Windows, A Book About Stained & Painted Glass Part 1

A Book About Stained & Painted Gla.s.s.

by Lewis F. Day.

PREFACE.

A stained gla.s.s window is itself the best possible ill.u.s.tration of the difference it makes whether we look at a thing from this side or from that. Goethe used this particular image in one of his little parables, comparing poems to painted windows, dark and dull from the market-place, bright with colour and alive with meaning only when we have crossed the threshold of the church.

I may claim to have entered the sanctuary, and not irreverently. My earliest training in design was in the workshops of artists in stained gla.s.s. For many years I worked exclusively at gla.s.s design, and for over a quarter of a century I have spent great part of my leisure in hunting gla.s.s all Europe over.

This book has grown out of my experience. It makes no claim to learnedness. It tells only what the windows have told me, or what I understood them to say. I have gone to gla.s.s to get pleasure out of it, to learn something from it, to find out the way it was done, and why it was done so, and what might yet perhaps be done. Anything apart from that did not so much interest me. Those, therefore, who desire minuter and more precise historic information must consult the works of Winston, Mr. Westlake, and the many continental authorities, with whose learned writings this more practical, and, in a sense, popular, volume does not enter into any sort of compet.i.tion.

My point of view is that of art and workmans.h.i.+p, or, more precisely speaking, workmans.h.i.+p and art, workmans.h.i.+p being naturally the beginning and root of art. We are workmen first and artists afterwards--perhaps.

What I have tried to do is this: In the first place (Book I.), I set out to trace the course of _workmans.h.i.+p_, to follow the technique of the workman from the twelfth century to the seventeenth, from mosaic to painting, from archaism to pictorial accomplishment; and to indicate at what cost of perhaps more decorative qualities the later masterpieces of gla.s.s painting were bought.

In the second place (Book II.), I have endeavoured to show the course of _design_ in gla.s.s, from the earliest Mediaeval window to the latest gla.s.s picture of the Renaissance.

Finally (Book III.), I have set apart for separate discussion questions not in the direct line either of design or workmans.h.i.+p, or which, if taken by the way, would have hindered the narrative and confused the issue.

The rather lengthy chapter on "_Style_" is addressed to that large number of persons who, knowing as yet nothing about the subject, may want _data_ by which to form some idea as to the period of a window when they see it: the postscript more nearly concerns the designer and the worker in gla.s.s.

In all this I have tried to put personality as much as possible aside, and to tell my story faithfully and without conscious bias. But I make no claim to impartiality, as the judge upon the bench understands it. We take up art or law according to our temperament. I can pretend to judge only as one interested, to be impartial only as an artist may.

LEWIS F. DAY.

13, MECKLENBURGH SQUARE, LONDON.

_January 29th, 1897._

_NOTE IN REFERENCE TO ILl.u.s.tRATIONS._

_Theoretically the ill.u.s.trations to a book about windows should be in colour. Practically coloured ill.u.s.trations of stained gla.s.s are out of the question, as all who appreciate its quality well know. It may be possible, although it has hardly proved so as yet, to print adequate representations of coloured windows, but only at a cost which would defeat the end here in view._

_The_ EFFECT _of gla.s.s is best suggested by process renderings of photographs from actual windows or from very careful water-colour drawings, such as those very kindly placed at my disposal by Mr. T. M.

Rooke (pages 128, 159, 337) and Mr. John R. Clayton (pages 51, 74, 98, 186, 207, 252, 286, 304, 342), an artist whose studio has been the nursery of a whole generation of gla.s.s designers._

_Details of_ DESIGN _are often better seen in the reproductions of tracings or slight pen-drawings, little more than diagrams it may be, but done to ill.u.s.trate a point. That is the intention throughout, to ill.u.s.trate what is said, not simply to beautify the book._

_The direction of the pen-lines gives, wherever it was possible, a key to the colour scheme. Red, that is to say, is represented by vertical lines, blue by horizontal, yellow by dots, and so on, according to heraldic custom._

BOOK I.

CHAPTER I.

THE BEGINNINGS OF GLa.s.s.

The point of view from which the subject of stained gla.s.s is approached in these chapters relieves me, happily, from the very difficult task of determining the date or the whereabouts of the remote origin of coloured windows, and the still remoter beginnings of gla.s.s itself. The briefest summary of scarcely disputable facts bearing upon the evolution of the art of window making, is here enough. We need not vex our minds with speculation.

White gla.s.s (and that of extreme purity) would seem to have been known to the Chinese as long ago as 2300 B.C., for they were then already using astronomical instruments, of which the lenses were presumably of gla.s.s. Of coloured gla.s.s there is yet earlier record. Egyptologists tell us that at least five if not six thousand years ago the Egyptians made jewels of gla.s.s. Indeed, it is more than probable that this was the earliest use to which stained gla.s.s was put, and that the very _raison d'etre_ of gla.s.s making was a species of forgery. In some of the most ancient tombs have been found scarabs of gla.s.s in deliberate imitation of rubies and emeralds, sapphires and other precious stones. The gla.s.s beads found broadcast in three quarters of the globe were quite possibly pa.s.sed off by Phoenician traders upon the confiding barbarian as jewels of great price. At all events, gla.s.s beads, according to Sir John Lubbock, were in use in the bronze age; and, if we may trust the evidence of etymology, "bedes" are perhaps as ancient as praying.

Apart from trickery and fraud, to imitate seems to be a foible of humanity. The Greeks and their Roman successors made gla.s.s in imitation of agate and onyx and all kinds of precious marbles. They devised also coloured gla.s.s coated with white gla.s.s, which could be cut cameo-fas.h.i.+on--a kind of gla.s.s much used, though in a different way, in later Mediaeval windows.

The Venetians carried further the pretty Greek invention of embedding vitreous threads of milky white or colour in clear gla.s.s, the most beautiful form of which is that known as _latticelli_, or _reticelli_ (reticulated or lace gla.s.s), from the elaborate twisting and interlacing of the threads; but nothing certain seems to be known about Venetian gla.s.s until the end of the eleventh century, although by the thirteenth the neighbouring island of Murano was famous for its production. The Venetians found a new stone to imitate, aventurine, and they imitated it marvellously.

So far, however, gla.s.s was used in the first instance for jewellery, and in the second for vessels of various kinds. Its use in architecture was confined mainly to mosaic, originally, no doubt, to supply the place of brighter tints not forthcoming in marble.

Of the use of gla.s.s in windows there is not very ancient mention. The climate of Greece or Egypt, and the way of life there, gave scant occasion for it. But at Herculaneum and Pompeii, there have been found fair sized slabs of window gla.s.s, not of very perfect manufacture, apparently cast, and probably at no time very translucent. Remains also of what was presumably window gla.s.s have been found among the ruins of Roman villas in England. In the basilicas of Christian Rome the arched window openings were sometimes filled with slabs of marble, in which were piercings to receive gla.s.s (which may or may not have been coloured), foreshadowing, so to speak, the plate tracery of Early Gothic builders. According to M. Levy, the windows of Early Mediaeval Flemish churches were often filled in this Roman way with plaques of stone pierced with circular openings to receive gla.s.s.

Another Roman practice was to set panes of gla.s.s in bronze or copper framing, and even in lead. Here we have the beginning of the practice identified with Mediaeval glaziers.

There is no reason to suppose that the ancients practised gla.s.s painting as we understand it. Discs of Greek gla.s.s have been found which are indeed painted, but not (I imagine) with colour fused with the material; and certainly these were not used for windows.

The very early Christians were not in a position to indulge in, or even to desire, luxuries such as stained gla.s.s windows, but St. Jerome and St. Chrysostom make allusion to them. It is pretty certain that these must have been simple mosaics in stained gla.s.s, unpainted: one reads that between the lines of the records that have come down to us.

Stained and painted gla.s.s, such as we find in the earliest existing Mediaeval windows, may possibly date back to the reign of Charlemagne (800), but it may safely be said not to occur earlier than the Holy Roman Empire. A couple of hundred years later mention of it begins to occur rather frequently in Church records; and there is one particular account of the furnis.h.i.+ng of the chapel of the first Benedictine Monastery at Monte Ca.s.sino with a whole series of windows in 1066--which fixes the date of the Norman Conquest as a period at which stained gla.s.s windows can no longer have been uncommon. The Cistercian interdict, restricting the order to the use of white gla.s.s (1134), argues something like ecclesiastical over-indulgence in rich windows before the middle of the next century.

Fragments, more or less plentiful, of the very earliest gla.s.s may still remain embedded in windows of a later period (the material was too precious not to have been carefully preserved); but archaeologists appear to be agreed that no complete window of the ninth or tenth century has been preserved, and that even of the eleventh there is nothing that can quite certainly be identified. After that doctors begin to differ. But the general consensus of opinion is, that there is comparatively little that can be incontrovertibly set down even to the twelfth century. The great ma.s.s of Early Gothic Gla.s.s belongs indubitably to the thirteenth century; and when one speaks of Early Gla.s.s it is usually thirteenth century work which is meant.

The remote origin of gla.s.s, then, remains for ever lost in the mist of legendary days. There is even a fable to the effect that it dates from the building of the Tower of Babel, when G.o.d's fire from heaven vitrified the bricks employed by its too presumptuous builders.

Coloured gla.s.s comes to us from the East; that much it is safe to conclude. From ancient Egypt, probably, the art of the gla.s.s-worker found its way to Phoenicia, thence to Greece and Rome, and so to Byzantium, Venice, and eventually France, where stained gla.s.s windows, as we know them, first occur.

It is probably to the French that Europe owes the introduction of coloured windows, a colony of Venetian gla.s.s-workers having, they say, settled at Limoges in the year 979.

Some of the earliest French gla.s.s is to be found at Chartres, Le Mans, Angers, Reims, and Chalons-sr-Marne; and at the _Musee des Arts Decoratifs_, at Paris, there are some fragments of twelfth century work which may be more conveniently examined than the work _in sit_. The oldest to which one can a.s.sign a definite date is that at St. Denis (1108) but its value is almost nullified by expert restoration.

In Germany the oldest date is ascribed to some small windows at Augsburg, executed, it is said, by the monks of Tegernsee about the year 1000. There is also a certain amount of twelfth century work incorporated in the later windows at Strasbourg. The oldest remains of gla.s.s in England are, in all probability, certain fragments in the nave of York Minster. The more important windows at Canterbury, Salisbury, and Lincoln are of the thirteenth century.

CHAPTER II.

THE MAKING OF A WINDOW.

Since it is proposed to approach the subject of stained gla.s.s in the first place from the workmanlike and artistic, rather than the historical or antiquarian, point of view, it may be as well to begin by explaining precisely what a stained gla.s.s window is.