commonly painted upon the grey-blue sky seen through it. Possibly, as at Conches, further vistas of architecture may be stained greenish upon it—any colour almost, for a change. But whatever it may be, and wherever it may be, in the best work it is colour; and it is always more effective than where the shadow is represented by paint, even though the brown be not laid on with a heavy hand, infinitely more effective than when blue or other coloured enamels are relied upon, as in some instances at Montmorency. Enamel may, for all one can tell, have been used in some of the landscapes here commended—it is impossible to say without minute examination of the glass, which is rarely feasible—but it never asserts its presence; and in any case it has not been used in sufficient quantity to damage the effect.
It will be gathered from the descriptions of early sixteenth century glazed and painted distances, that they were as carefully schemed with a view to glazing (though in a very different way) as a Gothic picture. Sometimes, as at Conches, they are rather elaborately leaded; and where that is the case there is not so much danger of incongruity between the delicacy of the painting and the strength of the leads—which assert themselves less than where they occur singly. It stands to reason also that the more mosaic the glass the less fragile it is. Painting alone upon the blue is best employed for small peeps of distance. It adapts itself to smaller windows; and it must be done (as for a while it was done) so well, that it seems as if the designer must himself have painted it. Were the artist always the glass painter, and the glass painter always an artist, who knows what case pictorial glass might not make out for itself?
The Relief of Leyden176.The Relief of Leyden, Gouda.
It is a coarser kind of distance than the French that we find at King’s College, Cambridge. There the landscape backgrounds are in white and stain, grey-blue being reserved for the sky beyond, broken more or less by white clouds, or, occasionally, by the white trunks of trees, the foliage of which is sometimes glazed in green glass, sometimes painted upon the blue and stained. Here and there a distant tree is painted entirely upon the blue. This treatment is not ill adapted to subjects on the large scale of the work at King’s College, but one does not feel that the painters made anything like the most of their opportunity. The inexperience of thedesigners is shown in their fear of using leads, a most unnecessary fear, seeing that, at the distance the work is from the eye, the bars themselves have only about the value of ordinary lead lines.
Stronger and more workmanlike, but not quite satisfactory, is the much later landscape (1557) of Dirk Crabeth at Gouda. There the sky is blue, leaded in quarries, on which are trees, painted and stained, and some rather florid clouds. In the later work generally the lead lines are no longer either frankly acknowledged or skilfully disguised. The outline of a green hill against the sky will be feebly softened with trivial little twigs and scraps of painted leafage. The decline of landscape is amply illustrated at Troyes. At Antwerp again there is a window bearing date 1626, in which the landscape background of a quite incomprehensible subject extends to a distant horizon, above which the sky is glazed in white quarries, with clouds painted upon it. This is an attempt to repeat the famous feat of glass painting which had been done some twenty years before at Gouda. The Relief of Leyden, of which a diagram is here given, is in its way a most remarkable glass picture. In the foreground is a crowd of soldiers and citizens, upon the quay, about lifesize. They form a band of rich colour at the base of the composition; but the design is confused by the introduction of shields of arms and their supporters immediately in front of the scene. Beyond are the walls and towers of the city of Delft, and the adjacent towns and villages, and the river dwindling into the far distance where Leyden lies—in the glass a really marvellous bird’s-eye view over characteristically flat country. The horizon extends almost to the springing line of the window arch, and above that rises a sky of plain blue quarries, broken onlytowards the top by a few bolster-like and rather dirty white clouds. Absolute realism is of course not reached, but it is approached near enough to startle us into admiration. It is astonishing what has here been done. But the painter has not done what he meant to do. That was not possible, even with the aid of enamel.
In the course of the preceding chapters the reader has been rather unceremoniously carried from country to country, in a way which may have seemed to him erratic. But there was a reason in the zig-zag course taken. The progress of the glass painter’s art was not by any means a straight line. Nor did it develop itself on parallel lines in the various countries in which it throve. It advanced in one place whilst it was almost at a standstill in another.
That is easily understood. It was inevitable that glass painting, though it arose in France, should languish there during the troublous times when English troops overran it under Edward III. and throughout the Hundred Years’ War, that it should revive in all its glory under Francis the First, and that during the disturbances of the Fronde it should again decline. The extremity of France was England’s opportunity; and our greatest wealth of stained glass windows dates from the reign of the later Plantagenets. The Wars of the Roses do not appear greatly to have affected art; but after the Reformation we were more busy smashing glass than painting it.
In Germany the course of art ran smoother. Glass throve under the Holy Roman Empire, and it was not until the Reformation that it suffered any very severe check. Mediæval Swiss glass may be classed with German.
In the Netherlands glass painting blossomed out suddenly under the Imperial favour of Charles V. It continued to bear fruit under the Dutch Republic, until it ran to seed at the end of the seventeenth century.
So it happens that, in following the development of glass painting, it has been necessary to seek the best and most characteristic illustrations first in one country and then in another, to travel from France to England, from England to Germany and back to France, thence to Flanders, to Franceagain, and finally once more to the Netherlands, to say nothing of shorter excursions from one place to another, as occasion might demand. In each separate locality there was naturally some sort of progress, but we cannot take any one country as all-sufficient type of the rest; and to have traversed each in turn would have been tedious. There were everywhere differences of practice and design; in each country, for that matter, there were local schools with marked characteristics of their own. Some of the characteristic national differences have been pointed out in passing. To describe them at length would be to write a comparative history of glass, of which there is here no thought. What concerns us is the broadly marked progress of glass painting, not the minor local differences in style.
Something more, however, remains to be said of Italian glass than was possible in any general survey. The mere facts, that the Renaissance arose in Italy so long before it reached this side the Alps, and that glass painting was never really quite at home in Italy (any more than the Gothic architecture which mothered it), sufficiently account for the difficulty, nay, the impossibility, of classing it according to the Gothic periods. Indeed, one is reminded in Italian glass less often of other windows of the period, English, French, or German, than of contemporary Italian painting.
The comparative fitness of the works of the “Primitive” painters for models of glass design has already been pointed out. It is so evident that the Italian sense of colour could find more adequate expression than ever in glass, that one is inclined to wonder, until it is remembered that Italian churches were at the same time picture galleries, that it did not more commonly find vent in that medium. Even as it is, Italian painters did found a school of glass painting, comparatively uninfluenced by the traditional Gothic types of design, whilst observing the best traditions of glazier-like technique. Hence it is that we find in Italy windows such as are nowhere else to be seen, windows which at their best are of the very best.
There are resemblances in Italian glass to German work; and some of it is said to have been executed by Germans. It is none the less Italian. Though it were executed in Germany, glazier and painter must have worked under the direct influence of the Italian master, and in complete accordwith him, putting at his service all their experience in their craft, and all their skill. So well did they work together, that it seems more likely that the executant not only worked under the eye of the master, but was at his elbow whilst he designed. That alone would account satisfactorily for the absolutely harmonious co-operation of designer and glass-worker. One thing is clear, that the artist, whatever his experience in glass, great or little, had absolute sympathy with his new material, felt what it could do, saw the opportunities it offered him, and seized them.
An Englishman, or a Frenchman, who found himself for the first time in Italy, would be puzzled to give a date to the windows at Pisa or Milan, or in either of the churches of S. Francis at Assisi. Even an expert in the glass of other countries has to speak guardedly as to Italian work, or he may have to retract his words. Italian Gothic is so Italian and so little Gothic, it is of no use attempting to compare it with Northern work. To those, moreover, who have been in the habit of associating the Renaissance with the sixteenth century, the forms of Quattro-Cento ornament will persist at first in suggesting the later date—just as the first time one goes to Germany the survival of the old form of lettering in inscriptions throws a suspicion of lingering Gothic influence over even full-blown Renaissance design. It takes some time to get over the perplexity arising from the unaccustomed association of an absolutely mosaic treatment of glass (which with us would mean emphatically Gothic work) with distinctly Renaissance detail, such as one finds at the churches already mentioned, at the Certosa of Pavia, or at Florence.
At Assisi the glass means, for the most part, to be Gothic. One is reminded there sometimes of German work, both by the colour of the glass and by the design of some of the medallion and other windows. The ornament generally inclines to the naturalistic rather than to the Quattro-Cento arabesque, or to the geometric kind shown onpage 96; and though it includes a fair amount of interlacing handwork of distinctly Italian type, and is sometimes as deep in colour as quite Early glass, it is approximately Decorated in character. That is so equally with the brilliant remains in the tracery lights of Or San Michele at Florence. But it is characteristic of Italian glass of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that, both by thedepth of its colour and the very quality of the material, it should continually recall the thirteenth century. Sometimes, as at Milan, for example, you find even sixteenth century glass in which there is practically no white at all except what is used for the flesh tint.
In the cathedral at Pisa are some windows with little subjects, framed in ornament, all in richest and most brilliant colour, which are at first sight extremely perplexing. The leading is elaborately minute, and there is no modelling in the figures, which yet have nothing of archaic or very early character. It turns out that the paint upon the glass has perished, and there is hardly a vestige of it left to show that this was not intended for mere mosaic. The effect, nevertheless, is such as to prove how much can be done in pot-metal glass, and how little it depends upon the painting on it.
Assisi177.Assisi.
Elsewhere, as at Arezzo (in work earlier than that of William of Marseilles), the paint has often peeled off to a very considerable extent, revealing sometimes patches of quite crude green and purple, which go to show that the Italians habitually used glass of a raw colour, where it suited their convenience, and just toned it down with brown enamel. The result proves that it was a dangerous practice; but, where the paint has held, the effect is not dull or dirty, as with us it would be. The Italian sun accounts probably both for the use of this scum of paint and for its not injuring the effect of colour.
The same quality of deep rich pot-metal colour associated with Renaissance design, is the first thing that strikes one in the windows at Bologna, in the cathedral at Milan, and in Florence everywhere. At Milan in particular there are compositions, in which blue and red predominate, magnificently rich and deep, in spite of recent cleaning. The cunning way in which green is occasionally used to prevent any flowing together of red and blue into purple, is a lesson in colour. Two schemes of design prevail in the nave windows (the old glass in the choir is so mixed up with new that it does not count), both equally simple. In the one the rectangular divisions formed by the mullions and the stouter bars areaccepted, without further framing, as separate picture spaces; in the other the main form of the window is taken as frame to a single picture, the mullions being only so far taken into account that the prominent figures are designed within them. Some of these windows are late enough in the century to show a falling off in treatment. In the Apostle window (attributed to Michel Angelo?) the white glass is all reduced to a granular tint of umber; and in the one illustrating the Life of the Virgin there is a most aggressively foreshortened figure, which may have been effective in the cartoon, but is absurd in the glass. It is not, therefore, at Milan that typically Italian glass is best to be studied, though there is enough of it to startle the student of glass whose experience had not hitherto extended so far as Italy. Neither is Italian glass at its best at Bologna, though the city was noted for glass painting, which was practised there by no less a person than the Blessed James of Ulm. But, truth to tell, the best windows at Bologna (they are most of them fairly good) are not those of the Saint but of Pellegrino Tibaldi and Lorenzo Costa. It is at Florence that the distinctive quality of Italian glass is best appreciated. There is a vast quantity of it, varying in date from the early part of the fifteenth to the latter part of the sixteenth century, but it is uniformly Italian, and, with few exceptions, it is extremely good.
Figures under canopies are of common occurrence in Florentine windows; but the canopies differ in several respects, both from the ordinary Gothic canopy and from the shrine-like structure of the later Renaissance. In the first place, the canopy returns in Italy to its primitive dimensions. It may or may not be architecturally interesting, but there is in no case very much of it. The Italians never went canopy-mad; and they kept the framework of their pictures within moderate dimensions. The Italian canopy of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, then, was just a niche, sometimes of Renaissance design, sometimes affecting a more Gothic form with pointed or cusped arch and so on, under which, or in front of which, the figures stood. It bore definite relation to the figures, and it was neither impossible of construction nor absurd in perspective. Occasionally, in later work, as at the Certosa at Pavia, it was delicate in colour, but, as a rule, it was strong and rich. It was not merely that the shadowed portions were glazed in pot-metal, as when, at Santa Croce, the coffered soffits of thearches are one mosaic of jewellery, but that the canopy throughout was in colour.
S. Maria Novella
178.S. Maria Novella, Florence.
That is the most striking characteristic of Italian canopy work, and indeed of other ornamental setting—that it is as rich as the picture, a part of it, not a frame to it. Constructionally, of course, it is a frame; but the colour does away with the effect of framework. It serves rather to connect the patches of contrasting colour in the figures, than to separate one picture from another. Occasionally this results in too much all-overishness, more commonly it results in breadth, making you feel that the window is one. It was explained what use was made of white canopy work in Gothic glass, judiciously to break up the surface of the window. In Italy the surface is judiciously left unbroken, and in that case also the result is most admirable.
Florence179.Florence.
With the exception of an occasional brassy yellow canopy, recalling German colour, the same system of connecting canopy and subject together by colour is adopted alike at S. Croce, at S. Maria Novella, and at the Duomo at Florence. The composition of the windows is simple: within a border of foliage or other ornament, two or three tiers of figures, under modest canopies, separated perhaps by little medallions containing busts or demi-figures. That occurs at S. Domenico, Perugia, as well as at Florence.
A modification of the canopy occurs in the navewindows of the Duomo. The space within a narrow border which frames the broad lancet, is divided into two by a strong upright bar, and the divisions thus formed are treated as separate trefoil-arched lancets, each with another border of its own, the space above being treated much as though it were tracery. (Something like this occurs, it will be remembered, already in the thirteenth century, at Bourges.) In the tall spaces within the borders are the usual tiers of figures under canopies. Again, in the chapel of the Certosa in Val d’Ema, near Florence, there is a window with double-niched canopies and pronounced central shaft dividing the broad lancet into two narrow ones.
The Italian canopy is not of so stereotyped a character as in Decorated or Perpendicular design; and generally it may be said that there is, both in the design and colour of Italian glass, more variety than one finds out of Italy. The plan is less obvious, the scheme less cut and dried; you know much less what to expect than in Northern Gothic, and enjoy more often the pleasure of surprise.