Round Glass
199.Round Glass, Roundels, or Bull’s-Eyes.“Photo-Tint” by James Akerman, London, W. C.
The occasional endeavours to get stronger and bolder effects in quarry work were not very successful. At Evreux and at Rouen there are some late quarries painted more after the fashion of bold mosaic diaper; but the effect, though satisfactory enough, is not such as to convince one that that is the better way.
Heraldic Glass
200.Heraldic Glass.
To heraldry, and especially to shields of arms surrounded by mantling (page 293), quarries form an excellent background, but only in the event of there being enough of them left free to show that it is a quarry window upon which the heraldry is imposed, or rather into which it is inlaid. Odds and ends of quarries want to be accounted for, as forming the continuation of the glass above and below. In the case of a window not a quarry window, it is a mistake to break up the background, as was sometimes done, into quarries, or rather into fragments of quarries. The object of the square or diamond shape is to break up a plain surface. If the ground is naturally broken up by figures, foliage, mantling, or what not, why introduce further quarry lines? They are not in themselves interesting. Their great value is in that they give scale to a window; but that is only on condition that they are seen in their entirety.
Quarry from Chetwode Church201.Quarry from Chetwode Church.
In Germany the place of quarries was supplied by roundels (page 292) unpainted. What applies to quarries applies in many respects to them; and they have a brilliancy whichflat glass has not. They were usually enclosed in painted borders of white and stain, and have a very delicate and pearly effect; but where (as at S. Peter’s, at Cologne) they occur in great quantity as compared with coloured subjects, these appear to be floating rather uncomfortably in their midst. The Italians, who also used roundels in place of quarries, often let colour into the interstices between them, and also little painted squares or pateræ of white and stain. In the sham windows decorating the Sistine Chapel at Rome, separating Botticelli’s series of Popes, the pointed spaces between the rounds are coloured diagonally in successive rows of red, yellow, and green; but the result is most pleasing where, as at Verona and elsewhere, the little triangular spaces are neither of one tint nor yet symmetrically arranged, but distributed in a quasi-accidental and unexpected way. Sometimes it was the little pateræ that was in colour and the rest white. In any case, the effect is refined, as it is at Arezzo also, where the monotony of roundels, in sundry clerestory windows, is broken by figure medallions and other featuresin white and colour. The adaptation of roundels to the circular shape is shown in the portion of a round window from Santa Maria Novella. What more remains to be said about roundels and quarry windows is reserved for the chapter on “Domestic Glass.”
Window in the Certosa
202.Window in the Certosa in Val D’ema, Florence.
It is customary to draw a distinction between “Ecclesiastical” and “Domestic” glass.
In mediæval days the Church was the patron of art; and, when kings and corporations commissioned stained glass windows, it was usually to present them to Mother Church. It is in churches, then, that the greater part of the old glass remains to us, iconoclastic mania notwithstanding; and it is only there that the course of glass painting can be traced. Once in a while, as at S. Mary’s Hall, Coventry, one comes upon a great window designed to decorate a civic building; but the whiles are few and far between. When such windows do occur they prove not to differ widely from more familiar church work.
What, then, is the difference between the two kinds of glass? It is not that the one is ecclesiastical the other secular, the one religious the other profane art. “Sacred Art” is a term consecrated by use; but, strictly speaking, it is a meaningless combination of words, signifying, if it signify anything, that the speaker confounds the art of telling with the thing told. Art has no more a religion than it has a country. No doubt there clings always to the art of the devout believer some fervour of faith, as there may hang about the sceptic’s doing a chill of doubt. The historian will enrich his glass with story, the preacher will convey in it a dogma. Poet or proser, philosopher or fool, may each in turn peep out of the window. Youth will everywhere betray its ardour, manhood its vigour, age its experience. A live man cannot help but put himself into his work. But none of that is art. His art is in the way he expresses himself, not in what he says; and there is no more religion in his glass painting than in his handwriting, though the graphologist may read in it his character.
The difference between church glass and domestic arises, speaking from the point of view of art, solely from architectural conditions. In so far as they are both glass, the samemethods of glazing and painting apply to both. It is only in so far as the position and purpose of the two are different, that they call for different treatment in design. The treatment suitable to a great hall does not materially differ from that adapted to a church; the same breadth of design, the same largeness of execution, are required; what suits a cloister would suit a passage. When, however, it comes to the windows of dwelling-rooms, the scheme and execution appropriate even to the smallest chapels of a church, would most likely be out of place. The distinction is very much as that between wall decoration in fresco and cabinet paintings in oil- or water-colour.
In the house there is less need than in the church for severity, and more for liveliness, less occasion for breadth, and more for delicacy. The scale of the dwelling-room itself justifies, perhaps demands, a smaller treatment. Here, if anywhere, is opportunity for that preciousness of execution which, in work of more monumental character, it seems a pity to expend upon so frail a substance as glass—frailer than ever when it was the thin white glass employed for window panes. For, so far from the glazier of the sixteenth or seventeenth century imagining, as we mostly do, that it was any part of the purpose of domestic glass to shut out the view—less need in those days!—he employed in most cases a material which was not merely translucent but absolutely transparent.
This use of transparent glass marks a distinction, and forms something of a new departure. It was employed to some extent in Renaissance church work; but there it was more as a background to the stained glass window than as a part of it. Here the transparent glass is the window; and the design, whether in pot-metal or in enamel, shows more or less against the clear.
The relationship of certain seventeenth century windows at Antwerp to the Italian windows onpages 295,299,352, is obvious. They may be quite possibly founded upon them. There is the same arrangement of subjects in cartouches, set in geometric glazing of clear glass. But in the Italian windows one kind of glass is used throughout (the little pieces of thin pot-metal colour in the cartouches, and so on, scarcely count); and the proportion of the painted work to clear glass is so schemed that, although you may feel that the plain work wants just a touch of enrichment to bring it all together, youare not asked deliberately to imagine yourself to be looking through, beyond the painting, into space.
Italian Grisaille
203.Italian Grisaille, Florence.“Photo-Tint” by James Akerman, London, W. C.
The detail in these windows from the Certosa in Val d’Ema, near Florence, is all outlined and painted in brown upon clear white glass, the flesh warmer in tint than the rest; the high lights are brushed out of a matt tint, and some pale stain is washed in. The artful thing about the design is, the cunning way in which the borders are planned, so as to avoid the absolute parallelism of marginal lines. For the rest the design is rather characteristically Late Renaissance, though the relation of border to cartouche, and of both together to clear glass, is better than usual. It will be noted that these are not strictly domestic windows; but they are designed to be seen about on a level with the eye, and from a distance of not more than ten feet, which is as far as the width of the cloister allows one to get away from them.
They fulfil, therefore, altogether very much the conditions which apply generally to domestic glass, and may be taken, if not as types of domestic work, at least as something on the way from the church to the house. This, though the common type of Italian Renaissance grisaille, was not invariable. At S. Frediano, Lucca, for example, there is a white window, which, except for a little medallion in its centre, might at a glance almost pass for thirteenth century work: the Cinque-Cento scroll is so rendered, with cross-hatched ground and all, as to suggest the early mediæval craftsman; it is centuries away from Da Udine in style.
Certosa in Val d’Ema.204.Certosa in Val d’Ema.
The domestic quarry window differed, in mediæval work, in no respect from church work. In the sixteenth century it took rather a new form. It consisted no longer of a more or less diaper-like all-over pattern, but of a panel, designed to be glazed in quarries. Here, again, is an approximationto the seventeenth century practice of leading up pictures in rectangular panes, but only an approximation. There is this important difference, that the quarry window starts from the lead lines, and is religiously designed within them.
Thus to accept, the simple square and obviously fit lines of quarry glazing, and to expend his art in painting upon them, simplifies the task of the glass painter; and he very frequently fell back upon that plan, more readily perhaps when he happened to know more about painting than about glazing. That was Da Udine’s case, who is credited with the design of the windows in the Laurentian library at Florence, as of those at the Certosa in Val d’Ema. They bear a date some few years after his death; but they are so like what he certainly would have done that, directly or indirectly, the design is clearly due to him. The one illustrated onpage 298is quite one of the best of these windows; in the others the ornament is even less coherent. The characteristic arabesque is painted in brown enamel, with redder enamel for the flesh tints, some yellow stain, and a little blue enamel in the heraldic lozenge, all upon clear white glass. The effect is delicate and silvery and no appreciable amount of light is excluded (a point usually of some importance in domestic work); but, though the main forms are designed within the lead lines, one feels that these have not been considered enough, that the leads compete with the painting, and that the bars, in particular, which are far thicker than need be, and occur with unnecessary frequency (in fact, at every horizontal quarry joint but one), very seriously mar the effect of delicate painting. That is as much as to say that the design, graceful and fanciful as it is, does not fulfil the conditions of quarry glass.
It is not enough for complete success in this form of window that the quarry lines shall be the basis of the design; the painting also must be strong enough to hold its own against leads and bars. That is hardly the case with the exceptionally delicate ornament in the Dutch glassopposite. But here, notwithstanding that the scroll is slighter than the Italian work and more delicately painted, the central patch of enamel colour in the shield and mantling does, to some extent, focus the attention there, and so withdraw the eye from the lead lines. The window is not merely cleverly designed; it is a frank, straightforward, manly piece of work, marred only by the comparative heaviness of the leads. The truth is that a glasspainter becomes so used to lead lines, and gets to take them so much for granted, that they do not offend him; and he is apt to forget how obtrusive they may appear in the eyes of the unaccustomed. Hence his sometimes seemingly brutal treatment of tenderly painted ornament.
Dutch Quarry Window
205.Dutch Quarry Window, S. K. Museum.
Other good examples of Dutch domestic glass, not quite so good as this, but painted with admirable directness, are to be found at theMusée des Antiquitésat Brussels. At the Louvre also the Dutch work is good. There are two lights there in which cartouches enclosing small oval subjects (fables) spread over the greater part of the quarry glazing, leaving only the lowermost of them comparatively empty. On these are painted butterflies, a dragon-fly, even a gad-fly, almost to the life. These flies upon the window pane, like the little miniature figures in the bottom corner quarries onpage 301, are trivial enough in idea; but the idea is cleverly and daintily expressed; and one does not expect much else than triviality in seventeenth century design. Moreover, in the privacy of domestic life it is permitted to be trivial.
For dignity of treatment it would be difficult to match the specimen of Flemish glass shown onpage 304, now at Warwick Castle. Like the Dutch and Italian work, it is painted on clear glass but without the prettiness of flesh tint, and the background to the ornament (it shows dull grey in the print) is brilliant yellow stain. This little light and its companion onpage 98are as large in style as they are beautiful in effect.
There is a gayer touch in the less seriously decorative panel of French work in the Louvre given onpage 307. In that pot-metal is used for the dark ruby of the outer dress, and for the little bits of blue rather cunningly let into the spandrils of the arch. The fancifully designed canopy, the arabesque, and a portion of the drapery are in stain, all delicately painted upon clear glass, and glazed mainly on quarry lines—from which, however, the designer saw fit to depart. What he meant by the unfortunate circular lead line about the head is difficult to imagine. It can hardly be, like other erratic leading, the result of mending. No fracture could possibly have steered so carefully between the figure and the ornament. It looks almost as if at the last he had lost confidence in his technique, and, in trying vainly to avoid lead lines, had ended in giving them extraordinary emphasis.
Grisaille
206.Grisaille, Warwick Castle.“Photo-Tint” by James Akerman, London, W. C.
In ultra-delicate domestic work the leads are more thanever the difficulty. One is uncomfortably conscious of them in the wonderful series of windows—formerly at Ecouen, and now in the Château de Chantilly—in which is set forth in forty pictures the story of Cupid and Psyche. A specimen of these is given onpage 218, thanks to the friendly permission of Monsieur Magne, who illustrates the whole of them in his admirable monograph of the Montmorency glass. The legend to the effect that Raffaelle designed and Palissy painted them, is past all possible belief; but they are very remarkable specimens of sixteenth century work, restored about the period of the First Empire, and mark somewhere about the high-water mark of French domestic picture glass.
A glance at these windows is enough to show that they were never schemed with any definite view to glazing. Rather it would appear that the pictures were first designed and then the leads introduced where best they could be disguised. But the disguise is everywhere transparent. Such gauzy painting is inadequate; it hides nothing. You see always the thick black lines of lead, cruel enough, but clinging in a cowardly way to the edges of weak forms, sneaking into shadows, and foolishly pretending to pass themselves off as the continuation of painted outlines not one-twentieth part so strong as they. The sparing use of glazing lines makes them all the more conspicuous. They must originally have asserted themselves even more than they do now; for the accidental lead lines introduced in reparation, however much they damage the pictures, do in a measure support the original glazing lines, and pull the windows together. The Chantilly glass goes to prove the impossibility of satisfactorily disposing of the leads in very small figure subjects in grisaille. In work on a larger scale it wants only a man who knows his trade to manage it. Witness what was done in church work.
The propriety of executing figures in grisaille at all has been called in question by Viollet le Duc. “Every bit of white glass,” he said, “should be diapered with pattern traced with a brush; and, since this treatment is not possible in flesh painting, flesh ought not to be painted.” Moreover, he says that grisaille has always the appearance of vibrating, and the vibration fatigues the eye; therefore, he argues, it is labour lost to paint white figures. Far be it from an ornamentist to deny that a great deal too much importance is attached to figure work in decoration. But the amount of tracing necessary onwhite glass is relative. In grisaille it is quite safe to leave some glass clear; and, if it is not worth while to paint figures, is it worth while to paint anything worth looking at, or worth painting?
Louis XIII. and Anne of Austria
207.Louis XIII. and Anne of Austria.
The truth is, it wearies the sight to look at any glass for long at a stretch, and for a merecoup d’œilthe most brutal workmanship would often do. But, if work is ever to be seen from near, the charm is gone when once you know how coarse it is. One tires of crude work, and delights more and more in what is delicate. Whoever has taken pleasure in such work as the windows at S. Alpin at Troyes would find it hard to renounce the figure in grisaille.
Domestic Glass
208.Domestic Glass, The Louvre.
To return to the leading of grisaille. Of the two extremes, the bold, even the too bold, acknowledgment of the constructional lines of a window, is far preferable to the timid attempt to conceal them. The glaziers of the Renaissance eventually got over the difficulty by the simple plan of inserting into quarry windows (usually unpainted) or into pattern work of plain glass only, little panes of painted glass. In this way there are introduced into some windows at the Château de Chaumont some very beautiful little portrait medallions, outlined with a firmness and modelled with a delicacy which remind one of the drawings of Clouet. At the Germanic Museum at Nuremberg are some similar medallion heads, quite Holbein-ish in character. A later portrait panel, lacking the style and draughtsmanship of these, but very cleverly painted (by Linard Gontier they say), is reproduced onpage 305. It represents, as the inscription and cypher go to show, Louis Treize and Anne of Austria, as bride and bridegroom. Its date, therefore, speaks for itself. Another little pane by Gontier, from the Hôtel des Arquebusiers at Troyes, now in the library there, is given onpage 310. The characteristic ornamental work surrounding this, though not forming a consecutive frame to the picture, is of about the same period with it (1621). Its design consists of that modified form of Arab foliation (compare it with the detail onpage 352), which was very much used in damascening and niello work; indeed, the French still call that kind of pattern “nielle.” Here it is traced in a fine brown outline, and filled in partly with yellow stain and partly with blue enamel. The effect is pleasing.
It was in Switzerland that glass painting other than for churches was most extensively practised. The Council Chambers of Swiss towns, and the halls of trade and otherguilds, were enriched with bands of armorial glass across the windows; and throughout the sixteenth century it was the custom to present to neighbouring towns or friendly Corporations a painted window panel. Great part of these have been dispersed, and in Switzerland they are now perhaps rarer than in the museums of other countries. The Germanic Museum at Nuremberg and the Hôtel Clûny, at Paris, are rich in Swiss glass; and we have some at South Kensington. Superb examples, however, still remain in Switzerland—for example, in the Rath-haus at Lucerne—though they belong to a period as late as the first ten years of the seventeenth century.
Pierced Quarries
209.Pierced Quarries, Warwick.
The usual form of design consisted of a sort of florid canopy frame of moderate dimensions, enclosing a shield or shields of arms, supported by fantastically dressed men-at-arms. There was often great spirit in the swagger of these melodramatic swashbucklers, admirably expressive of the idea which underlies all heraldry: “I am somebody,” they seem to say, “pray who are you?” It is a comparatively modest specimen of this class that is presented onpage 90. In the windows of a privatehouse it was frequently the master and mistress who supported the armorial shield, all in their Sunday best, and very proud of themselves too. Little Bible subjects were also painted, mainly in grisaille. It was for window panes that Holbein drew the Stations of the Cross, now among the chief treasures of the museum at Bâle. These also must be classed with domestic work. They may in some cases have been destined for a church; but they would much more appropriately decorate a private oratory.
Quarry of Fretted Lead210.Quarry of Fretted Lead.
These heraldic or pictorial panes go even beyond the delicacy of cabinet pictures, and are sometimes more on the scale of miniatures; but of such miniature painting the Swiss were masters. They carried craftmanship to its very furthest point, and among them traditions of good work lingered long after they were quite dead in France. Of English work there was not much; and of that the less said the better.
Far into the eighteenth century the Swiss still had a care for their window panes, and, when painting went out of fashion, engraved them with armorial or other devices. Precisely that kind of engraving was employed also upon polished mirrors, of which one finds examples in Italy.
Unpainted quarry windows in English houses were sometimes relieved, at the same time that ventilation was secured, by the occasional introduction (in the place of glass) of little fretted panels of pierced lead, as shown onpage 308.Belowis a diamond-shaped piercing of the Jacobean period.
Domestic Window Pane
211.Domestic Window Pane, Troyes.
No one can have paid much attention to stained glass without observing the conspicuous part played in its design by the quasi-architectural canopy.
Inasmuch as it, in a sense, enshrines the figure, there exists some sort of symbolic reason for its use. But that is not enough to account for its all but universal employment. A more obvious excuse for it is, the purpose it fulfils in the construction of design. It is a means of accounting for the position of figures midway up the window, perhaps one above the other, and not standing upon the sill. It is at once framework and support to them, preventing them from seeming to float there in space.
Where the designer of the church designed also the glass for it, it was almost inevitable that he should plan it more or less upon architectural lines; and so we find that in windows known to have been designed by architects the canopy is very often the most conspicuous part of the design. But at all times the master-builder must have been a power, and at all times also even glaziers and glass painters must have been so intimately acquainted with forms of architecture, that it is not surprising they should have introduced them into their work.
The fact is, the designer happens upon something like a canopy almost without intending it, and, having arrived so far, perfects the resemblance to it. Suppose a window of four long lights, in each of which it is desired to introduce three figures. That means dividing it horizontally into three, which may be done by the use of bands of inscription, as atain the diagramoverleaf: there is no suggestion of architecture there. Supposing you wish to frame the window at the sides, so as to stop the picture, as atb, to the left of the diagram; you have still no very distinct suggestion of architecture. But if, the better to frame the picture, you add an extra band of colour, as shown atc, you arrive at once at something so like perspectiveas to indicate an architectural elevation. Indeed, that is precisely the form the canopy takes sometimes in Italian glass. Even when the cinque-centist framed his picture merely in lines he could hardly help giving them the appearance of mouldings, painting upon (as at Arezzo) egg-and-tongue or other familiar architectural enrichment in white and stain.
212.Diagram.
In the clerestory at Freiburg is a window in which the serried saints appear at first sight to be simply framed by lines of pale purple; but on examination these resolve themselves into a simple architectural elevation, with even a hint of unsuspected shadow in it. The date of that example is 1512; and canopies, not to go back to Græco-Roman decoration, begin with the beginning of Gothic. It is adduced, therefore, to show, not the origin of canopy work, but how inevitably something of the sort occurred. Its immediate source is clearly imitation. The thing is borrowed straight from architecture, and indicates, it may justly be said, if not a certain lack of inventive faculty on the part of the designer, at least some disinclination to take the pains to invent.
So in the thirteenth century we have funny little glass penthouses over the figures of saints, architectural in form but not in colour; in the fourteenth windows are crossed by rows of tall brassy disproportioned tabernacles, as yet flat fronted; in the fifteenth, white ghosts of masonry pretend to stand out over the figures; in the sixteenth, altar-like, or other more or less monumental, structures, are pictured with something like the solidity of stonework; and eventually the canopy is merged in painted glass architecture, which joins itself on as best it can to the actual masonry.
The forms of canopy typical of each period of architecture have been discussed in the several chapters on design, but something remains to be said upon canopy work in general, and upon particular instances of it.
The Early canopy goes for nothing as design. Its one merit is that it is inconspicuous. One could wish that the Decorated were equally so. There is, as a rule, no shutting your eyes to its mass of overpowering shrinework. When, by way of exception, it chances to be modest it is sometimes more interesting—as where it is scarcely more than a cusped arch, or where, as at Strassburg, it takes the form of an arcaded band across the window, in which are series of little demi-figures. At Cologne Cathedral also sundry saints are pigeon-holed in this way.Aproposof this, it should be mentioned that it invariably adds to the interest of a canopy, when; for example, the broad shaft of a Decorated canopy enniches angels and other figures, or when they are introduced among its pinnacles or in its base. The wide-spreading German canopy affords scope for variety of design not possible so long as the structure is confined within a single light. In some four-light windows at Erfurt (1349-1372) the broad shafts of the canopies, with saints in separate niches, occupy the whole width of the outer lights, leaving only two lights for the central picture. In a five-light window at Strassburg the canopy is five-arched, allowing separate arches in the outer lights for figures of saints, whilst the three central ones cover a single subject.
In canopies which include niches with separate subsidiary subjects, these are sometimes by way of prelude to the main story. In the cathedral at Berne is something of the kind. There, among the pinnacles of the canopy which crowns the subject of the Adoration, are seen the Kings setting out on their pilgrimage, journeying by night, having audience of Herod, and arriving finally at the city of Bethlehem.
In the great altar-like canopies of the Renaissance there is sometimes a gallery above, with angels or other figures, which give points of colour amidst the white. In any case, the canopy is usually more interesting when it is peopled.
The Perpendicular canopy is in effect much more pleasing than what had gone before, but it sins in its simulation of stonework. There also little figures in white and stain are very effectively introduced into the shafts and other parts ofthe construction, but more in the form of architectural sculpture. There are some very interesting instances of this at Fairford, though the canopies themselves are not otherwise peculiarly interesting.
The useful device of low, flat-topped canopies, adopted in the nave windows at Cologne Cathedral, seldom occurs out of Germany. It is there most successful. Indeed, these particular canopies are interesting examples of the interpenetration of architectural tracery as well as of its moderate and modest use.
Late German canopies are often much more leafy than French or English; they are less architectural—or rather, the architecture breaks out into more free and flowing growth. The charm of Late Gothic canopy work, as was said, lies in its colour, or in the absence of colour—in its silvery effect, that is to say. And one may safely add that quite the most satisfactory canopies, in whatever style, are those in which white largely prevails, modified by stain, but preserving its greyish character. In later Renaissance work white is still largely used; but it is made less brilliant by painted shadow, and so has less to excuse its architectural pretensions. At Milan there is a window in which what should be white is in various granular tints of brown.
The coloured canopy, to which the Italians adhered (as well as to the border enclosing it), does not frame them as the white glass does. The idea appears to be, on the contrary, that it should form part of the picture. Elsewhere than in Italy coloured canopies, other than yellow, are rare; but they occur. There are, for example, the hideous flesh-coloured constructions peculiar to Germany. At Troyes are some not unsatisfactory little canopies in green, and others in purple (1499). At Châlons-sur-Marne is an effective canopy (1526-1537) of golden arabesque on purple. At Freiburg (1525) is a steely-blue Renaissance canopy, from which depend festoons of white and greenish-yellow, against the ruby ground of the subject. And there are others satisfactory enough. But so invariably effective is the framework of white and stain, that to depart from it seems almost like giving up the very excuse for canopies.
The Late Gothic canopy work does most effectually frame the pictures, and gives light, of course, at the same time. It goes admirably with the colour scheme, which includes alwaysa fair quantity of white, even in comparatively rich figure subjects. There is no denying, nor any desire to deny, its altogether admirable effect. If the effect were not otherwise to be obtained, the end would justify the means. But the effect is due simply to the setting of the subjects in a framework of white, not to the architectural character of the design. All that those Perpendicular canopies do could be done equally without architectural forms at all. Canopies make no more beautiful screens of silvery-white than, say, the Five Sisters at York. Intrinsically they are less interesting than pattern work. They give less scope for arranging subjects variously, just as one will; and they allow less range for the fancy of the artist. The most interesting canopies, and among the most effective, are those Early Renaissance picture frames (French, German, or Italian) which, whilst just sufficiently suggesting something near enough to architecture to be called canopies, are really little more than arabesque. One might almost say they are pleasing in proportion as they depart from the quasi-architectural formula.
The enormous value of the mass of white afforded by the canopy, as a setting for colour, has reconciled us too readily to its use. Why not this mass of white without pretended forms of masonry, without this paraphernalia of pinnacles? The architect alone, perhaps, in his heart likes canopy work, and would prefer it to any other kind of ornamental device. When he plans a window, or directs its planning, forms of architectural construction occur to him naturally. Supposing him to be an artist (as we have perhaps a right to expect him to be) he produces a fine thing; but were he to work upon more workmanlike lines, or, to speak quite precisely, more upon the lines of the worker in glass, how much better he would do—being an artist! In his reliance upon inappropriate structural forms, he makes the obvious mistake of depending upon the kind of thing with which he is most familiar, not the thing especially called for. Each particular craft has a technique of its own.
One other class of person also loves canopy work—the tradesman; but his affection for it is less disinterested, and more easily accounted for. The stock canopy (as every one knows who has been, as it were, behind the counter) is a famous device for cheapening production. The examples chosen forillustration throughout these pages do, on the whole, much more than justice to the periods which they were chosen to represent; but, taken altogether, they do not, even so, form a very effective plea for canopy work.
Were the canopy more defensible than it is in glass, it would still have monopolised far too large a place in the scheme of mediæval and Renaissance design. We owe largely to it, in connection with the gradually increasing claims of figure work, the all but extinction of pattern glass. Figure work is practically implied by the canopy. Occasionally, indeed, architecture has formed the wholemotifof a window; but the case is so rare that it does not count. Once in a while there may be excuse, and even occasion, for almost any device.
There is no valid reason of art why figures and figure subjects should not be framed in ornament, designed indeed with reference to the architecture of the building, but not in the least in the likeness of architecture. This ornament might perfectly well be in white and stain. Ornamental setting in colour does occur in thirteenth century medallion windows, and again (though only by exception) in certain Early Renaissance glass; but by that time pictures, as a rule, absorbed all the interest of design. The instinct which makes us want to give even pictured personages some sort of roof above their heads is more natural than logical. Anyway, to make windows to look like niches in the wall, is an absurd ideal of design, and the nearer the glass painter gets to it the further he has gone off the track. If anything in the nature of a canopy be desirable, clearly it should be constructed on the lines, not of masonry, but of glazing.
There is a direction in which glass has never been fully developed, that of purely ornamental design. This is the more to be deplored because that direction is the one in which was most scope for the peculiar depth and brilliancy of colour characteristic of mosaic glass. Ornament was used in the thirteenth century not only as a setting for figure medallions, but as of sufficient interest to form of itself most beautiful windows in grisaille. Presently the attractions of figure work put an end to that; and, furthermore, the preference for picture naturally led to the development of design in the direction of glass painting, which lent itself so much more readily than mosaic to pictorial expression. We owe to that, not only the perfection of glass painting, and its ultimate degradation, but the neglect of latent possibilities in more thoroughly mosaic glass, aye, in pure glazing.
Even in figure work, much might be done for clerestory and other distant work, at all events, in pure mosaic glass. Those who have not closely observed old glass have no conception of the amount of leadwork there is in the windows they admire, at the very moment that they deprecate leading, so little do these interfere with the design, when disposed with the cunning of a craftsman. One can imagine figures on a large scale boldly blocked out, with broad shadows, in which not only the shadows, but even the reflected lights in them, might be glazed in pot-metal, and from the floor of a big church the leads would be inappreciable. But, except in work upon an absolutely heroic scale, there would always be the difficulty of the flesh; the features would have to be painted; and glass pictures of this kind would needs be designed with a severe simplicity not calculated to satisfy the modern pictorial sense.
The advocates of painting complain that due consideration of the qualities of glass would limit the artist to the baldest kind of pictorial effect. Something certainly must be sacrificed to fittreatment of the material, or glass suffers, whatever picture may gain. That is what has happened. But if so much sacrifice is necessary to figure, why always adopt that form of design? Why not sometimes at least abandon subject, and seek what can best be done in glass, even though that be barbaric? It is not quite certain but that glass really lends itself only to a rather barbaric kind of design, or what we are barbarous enough to call barbaric. This is certain: the interest of figure work has put an end to ornamental glass. It has become almost an article of faith with us that, to the making of a window worth looking at, figure design is indispensable. That should not be so. And, seeing that picture does not afford full scope for the qualities which glass-lovers most dearly love in glass, it seems rather cruel that picture should so largely preponderate in its design as to suppress the possibilities in the way of ornament. Why should it be so?
There are two very important reasons for the introduction of figure into glass, the one literary, the other artistic. In the first place, we love a story, that is no more than human; we want to know what it is all about, that is no more than rational; and figure subjects afford the most obvious means of satisfying those cravings of ours. But artists want these cravings satisfied by means of art. Some of them, perhaps, think more of the means employed than of the end achieved, and would have “art for art’s sake.” Theirs is a doctrine of very limited application. Sanity insists upon subordination of the means to end; and art is not an end in itself, nor is craftsmanship. It is not, therefore, for one moment suggested that story, sentiment, meaning, in windows, should be ruthlessly sacrificed to craftsmanship, even though expression implied the use of figure, which it does not. What is claimed, is merely this: that when you employ a material or a process some consideration is due to it.
Before undertaking to express an idea, it is always as well for the artist to consider how far its expression is consistent with art. If it can be expressed only at the cost of all that is best in art, it were better to adopt some other means of expression. If a particular craft is your one means of expression, and that particular thing cannot well be said in it, then say what can be said; it will be to much more purpose than saying even a better thing and saying it ill.The better the thought, the greater the crime of saying it inadequately.
After all, the sentiment, or what not, which people ask for in glass, and which compels figure work, is not, in the majority of instances, by any means so important, even in their eyes, but that they would sacrifice it readily enough if they knew the price in art at which they would have to pay for it. Let patrons of stained glass, if they care for art, ponder this statement; it is not spoken in haste, but in conviction.
There is one reason of sentiment which would argue against great part of the use that is made of figure work, at all events in church glass, the doubt, namely, as to how far it is possible, in these days, to reconcile the devout with the decorative treatment of sacred subjects. We are all admiration when we gaze up at the splendid figure of Moses in the great transept window at Chartres. But it is the artist in us that is entranced, the lover of glass, and especially of colour; the artless worshipper might feel that the dignity of the Lawgiver would perhaps have been better expressed with less attention to decorative effect. We are not shocked at the archaic effigy, because we realize that reverence underlies its simplicity. In modern work it is otherwise. Artistic intention, admirable or not from the æsthetic point of view, is responsible for the introduction into our churches of delineations of all that Christians hold sacred so ridiculous, it is a wonder devout worshippers allow them to be there. The excuse for glass is its decorative effect. Its value is in its colour. A Saint in stained glass (to mention no higher Person) stands in a window for just so much colour: is not that rather a degradation of the saint?
In the second place, apart altogether from what has been called the literary interest (which no one will dispute) there is in figure work a charm, altogether artistic, in the very unexpectedness of the colour-patches you get in it, not accidental quite, but in many instances at least, inspired by accident. The besetting sin of ornament is obviousness; it has a way of distributing itself too symmetrically and evenly, of laying its secret bare to the most casual glance. We see at once there is nothing to find out in it, and our interest drops to zero.
In figure design, on the contrary, there are breaks even in the very best balanced scheme; there is always something unexpected, unforeseen, something to kindle interest; in fact, the difficulty is, there, to distribute the composition evenly enough. The question arises whether this sameness, and consequent tameness, of ornament, the way the points of intended interest recur with irritating frequency and regularity, resolving themselves into mere spots—whether this defect is inherent in ornament, and inseparable from it.
Proof that it is not is afforded by heraldry, distinctly a branch of ornamental design, in which, for precisely the same reasons as in figure work, we get just that inevitable deviation from system, and more especially from symmetry, which seems necessary to the salvation of ornament. Where by happy chance an ornamental window has been patched with glass not belonging to it, or where portions of it have been misplaced, we get similar relief from monotony. Here the unexpectedness of contrast, colour, and so on, is accidental; in heraldry it is, in the nature of things, unforeseen of the artist, and unavoidable. May not similar results be obtained of set purpose and design? Surely they may. Were it otherwise, it would be worth falling back now and then upon haphazard, and letting colour come as it might.
Happily there is no occasion for that feeble sort of fatalism. Given a colourist and a man with that sense of distribution (whether of line, mass, or colour) which makes the artist, what is to hinder him from deliberately planning so much of surprise as may be necessary to tickle the appetite for the ornamental? The ogre in the path is what we call economy. Because ornament can without doubt be more cheaply executed than figure work, it is taken for granted that it must be reserved by rights for cheap work. What else is there to recommend it? And, that being so, ornament being but padding, by all means, it is argued, let it be not only cheap but of the cheapest!
Design, moreover, if it be worth having at all, is costly, and there is clearly thrift in repeating the same pattern, and even one unit of it, over and over again. The practice of saving design in this way has become at last so much a matter of course, that no one thinks of designing an ornamental window, as a whole, without repetition of pattern—except the artist;and with him it is a fond desire which he hopes perhaps some day to fulfil—at his own expense.
Under circumstances such as these, what wonder ornament is monotonous? It could not well be otherwise. But these conditions are not in the nature of things. Ornamental design has subsided because no one asks for, cares for, or encourages, ornament. It needs only to be in the hands of an artist—not necessarily a Holbein, but just a Rhodian potter, a Persian carpet weaver, a mediæval carver, or a nameless glazier—to be worthy of its modest place in art.
Considering the costliness of good figure work and the absolute worthlessness of bad, considering the way in which glass lends itself especially to ornament, considering how in ornament the qualities most necessary to decorative effect and most characteristic of the material can be obtained, surely the wiser policy would be to do what can so readily be done. When glass lends itself so kindly to ornament it seems a sin to neglect it. Is it quite past praying for, that there may still be a future for windows merely ornamental, which shall yet satisfy the sense of beauty?
What are the characteristics of the various styles in glass? How does one tell the period of a window? These are not questions that can be fully answered in the short space of a chapter, which is all that can here be devoted to it; but it may help those to whom a window tells nothing of its date, briefly to mention the characteristics according to which we class it as belonging to this period or that. With a view to conciseness and to convenience of reference it will be best to catalogue these characteristics rather than to describe them.
Any subdivision of glass into “styles” must be more or less arbitrary. One style merges into the other, and the characteristics of each overlap, so to speak. The most convenient lines of demarcation are the centuries; for, as it happens, the changes in manner do take place more or less towards the century end. The one broad distinction is between Gothic and Renaissance.
Gothic may best be divided into three periods—viz., Thirteenth century and before, Fourteenth century, and Fifteenth century and after.
Thirteenth century glass, commonly called “Early English,” or, as the case may be, “Early French,” may as well be taken to include, for our purpose, what little remains of twelfth century or Norman work. It includes naturally Early German work, which is Romanesque and not Gothic in character.
Fourteenth century glassbelongs to the Middle or Transitional Gothic period. We call it “Decorated,” for the inadequate reason that its detail is naturalistic.