Windows, A Book About Stained & Painted Glass Part 25

When it is in two stages, enclosing two subjects, the lower one has naturally this horizontal entablature (Chapel of the Holy Sacrament, S.

Gudule).

A less usual treatment is where the figures do not occupy the foreground, but are seen through the arch. The subject occupies, in fact, very much the position of a painted altar-piece in a carved stone altar.

Foreground figures prove often to be donors and their patron saints. The head of the window above the great architectural canopy, as it is convenient to call it, is usually of plain white gla.s.s, glazed in rectangular or diamond quarries (page 71).

A coloured ground above a Renaissance canopy indicates Gothic tradition, and an Early period therefore (S. Jacques, Liege).

More to the latter half of the century belong the pictorial compositions in which architecture, more or less proper to the subject, fills great part of the window, the foremost arches adapting themselves, sometimes, to the stonework. In this case the architecture is in white gla.s.s, more or less obscured by painted shadow; and pot-metal colour occurs only in the figures, where it is perhaps quite rich, in occasional columns of coloured marble, and in a peep of pale blue distance seen through some window or other opening (page 213).

[Ill.u.s.tration: 239. FRANcOIS IER CANOPY, LYONS.]

The grey-blue distance has often figures as well as landscape and architecture painted upon it; to represent verdure it is stained green.

Blue is more usual than white as a ground; but that also occurs, similarly painted. The not very usual landscape in white, with a blue sky above, in the windows of King's College Chapel, Cambridge, belongs to the early part of the century.

_Tracery._--In small windows the subject, or its canopy, is often carried up into the tracery lights (page 368), or the architecture ends abruptly and horizontally at the springing of the arch, and the heads of the lights are treated as part of the tracery.

Tracery lights often contain figure subjects. Very commonly they are occupied by figures of angels robed in white and stain, or in rich colour, or with colour only in their wings, playing upon musical instruments, bearing emblems, scrolls, and so on, all on a coloured ground (page 280). There occur also, but less frequently, cherubic heads, portrait medallions, badges, twisted labels, or other devices, upon a ground of ruby, pale blue, purple, or purple-brown. A purple or purplish background is of the period.

Coloured grounds are used without borders. White grounds are usually diapered with clouds.

There is no very distinctive treatment of rose windows. They are filled as pictorially as they well can be. They contain, perhaps, a central subject and in the outer lights angels, cherubs, and the like, much as in other tracery lights.

_Ornament._--The detail of their ornament is a ready means of distinguis.h.i.+ng Renaissance windows. In place of Gothic leaf.a.ge we have scrollwork of the marked arabesque or grotesque character derived from Italy. It needs no description.

Screens and draperies have often patterns in white and stain on ruby and other coloured grounds, produced by abrading the red and painting and staining the white thus exposed. The process may be detected by the absence of intervening lead between the white or yellow and the deep ground.

Other damask patterns are stained on the coloured gla.s.s without abrasion, yellow on blue giving green, on purple olive, and so on.

Ornamental windows scarcely go beyond quarry work, with a border of white and stain. Except in quarry windows, borders are seldom used.

Grisaille windows scarcely occur. The little subjects in white and stain painted upon a single piece of gla.s.s, usually circular and framed in quarries or in a cartouche set in plain glazing (page 352), belong to a cla.s.s by themselves.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 240. CHURCH OF S. PETER, COLOGNE.]

_Technique._--In many respects the technique of the Renaissance gla.s.s painter is only a carrying further of the later Gothic means. He uses more and more white gla.s.s, employing it also as a background; he uses more shades of coloured gla.s.s, especially pale blues, greens, and purples; he chooses his gla.s.s more carefully for specific purposes; he uses more coated gla.s.s, and abrades it; he makes greater use of stain, staining upon all manner of colours--ruby, blue, purple, green--and even painting in stain, and picking out high lights upon it in white. He paints delicate work more delicately. Flesh-painting he carries to a very high point of perfection, more especially in the portraits of Donors. In strengthening his shadows he eventually gets them muddy. At first he used to hatch them to get additional strength; eventually he was not careful always so much as to stipple them. He uses often a warmer brown pigment for flesh painting, and by-and-by resorts to a quite reddish tint by way of local colour; he uses large pieces of gla.s.s when he can, and glazes his backgrounds and other large surfaces in rectangular panes. Above canopies he comes to use pure white gla.s.s, as if to suggest that the canopy is solid, and beyond only atmosphere.

The one quite new departure in sixteenth century technique was the use of enamel colour (see Chapter VIII.). That began to come into use towards the middle of the century. When you detect the least touch of enamel colour in a window, other than the pinkish flesh tint, you may suspect that it belongs to the second half of the century; when it seriously affects the design and colour of the window, you may be sure it does. But it is not until quite the end of the century that mosaic anywhere practically gives way to enamel painting.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 241. S. JEAN, TROYES, 1678.]

The sixteenth century, therefore, includes, broadly speaking, all that is best in Renaissance gla.s.s and much that is already on the decline.

There is a tide in the affairs of art; and after the full flood of the Renaissance, sweeping all before it, glazing and gla.s.s painting sank to the very lowest ebb, out of sight in fact of craftsmans.h.i.+p. Only here and there, by way of rare exception, was good or interesting work any longer done,--as for example at Troyes, where good traditions, piously preserved in a family of exceptionally skilful gla.s.s painters, were followed long after they were elsewhere extinct.

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

You may recognise seventeenth century work not so much by any new departure in design (except that it aims more and more at the effect of an oil picture, and that the portrait of the Donor and his family const.i.tutes the picture) as by its departure from the old methods, the methods above described; by the introduction of pure white gla.s.s, glazed in geometric pattern, in the upper half of the window or, it may be, as a background; by the use of enamel paint instead of coloured gla.s.s; by the abuse of heavy shading (in the vain attempt to get chiaroscuro), and by a loss, consequently, of the old translucency and brilliancy; by the aggressiveness of the lead lines (now that it is sought to do as much as possible without them); by the adoption of thin-coloured gla.s.s, toned by paint, instead of deep pot-metal; by the occurrence of whole panes of gla.s.s coated with solid paint; by the decay of the enamel; and by the general dilapidation of the window.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 242. CERTOSA IN VAL D'EMA.]

The unlearned must not be misled by the shabbiness of a window, by the breakages, the disfiguring leads which represent repair, the peeling off of the paint, and so on, into the supposition that these are signs of antiquity. On the contrary, the very method of its making was the saving of Early gla.s.s, and Late work owes its vicissitudes largely to the mistaken process adopted in its execution,--by which you may know it.

It would be beyond the scope of a book about gla.s.s to go more thoroughly into the characteristics of style generally. Enough to indicate what more especially concerns the subject in hand.

Without some slight acquaintance with the course of art, it will perhaps be difficult to trace the development of gla.s.s design. Historical or antiquarian knowledge of any kind will make it more easy. Not merely the character of ornament or architecture, but the details of lettering, costume, heraldry, give evidence in abundance to those who can read it; but it is with art and craftsmans.h.i.+p that we have here to do.

The data given in this chapter and throughout are derived from the study of old work. Winston and other authorities have been referred to only to corroborate impressions gained by personal experience,--the experience only of a designer, a workman, a lover of gla.s.s, professing to no more learning than a student must in the course of study acquire.

Nevertheless these few notes on what is characteristic in design and workmans.h.i.+p, may, it is hoped, be helpful to artists, craftsmen, students, and lovers of art, and perhaps sufficient for their guidance.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

STYLE IN MODERN GLa.s.s (A POSTSCRIPT).

It is easy, and it is only too common a thing, for the designer to depend for inspiration over much upon old work; but until he knows what has been done he is not fully equipped for his trade.

Moreover, a workman skilled only in his craft may be prolific in good work: one, on the other hand, learned only in archaeology, is, in the nature of things, sterile. He may know as much about old gla.s.s as Winston, and fail as utterly even to direct design a-right as he did at Glasgow. The Munich windows there are glaring evidence as to what a learned antiquary and devoted gla.s.s-lover can countenance. Too surely the fire of archaeological zeal warps a man's artistic judgment.

What, then, about historic style? Are we to disregard it in our work?

That question may be answered by another: What about old work? Old work, it is argued, should be our guide. Well, old work preaches no adherence to past styles. It went its own way, in delightful unconsciousness that the notion could ever occur to any one deliberately to go back to a manner long since out of vogue; and when the idea of a Renaissance did occur to the artist, he very soon made it something quite different from the thing he set out to revive--if ever that was his deliberate intention.

It is too lightly a.s.sumed that "the styles" are there, ready made for us, and that all we have to do is to make our choice between them, and take the nearest to a fit we can find. So many of us only learn to copy, whereas the whole use of copying is to learn. Artists study style for information, not authority.

The truth is, no style of old gla.s.s is fas.h.i.+oned to our use. Early Gothic gla.s.s has most to teach us with regard to the mosaic treatment of the material, and perhaps also about breadth and simplicity of design; but when it comes to figure drawing and painting, here is surely no model for a nineteenth century draughtsman. Renaissance work has most to teach in the way of painting and pictorial treatment; but it is not an exemplar of workmanlike and considerate handling of gla.s.s.

Because Early work was badly drawn, because Decorated was ill-proportioned, because Perpendicular was enshrined in stone-suggesting canopy work, because Renaissance was apt to depend too much upon finish, because seventeenth century work was overburdened with paint; must a man, therefore, according to the style of the building for which his work is destined, make it rude, misproportioned, stonelike, ultra-finished, or over-painted?

It happens that Early figure work in gla.s.s was mostly in deep rich colour. Are we to have no figures, therefore, in grisaille? It happens that later gla.s.s was, at its best, delicate and silvery in effect. Are we, therefore, to have no rich windows any more? Thirteenth century pictures were diminutive in scale. Are we to have no larger pictures ever? Sixteenth century subjects spread themselves over the whole window. Are we never to frame our gla.s.s pictures? And as to that frame, are we to choose once and for all the ornamental details of this period or that, or the formula of design adopted at a given time?

Whether in the matter of technique or treatment, of colour or design, no one style of old gla.s.s is enough for us. What does an historic style mean? Partly it means that during such and such years such and such forms were in fas.h.i.+on; partly it means that by that time technique had reached such and such a point, and no further. Must we rest there? If at a certain period in the history of design the scope of the gla.s.s painter was limited, his art rude, shall we limit ourselves in a like manner? If at another it was debased, ought we to degrade our design, just because the building into which our work is to go is of that date, or pretends to be? It was the merest accident that in the thirteenth century drawing was stiff and design more downright than refined, that the appliances of the glazier were simple, and the technique of the painter imperfect. It was an accident that silver stain was not discovered until towards the middle of the fourteenth century, that the idea of abrading colour-coated gla.s.s did not occur to any one until nearly a century later, that the use of the gla.s.s-cutter's diamond is a comparatively modern invention, and so on.

Out of the very scarcity of the craftsman's means good came; and there is a very necessary lesson to us in that; but to throw away what newer and more perfect means we have (all his knowledge is ours, if we will) is sheer perversity.

To affect a style is practically to adopt the faults and follies of the period. If you are bent upon making your gla.s.s look like sixteenth century work, you glaze it in squares, and introduce enamel. To treat it mosaically would be not to make it characteristic enough of the period for your pedant, notwithstanding that sixteenth century gla.s.s was, by exception, treated in a glazier-like fas.h.i.+on.

Should one, then, it may be asked, take the exception for model? The answer to that is: take the best, and only the best. It is no concern of the artist whether it be exceptional or of every-day occurrence; some kinds of excellence can never be common. Is it good? That is the question he has to ask himself.

With regard to the use of the forms peculiar to a style--Gothic Tracery or Renaissance Arabesque--that is very much a question of a man's temperament. Has he any sympathy with them? Does that seem to him the thing worth doing? If his personal bias be that way, who shall say him nay? a.s.sume even that the conditions of the case demand Decorated or Italian detail, it does not follow that they demand precisely the treatment of such detail found in the fourteenth or the sixteenth century.

The style of a building is not to be ignored. To put, nowadays, in a thirteenth or fourteenth century church windows in the style of the fifteenth or sixteenth would be absurd; to put in a fifteenth or sixteenth century church windows in the style of the thirteenth or fourteenth, more foolish still. But it does not follow that in a church of any given century, the modern windows should be as nearly as possible what would have been done in that century.

No man in his senses, no artist at all events, ever denied that the designer of a stained gla.s.s window must take into consideration the architecture of the building of which his work is to form part. The only possible question is as to what consideration may be due to it.

The archaeologist (and perhaps sometimes the architect) claims too much.

Certainly he claims too much when he pretends that the designer of a window should confine himself to the imitation of what has already been done in gla.s.s belonging to the period of the building, or of the period which the building affects. Why should the modern designer submit to be shackled by obsolete traditions? What is his sin against art, that he should do this dreary penance, imposed by architectural or ecclesiastical authority? And what good is to come of it?