Windows, A Book About Stained & Painted Glass Part 16

[Ill.u.s.tration: 171. S. MARY'S, SHREWSBURY.]

It is quite possible, nay, probable, that in connection with any given window, or series of windows, there will be architectural features which deserve to be emphasised. It may be the springing of the arch which calls for accentuation; it may be a string-course in the walls that asks for recognition; it may be that the proportion of the window wants correction. Whatever it be, it is the part of the decorator to feel the want and to meet it, to grasp the situation and to accept it.

In not doing so, he shows perhaps pictorial, certainly not decorative, instinct. So with regard to the plane of a gla.s.s picture. It is not necessary to restrict one's design to silhouette, to make one's picture as flat as the first gla.s.s painters or the Greek vase painters made theirs. How much of distance and relief a man may indulge in is partly his own affair. It depends upon what he can manage to do without destroying the surface of his window. So long as he preserve that, he may do as he pleases, and yet not lay himself open to the charge of being unduly pictorial; only it is as well to remember that on the simplest and severest lines grand work has been done, and may still be done, without falling into archaism; whilst the Crabeths, and the rest of the astoundingly clever gla.s.s painters of Gouda fail to reconcile us to the attempt to render the sky beyond (page 258) or distant architectural vistas in gla.s.s.

It has sometimes been contended that all lines of perspective (which in the sixteenth century begin to take a very important place in design) are amiss in gla.s.s, inasmuch as they destroy its flatness. That is surely to go too far. So long as no effect of relief is sought, no effect of distance attempted, no illusion aimed at, one can hardly find fault with lines indicating the perspective necessary perhaps to the expression of the design--a.s.suming, of course, that the lines of perspective take their place in the decorative scheme, and help the composition of the window. They do that very cleverly in Crabeth's picture of "Christ Purifying the Temple" (page 244). Our complaint is rather with the strong relief attempted, the abuse of shadow, and especially of painted shadow. The case is far worse where, as at S.

Eustache, Paris, the architectural background is shown obliquely. In that case, no uncommon one in the seventeenth century, when the painter would just as likely as not choose his point of view as best suited his picture, without any reference whatever to its architectural setting, the painter shows himself, as gla.s.s painter, at his most pictorial and worst.

So much for the window as an architectural feature, now let us look at it as gla.s.s.

It becomes here very much a question of craftsmans.h.i.+p. To a workman it seems so natural, and so obvious, that the material he is working in, and the tools he is using, must from beginning to end affect the treatment of his design, that it appears almost unnecessary to insist upon such a truism. Experience, however, goes to show that only the workman and here and there a man who ought, perhaps, to have been one, have any appreciation of what artists call treatment. The rest of the world have heard tell that there is such a thing as technique, to which they think far too much importance is attached. That is so, indeed, when artists think technique is enough; but not when they look upon it as indispensable, the beginning of all performance, not when they insist that a man shall know the grammar of his art before he breaks out into poetry.

Now the A, B, C, of workmans.h.i.+p is to treat each material after its kind. It is a truism, therefore, to say that gla.s.s should be treated as gla.s.s. Yet we find that a man may be enthusiastic to a degree about an art, learned above most men in its history, and yet end in entirely misconceiving its scope. "What is to be condemned on canvas," said Winston, "ought not to be admitted on gla.s.s." As well might he have said, that what would be condemned on gla.s.s should not be allowed on canvas, or that language and behaviour which would be unbecoming in church should not be tolerated on the platform, or at the dinner-table.

The fallacy that one rule applies to all forms of art is responsible alike for the muddiness of seventeenth and eighteenth century windows and for the thin transparent tinting of nineteenth century Munich gla.s.s.

That "art is one" is a fine saying, rightly understood. So is humanity one, and it is well to remind ourselves of the fact; but race, climate, country, count for something; and to speak with effect we must speak the language of the land. Each separate craft included in the all-embracing t.i.tle of art, and making for its good and its glory, works under conditions as definite as those of climate, has characteristics as marked as those of nationality, and speaks also a language of its own.

And, to express itself to full purpose, it must speak in its own tongue.

The only pictures, then, which prove satisfactory in gla.s.s are the pictures of the gla.s.s painter; and by gla.s.s painter is not meant any one who may choose to try his hand at gla.s.s painting, but the man who has learnt his trade and knows it from end to end, to whom use has become second nature, who thinks in gla.s.s, as we say. Now and again, perhaps, where a draughtsman and a gla.s.s painter are in unusual sympathy, it may be possible for the one to translate the design of the other into the language of his craft; but good translators are rare, and translation is at best second-hand. Success in gla.s.s is achieved mainly by the man to whom ideas come in the form of gla.s.s, who sees them first in his mind's eye as windows. Even such a man may lack taste, insight, discretion; he may be led away by a misplaced ambition--it is not merely on the stage that the low comedian aspires to play Hamlet--but only the man who knows so well the dangers ahead that he insensibly avoids them, who knows so surely what can be got out of his material that he makes straight for that, who does, in short, the best that can be done in gla.s.s, can dare to be "pictorial" without danger of being false to his trade.

A painter without experience of gla.s.s might, of course, be coached in the technique of the material; but he would never get the most out of it. Conditions which to the gla.s.s painter would be as easy as an old coat, would be a restraint to him, and the greater his position the more impatient he would be of such restraint, the more surely his will would override the better judgment of the subordinate who happened to know.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 172. CHRIST PURGING THE TEMPLE, GOUDA.]

It was unfortunate that at a critical period in the history of gla.s.s, just when great painters from the outside began to be called in to design for it, knowledge was in rather an uncertain state. The use of enamel had been discovered; it offered undoubted facilities to the painter; it was believed in; it was the fas.h.i.+on. Any one who had protested the superiority of the old method would possibly have been set down as an old fogey, even by gla.s.s painters. At that moment, very likely, a gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s." 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 gla.s.s: in that case his artistic instinct would have led him surely to trust more to qualities inherent in gla.s.s, and less to painting upon it. Van Orley's picture scheme depended too much upon relief to be really well adapted to gla.s.s, 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 emanc.i.p.ated itself entirely, and the pictorial ideal did not therefore necessarily go beyond what gla.s.s could do; in any case, it did not take quite a different direction.

It may be as well to define more precisely the ideal gla.s.s picture. The ideal gla.s.s picture is, the picture which gives full scope for the qualities of gla.s.s, and does not depend in any way upon effects which cannot be obtained in gla.s.s, or which are to be attained only at the sacrifice of qualities peculiar to it.

And what are those qualities? The qualities of gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s.

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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s painter to translate. It is quite possible that some of the Florentine 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 authors.h.i.+p.

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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s painter. A designer for gla.s.s must be a colourist; but the colour he seeks is _sui generis_. Not every colourist would make a gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s. Velasquez was a colourist, but one fails to see how by any possibility the quality of his work could be expressed in gla.s.s.

On the other hand, colour in which the simple artist delighted, as in light and suns.h.i.+ne, 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s. Flesh-painting, as t.i.tian 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 gla.s.s. The Crabeths, like good gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s. Rembrandt, to have realised his ideal in gla.s.s, 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s painting. Realism of a kind was inevitable when once the painter gained the strength to realise what he saw, but when the gla.s.s painter, seeking the strength of actual light and shade, began to rely upon painted shadow for his effects, the case was hopeless. Gla.s.s asks to be translucent.

The point of perfection in gla.s.s design is not easily to be fixed. Gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s. It happens, therefore, that one expects almost to find consummate drawing and painting marred by some obscuration of the gla.s.s. 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 a.s.sociation of glazier and painter. According as one cares more for gla.s.s or for painting one will be disposed to s.h.i.+ft, backwards or forwards, the date at which gla.s.s painting began to decline. It may safely be said, however, that pictorial gla.s.s 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 sufficient recognition of the character of gla.s.s to satisfy all but the staunch partisan of pure mosaic gla.s.s--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 gla.s.s, 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 gla.s.s pictures that have ever been painted; the work, nevertheless, of a Frenchman--William of Ma.r.s.eilles--who established himself at Arezzo, and painted, amongst other gla.s.s, five windows for the cathedral there, which go about as far as gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s much what _he_ would 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 gla.s.s, 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 gla.s.s. 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s, 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s. 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 gla.s.s; they are no translations, but the creations of a gla.s.s painter--one who knew all about gla.s.s, 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 s.h.i.+rk 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 gla.s.s painter.

Work like this disarms criticism. One may have a strong personal bias towards strictly mosaic gla.s.s, 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 gla.s.s painter so perfectly tunes his work to the key of gla.s.s. 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 a.s.sociation 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 gla.s.s. The beautiful sixteenth century work at Montmorency or at Conches does not shake the conviction of the gla.s.s-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 gla.s.s decoration and picture is perhaps never more nearly adjusted than in some of the rather earlier Italian windows.

CHAPTER XX.

LANDSCAPE IN GLa.s.s.

At once a distinguis.h.i.+ng feature of picture-gla.s.s, and a characteristic of later work generally, is the _mise-en-scene_ of the subject.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 173. FROM THE ENTRY INTO JERUSALEM, FAIRFORD.]

In quite the earliest gla.s.s 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, a.s.sert 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) is shown 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 of _Pyramus and Thisbe_. But even in the fifteenth century it was rendered, one may judge how navely, from the little Nativity on page 54, a subject hardly to be rendered without the stable. Again, the quite conventional vinework, also from Malvern, shown in the upper part of page 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 refres.h.i.+ngly 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 leaf.a.ge 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 gla.s.s.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 gla.s.s, to paint the blue with clouds, indicating them, that is to say, more or less in the form of 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 gra.s.s and trees by the use of yellow stain. This distant view painted upon blue was a beautiful and most characteristic feature of sixteenth century gla.s.s. The French painters adopted it, and made it peculiarly their own, though it occurs also in German and Flemish gla.s.s. Backgrounds of this kind, which in themselves suffice to mark the departure from Gothic use, are shown on pages 207, 213, and on a larger scale opposite. The wintry landscape there with the bare tree trunks against the cold grey sky, forms the upper portion of the subject shown on page 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 gla.s.s. 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 ill.u.s.trated are of the simplest. The French painters went much further than that, a.s.sociating with their painting broad ma.s.ses 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 c.u.mulous 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 175. 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 sh.o.r.e 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 ma.s.s 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.