Windows, A Book About Stained & Painted Glass Part 24

Variety of colour in the background (or a further amount of white) is introduced by means of a screen of damask behind the figure, shoulder high, above which alone appears the usual blue or ruby background, diapered. The screen may be of any colour: purple-brown is not uncommon.

When scale permits, the damask pattern is often glazed in colours, or in white and stain upon pot-metal yellow.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 234. FIGURE AND CANOPY WINDOWS, BOURGES.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: 235. FAIRFORD.]

Heraldic s.h.i.+elds are more conspicuous than ever in the design. Donors and their patron saints are often important personages in the foreground of the picture.

_Tracery._--Tracery lights being now more of the same shape as the lights below, the gla.s.s is designed on much the same plan. That is to say, they also contain little figures under canopies. These are often entirely, or almost entirely, in white and stain, only here and there a point of colour showing in the background, more especially about their heads.

Trefoiled, quatrefoiled, three-sided, or other openings not adapted to canopy work, have usually foliated ornament in white and stain, with border line of white and stain, the background painted in solid brown.

Inscribed scrolls and emblematical devices in white and stain also occur in the smaller tracery lights.

_Grisaille._--Grisaille takes almost invariably the form of quarries.

The pattern of the quarries consists ordinarily of just a rosette or some such spot in the centre of the gla.s.s, delicately outlined and filled in with stain. A band of canopied figures sometimes crosses quarry windows, the pinnacles of the canopies breaking into the quarries above. Figures occur also often in white and stain, against a quarry ground, without canopy, standing perhaps on a bracket, or on a mere label or inscription band (York Minster). Occasionally we get subjects altogether in white and stain, without quarry glazing. In Germany unpainted roundels, or circular discs of white gla.s.s, take the place of quarries (page 292).

_Detail of Ornament._--The detail of Perpendicular foliage is no longer very naturalistic; it has often the appearance of being embossed or otherwise elaborated. It is most commonly in white with yellow stalks.

_Borders._--The border is no longer the rule, except in quarry windows.

It is now very rarely used to frame canopies. Where it occurs it is usually in the form of a "block" border, differing only from that of the Decorated period by the character of the painted detail. Borders all in white and stain also occur.

The border does not follow the deeply cut foils of the window head.

These are occupied each by its separate round of gla.s.s painted with a crown, star, lion's head, or other such device, in white and stain, against which the coloured border stops.

_Stain._--Abundant use of beautiful golden stain is typical of the period. Stain is always varied, sometimes shading off by subtle degrees from palest lemon to deep orange. The deliberate use of two distinct tones of stain, as separate tints, say of a damask pattern, argues a near approach to the sixteenth century. So does the use of stain upon pot-metal yellow.

Other signs of the mature style are:--

1. The very careful choice of varied and unevenly coloured gla.s.s to suggest shading or local colour.

2. The use of curious pieces of accidentally varied ruby to represent marble, and the like.

3. The abrasion of white spots or other pattern on flashed blue (the abrasion of white from ruby begins with the second half of the century).

4. The introduction of distant landscape in perspective, and especially the representation of clouds in the sky, and other indications of attempted atmospheric effect.

5. The treatment of several lights as one picture s.p.a.ce, without canopy.

_Colour._--White gla.s.s is cooler and more silvery, more purely white.

Red gla.s.s is less crimson, often approaching more to a scarlet colour.

Blue gla.s.s becomes lighter, greyer; sometimes it is of steely quality, sometimes it approaches to pale purple. More varieties of purple-brown and purple are used. Purer pink occurs.

_Drawing._--In the fifteenth century the archaic period of drawing is outgrown. Figures are often admirably drawn, more especially towards the end of the period, at which time the folds of drapery are made much of.

_Painting._--Painting is much more delicate. The method adopted is that of stippling (page 64).

Figure and ornament alike are carefully shaded, quarry patterns and narrow painted borders excepted.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 236. Sc.r.a.pS OF LATE GOTHIC DETAIL.]

For a long while painters hesitated to obscure the gla.s.s much; they shaded very delicately, and used hatchings, and a sort of scribble of lines, to deepen the shadows. As a result the shading appears sometimes weak, but the gla.s.s is always brilliant.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 237. FAIRFORD.]

With the progress of the century stronger stipple shading was used; more roundness and greater depth of shadow was thus achieved, at proportionate cost of silvery whiteness and brilliancy in the gla.s.s.

The characteristic of the later technique was that it depended less upon mosaic, and more upon paint.

Leads were not used unless they were constructionally unavoidable; and it was sought to avoid them. The nimbus, for example, was glazed in one piece with the head (page 189), stained perhaps, or with a pattern in stain upon it, to distinguish it from the face; or it showed white against the yellow hair.

From the lead lines alone of an Early window, and of many a Decorated one, you could read the design quite plainly. The later the period the less that is so. By the end of the fifteenth century the lead lines convey very often little or no idea of the picture, which they hold together but no longer outline. Canopies, for example, are sometimes leaded in square quarries, without regard to the drawing, except where that must be (page 342).

A pretty sure sign of period is afforded by the way the leads give, or do not give, the design. Exceptions are mentioned on page 73. Where leads seem to occur more or less as it happens, as though they might have been an after-thought, that is most positive proof of Late work.

SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

Renaissance gla.s.s does not, like Gothic, divide itself into periods. It was at its best when it was still in touch with mediaeval tradition.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 238. FRENCH RENAISSANCE, MOSAIC.]

The finest work in the new manner must be ascribed therefore to the first half of the sixteenth century. After that its merits belong more to picture than to gla.s.s.

Apart from details of architecture, ornament (as above), costume and so on, which at once proclaim the style, it is difficult to distinguish between Gothic and Renaissance gla.s.s of the very early sixteenth century. The distinction does not in fact exist; for Gothic traditions survive even in work belonging, according to the evidence of its detail, to the Renaissance.

_Design._--Design takes now mainly the pictorial direction. It spreads itself more invariably over the whole face of the window. The canopy, for example, is seldom confined to a single light.

_Canopies._--The canopy scheme is at first not widely removed from Gothic precedent, although the detail may be p.r.o.nouncedly Renaissance.

It frames the subject as before; but it is less positively white. It is enriched with much more yellow stain; and the ma.s.s of white and stain is broken by festoons and wreaths of foliage, fruit, and flowers, medallions with coloured ground, ribbons, or other such features, in pot-metal colour. A simple Francois Ier canopy is given on page 349.

Sometimes these canopies consist rather of arabesque ornament than of anything that can properly be called architectural, in white and yellow (page 350), or perhaps all in yellow, upon a ground of pot-metal colour (page 205); that is to say, the setting out of the window and the technique employed are absolutely Gothic, and perhaps not even very late Gothic, whilst the detail is altogether Renaissance in design. This mosaic manner (as at Auch) bespeaks, of course, the early years of the Renaissance.

Another sure sign of lingering Gothic influence is where the round arch is fringed with cusping.

The more typically Renaissance form of design is where a huge monumental structure fills the greater part of the window, not canopying a subject, but having in front of it a figure group (Transept of S.

Gudule, page 71). The foreground figures stand out in dark relief against the architecture and the sky beyond, seen through the central arch. Into this grey-blue merges very often a distant landscape, painted in great part upon the blue, and really seeming to recede into the distance. The effect of distance is largely obtained by contrast with the strong shadow of the soffits and sides of the arch seen in perspective.

We have here four characteristics of Renaissance gla.s.s:--

1. The monumental canopy with figures in front of it.

2. Strong contrast of light and shade.

3. Fairly accurate perspective in the architecture.

4. Something like atmospheric effect in the landscape, which is painted more or less upon the sky.

When in a canopy the shadowed portions of the architecture are glazed in deep-coloured gla.s.s (purple, as a rule), and not darkened by painting, it indicates the early part of the century. The canopy, instead of being arched, ends sometimes in a rich frieze and cornice (Church of Brou).