by apostles, saints, and angels; the same subject as that of the west
window of York Minster which it was probably meant to, and
certainly does, surpass. The figures themselves, however, still suffer
from the conventionality and affectation of the period, and it was not
for twenty years more that there was to be a change in that quarter as
well.
[Sidenote: William of Wykeham and Thomas the Glazier.]
It was in 1380, or soon after, that new life came into the art through
the piety and enterprise of William of Wykeham, whose influence may be
compared to that of Abbot Suger in the twelfth century, and the genius
of his master glazier, Thomas. Of the latter we only know his name
from the portrait of himself which he put in the windows of Winchester
College Chapel (now, alas! only modern copies of the originals), with
the inscription "Thomas operator ist. vitri," but his hand is easily
recognizable not only at Winchester, and in the three original lights
from thence now in South Kensington Museum, but in the glorious set of
windows in the antechapel of New College at Oxford.
[Sidenote: New College antechapel.]
There had been no such work as this last done since the best days of
the thirteenth century. Here, once again, one finds the art used as a
means of emotional expression not only in the deep and solemn
harmonies of colour that strike one with a thrill on entering the
building, but in the treatment of the subjects themselves, in which
the artist breaks completely away from the conventionalism of the
preceding period.
The antechapel of New College, a graceful piece of Early
Perpendicular, is really, like that at Merton, a cross transept at the
west end of the Chapel, forming a =T= of which the antechapel is the
head, having windows on all its four sides--two on the east, on either
side of the entrance to the Chapel proper, two on the north, one on
the south, and three on the west. The glass of the great central west
window was taken out to make room for Jervais' smudgy rendering in
muddy browns and yellows of Sir Joshua Reynolds' famous Virtues. I am
not concerned with this but with the other windows, which contain,
though some of the lights are evidently out of their order, the
original glazing which William of Wykeham placed here when he built
the Chapel, between 1380 and 1386.
[Sidenote: The canopies.]
The design of the windows is a very simple one. The horizontal transom
divides each window into two equal tiers of four, or, in the eastern
windows, six, lights with tracery above. Each light is filled with a
figure standing on a pedestal and under a canopy, both canopy and
pedestal being white, enriched with touches of yellow stain, relieved
against a background which is, or was, blue and red in alternate
lights, the colour of the background inside the canopy being
counterchanged with the colour outside. From this arrangement and from
the presence of the pedestal I think the artist had seen both Wells
and the east windows of Gloucester Cathedral, but the architecture of
his canopies is of a fantastic kind peculiar to this school and unlike
anything in glass of the styles which preceded and followed it, but
based to some extent on the stone canopies of the late fourteenth
century, such as those on the screen of the west front of Exeter
Cathedral. The most noticeable feature in them is the number of queer
rounded turrets with pepper-box tops, modelled in relief. Indeed for
their solidity, as well as for their violent and untrue perspective,
these canopies have more in common with those introduced at Fairford a
hundred years later, when the continental influence was coming in,
than with the typical canopy of English Perpendicular.
From the large amount of space that is occupied by the canopy work,
the general effect of these windows is rather a white one (though
white in all old work is a relative term, the white in this case
consisting really of a delicate play of greenish, yellowish, and pure
white continually contrasted), and the most beautiful to my mind are
those in which, as in the windows on the north side which face one on
entering, the figures themselves are almost entirely covered with a
coloured mantle which makes a broad splash of distinctive colour in
the middle of each light.
[Sidenote: The eastern windows.]
Although all the windows conform to the same general design, those on
the east side, on each side of the entrance to the Chapel proper, seem
to me to be by a different hand, and were probably done first. They
contain or contained originally no colours but red and blue, and the
drawing of the figures has much of the conventionalism of the earlier
fourteenth century work. The upper tier consists of the twelve
apostles, and the lower is believed to have contained the figure of
the crucified Christ with His mother and St. John on either side,
repeated four times. The figures of Christ have all been destroyed and
replaced by figures from elsewhere, perhaps from the destroyed west
window; but three figures of the Virgin and three of St. John remain,
though it was only in 1900 that they were replaced in what I have
little doubt were their original positions. It may, of course, be
that these windows are by the same artist as the others, but done
before he had quite found himself or emancipated himself from the
conventionalities of his predecessors, for he has infused a certain
amount of life into the old forms; and the "Mater Dolorosa," in spite
of her conventional S-like pose, is a tender and pathetic figure.
[Sidenote: The colouring.]
There is, however, no trace of this conventionality in the other
windows, quaint though the drawing may be, and in the colour of them
the artist has fairly "let himself go." I know of no better piece of
"colour music" in the world than is afforded by the double tier of
prophets and patriarchs which occupy the two northern windows which
face one on entering--deep rich purple of many shades, warm green,
slaty-blue, brown, and a splendid blood-red ruby with a great deal of
variety in it; the changes are rung on these in the mantles, hats, and
shoes of the figures, while the reds and blues of the backgrounds form
a connecting link between them all. A pretty detail is the powdering
of the backgrounds to the figures in all the windows with the initials
of the personage represented, in white Lombardic letters surmounted by
little gold crowns. The drawing is, I admit, quaint,--Thomas was not a
great draughtsman even for his time; far from it,--but it is always
big, masculine, and expressive, with a strong feeling for decorative
line. To copy the scrolls which twist and flutter round the prophets
in the upper tier is in itself a lesson in design.
[Sidenote: Eve.]
Perhaps nowhere is his originality of conception so well shown as in
the figure of Eve, in the northern west window. Instead of
representing her, as nearly every other artist has done to the best of
his ability, as a graceful nude, he has given us a peasant woman of
his own time, spinning with a distaff and spindle. I do not know that
he has even tried to make her pretty, and in the simple drawing of the
folds of her colourless dress he has managed to suggest that it is of
coarse thick stuff. She is neither nymph nor princess but the sharer
of man's daily drudgery. In looking at her one is unavoidably reminded
of the lines which Wat Tyler's followers had sung only a year or two
before:--
When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?
The little upright tracery lights are filled with angels, but in the
summit of the northern east window is a small figure of William of
Wykeham kneeling before his Saviour, who shows His wounds. This and
the mutilated inscription at the base of each light, "Orate pro
Willelmo de Wykeham, Episcopo Wynton, fundatore istius collegii," is
all there is to tell of the donor. There was a new spirit abroad; no
longer were the portrait and arms of the patron allowed to usurp half,
or, as at Tewkesbury, the whole of a church window, nor in England, at
all events till the end of the fifteenth century, was the practice
again revived to quite the same extent.
These windows mark the second of the great periodic impulses in
stained glass, which I spoke of at the beginning of the book. Only the
second, I consider, for though there had been many changes in style
since the twelfth century, each had meant, on the whole, a loss of
beauty rather than a gain, whereas now we find a sudden infusion of
new life into the art, which did not in England lose its force for
fifty or sixty years to come, and produced a new style, the style of
the Third Period. To me these windows are one of the great art
treasures of the world, yet as I lately sat there all through a long
spring afternoon, party after party of visitors, many of them people
educated enough, one would think, to know better, came in to gaze
awe-struck at Sir Joshua's muddy brown Virtues, and left without a
glance at the glorious colour harmonies which surrounded them.
[Sidenote: Winchester College.]
Of other work of Thomas the Glazier and his school--the Winchester
school, as Mr. Westlake calls it--little but fragments remain, unless
one counts a window in the south aisle of the Lady Chapel of York
Minster, the third from the east, which somewhat resembles their work
and represents just about the same stage in development. William of
Wykeham's next great work was the founding of Winchester College in
1387, and in what remains of its glass the hand of Thomas can be
clearly seen. But, alas! in the early nineteenth century they took out
the old glass and substituted modern copies; it was their method of
restoration in those days. The old glass seems to have been the
perquisite of the glazier, and three of the lights, after various
peregrinations,--spending eight years in a window of St. Mary's,
Shrewsbury,--have found their way to South Kensington Museum where
they may still be seen. In style they are very like the north, west,
and south windows at New College, and quite obviously by the same
hand, though perhaps the canopies, at least in one case, show a very
slight progress towards the regular Perpendicular type. The material
seems to me much the same as at New College, but for some reason
the coloured glass is much more pitted by the weather and consequently
obscured, though the white, perhaps from a different shop, is in
splendid preservation.
[Illustration: PLATE XXXVIII
KNEELING DONORS, FROM "ACTS OF MERCY" WINDOW, ALL SAINTS', NORTH
STREET, YORK
Fifteenth Century]
[Sidenote: Winchester Cathedral.]
The great west window of Winchester Cathedral contains fragments and a
few whole figures of very similar work, and there are others in the
side windows of the nave. William of Wykeham's will, made in 1403,
leaves money for the glazing of the Cathedral windows "beginning from
the west at the first window of the new work done by him," which
sounds as if the west end had been already glazed. Indeed the
fragments there are more like the eastern windows (the earliest, if I
am right) in New College antechapel, while in the fragments that
remain in the side windows of the nave the later hand can be traced,
though the tendency in the canopies of these is to assimilate
gradually to the regular Perpendicular type which by this time had
been developed elsewhere.
Winston thinks the west window of the Cathedral may have been glazed
in the time of William of Wykeham's predecessor, Bishop Edington, in
which case it is not unlikely that it and the east windows of the
antechapel at New College were the work of Thomas's master, whose
style was further developed and improved by Thomas himself.
[Illustration: PLATE XXXIX
FIGURE, FROM "VISITING THE PRISONERS," IN "ACTS OF MERCY" WINDOW,
ALL SAINTS', NORTH STREET, YORK
Fifteenth Century]
XIII
THE STYLE OF THE THIRD PERIOD
[Sidenote: Divergence between English and French schools.]
A notable feature of the fifteenth century is the divergence which
takes place in it between the styles of English and French stained
glass. Although in some respects they develop along parallel lines the
two no longer form, as they did almost to the end of the fourteenth
century, one school. The Hundred Years' War has done its work, and
produced a separation of spirit for which the world has, perhaps, been
the poorer ever since.
Indeed for the first half of the fifteenth century, during which the
best of the English work was done, the quantity of stained glass
produced in France seems to have been almost negligible, and a
comparison of the conditions of the two countries is a sufficient
explanation of this fact. While England was becoming rich and
prosperous and developing her foreign trade, France was laid waste by
war and struggling to free herself from the foreigner who had beaten
her down. It was not till the English had been finally expelled, and
France had emerged from the struggle a stronger State than she had
ever been before, that the art revived; and when it did so it owed
little, as is not surprising, to English influence, but on the other
hand began to feel, almost at once, the influence of the Continental
schools of painting.
In England, on the other hand, in spite of the quarrels of the nobles
and the rival claimants to the throne, the middle class were steadily
growing wealthy and powerful. The wool trade was bringing a great deal
of money into the country, and the result is still seen not only in
the number and size of Perpendicular churches that were built, but in
the immense output of stained glass that took place. The fifteenth
century, indeed, was by far the most prolific period in the history of
English stained glass, and, in spite of four hundred years of
destruction, vast quantities of it still remain.
[Sidenote: General characteristics of the English style.]
The general characteristics which distinguish the English style in
glass in the Third Period--the "Perpendicular" style--are as
follows:--
(1) The type of canopy.
(2) The increased amount of white in figure and canopy work, with
the delicate and accomplished use of silver stain.
(3) The more advanced style of drawing.
(4) The abandonment of natural form in ornament.
(5) The supersession of all other forms of grisaille ornament by
regular quarries.
(6) The material used.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The canopy.]
(1) _The Type of Canopy._--Although in the fifteenth, as in the
fourteenth century, figures were occasionally placed directly on a
background of white quarries, as may be seen at York, in the
clerestory of St. Martin's-le-Grand, and in the transepts of the
Minster, the fifteenth century artists showed no signs of wishing to
abandon the canopy.
It was a curious freak of fate that imposed the canopy upon
stained-glass designers and made it a _sine quâ non_ for two hundred
years. It has certain obvious advantages, it is true. It conveniently
filled the head of the light, and its upright lines and pinnacles
repeated those of the surrounding architecture and made the window
part of it; but the imitation of a stone niche in glass is hard to
justify on abstract grounds, and it is difficult now to understand
the enthusiasm which, as soon as it was introduced, made its adoption
so universal that, with few exceptions, the artists of the day seemed
unable to conceive of a single figure or a set of subject panels
otherwise than surmounted by a bewildering mass of crockets and
pinnacles. It is true that in the hands of mediæval craftsmen, in
England at least, there was no attempt, as there was later, at literal
imitation of stone-work; the canopy was rather ornament with an
architectural motif, and as such possessed beauty; but I cannot help
thinking that if they had never adopted it they would have evolved
some other ornamental form which, while serving the same purposes,
would have been more strictly in accordance with the rules of sound
art, and might have given more room for the play of individual fancy.
[Illustration: PLATE XL
SMALL FIGURES IN WHITE AND STAIN, FROM ALL SAINTS', NORTH STREET,
YORK
Fifteenth Century]
Though, however, the English fifteenth century craftsmen did not
abandon the canopy, they profoundly modified it and made it far more
pliant and adaptable. Plates XXXIV. and XXXV. from York will give a
better idea of the canopies of the early fifteenth century than any
description. It will be seen that the single overpowering crocketted
gable and wall-sided tower of the fourteenth century has disappeared,
and in its place we have a froth of pinnacles, windows,
buttresses and niches all in white and yellow stain, on a background
of colour. The earlier attempt at modelling the canopies in the round,
which is seen in the work of the Winchester school, had been
abandoned, and although every little shaft has its light and dark side
delicately distinguished, this counts for little except to diversify
the surface, the forms being expressed principally in strong and
simple outline. The extent to which this simplification of outline was
carried may be seen in the little crocketted pinnacles, such as those
at the bottom of Plate XXXIV., which are characteristic of all English
work of the time. There is, as you may see, no attempt to draw or
model the foliation of the crockets, which are simply knobs outlined
in the flat with a thick black line. This method is the salvation of
English Perpendicular work, and shows the thorough understanding on
the part of our craftsmen of the technical problem. In French work
later on in the century, and in much modern pseudo-Gothic work, the
attempt is made to express the canopy work in fine lines and delicate
modelling, which, in the result, appears confused and indistinct, and
too weak for the leading and for the coloured figure work it
encloses.
[Sidenote: The skilful use of silver stain.]
(2) _The Increased Amount of White used._--Not only is the canopy
white, but there is also as a rule a good deal of white in the figures
within it, which are generally relieved against a diapered flat
background of colour. Just one figure at New College has the
brown-pink flesh colour, and that is its last appearance. Everywhere
else one finds white used, the hair, in the case of women and young
men, being stained yellow. This large increase in the use of white
glass was accompanied, and indeed made possible, by a most delicate
and skilful use of the yellow silver stain. This operation, of all
others in stained-glass work, calls for the greatest exercise of taste
and judgment as well as skill on the part of the craftsman,--_experto
crede_,--and in its use the English workers of the first
three-quarters of the fifteenth century stand unrivalled.
[Sidenote: Loss of mosaic character.]
This use of white in the figures and canopies rendered unnecessary the
old fourteenth century plan of dividing the window up into alternate
panels of grisaille and colour, and this is abandoned. Another result
is the loss of the essentially mosaic character of the older windows.
So much could now be expressed with stain and brown enamel on one
piece of glass that, although the pieces used were still comparatively
small, it was no longer necessary to surround every form with a lead
as a matter of course. Plate XXXVI. is a good instance of this. The
green-striped background to the figures is the work of the restorer
and was probably once blue, as in Plate XXXVII., and this and the red
mantle surcoat and shield are the only forms that it was absolutely
necessary to lead in separately. It is true that, either for emphasis
or from habit, the artist has outlined the man's knees in lead; but he
need not have done so, and it would indeed have been easier not to. In
the next plate (Plate XXXVII.) the leading on the white takes very
little account of the drawing.
Out of these conditions then arose a wholly new attitude towards the
leading. Hitherto the disposition of the lead-work had followed
naturally and inevitably from the design--the artist drew in lead, so
to speak, merely supplementing it with the finer painted line; whereas
now the leads had, in part at least, to be so arranged as not to
interfere with the drawing, or only to emphasize it when needed, a
matter requiring much more thought. A comparison of either of the
above plates with Plate IV. will illustrate the difference. Hence we
find a gradual tendency to use larger pieces of glass and fewer leads
(the latter being sometimes concealed behind the iron-work), till by
the end of the century the jewel-like quality of the early glass is a
thing wholly lost and forgotten.
[Sidenote: The method of drawing.]
[Sidenote: Matt shading.]
(3) _The more Advanced Style of Drawing._--The older conventions in
drawing had, as we have seen, become outgrown and abandoned, and all
through the last part of the fourteenth century there is a steady
struggle for a more advanced method of expression. At the beginning of
the fifteenth century, drawing, in England at least, crystallized once
more into a convention satisfying to the mind of the time, which left
the artist free to tell his story. Plates XXXIX. to XLIII. are
examples of it as found at York, and Plate XLIV. from Canterbury does
not greatly differ in method. The drawing still depends chiefly on
line work, but the line work is far finer than before and is used to
express modelling with the help of the matt shading. This last is the
form of shading which has survived to modern times, and is done by
laying a flat semi-transparent coat or "matt" of enamel over the whole
surface of the glass, and, when it is dry, and before it is fired,
brushing out graduated lights and half tones with a small stiff
hog's-hair brush. Sometimes, but not always, the matt was stippled
when wet, as may be seen in Plate XLII. In later times the matt
shading was, and sometimes still is, abused in the attempt to give
modelling in high relief by its means alone, a method which results in
the loading of the glass with opaque muddy brown, while the modelling
becomes untrue with changing lights. This, however, was hardly done
within the limits of the period I am writing about in this book, in
which the drawing of form is still principally dependent on line work,
and is merely helped and softened with the matt.
[Illustration: PLATE XLI
HEADS, FROM ALL SAINTS', NORTH STREET, YORK
Fifteenth Century]
[Sidenote: The type of figure.]
The figures themselves in contrast to those of the previous period are
rather short and ungraceful, but, in the best work at least, very much
alive. The quaint nose of which Plate XLII. is an extreme type is
curiously universal throughout English work of the time, and was, I
suppose, the accepted type of beauty.
[Sidenote: Forms used in the ornament.]
(4) _The Abandonment of Natural Plant Forms in Ornament._--The natural
plant forms, which were so universally used in fourteenth century
ornament, were abruptly abandoned at the beginning of the fifteenth.
Their place is taken, in the diapered backgrounds to the figures, by a
curious long serrated leaf, rather like certain kinds of seaweed,
which may be seen in Plates XXXVII. and XXXVIII. Borders become less
frequent, and when they occur generally consist of a leaf of something
the same sort, in white and stain, wrapping round a central stem,
sometimes with and sometimes without a coloured background. Later on,
the conventional pomegranate pattern is occasionally introduced in
vestments and hangings, but it is the exception for coloured garments
to be ornamented except with an edging. White garments are sometimes
powdered with little devices in yellow stain, as in Plate XXXIX. The
edgings to bishops' copes are often of white set with coloured jewels,
which are sometimes let into the middle of a piece of glass without
its being cut across--a _tour de force_ of glazing very difficult to
accomplish and not worth the trouble when done.