general design of the fourteenth century windows in the same churches.
Thus the window in the chapel of SS. Peter and Paul in St. Ouen, which
Mr. Westlake thinks to be the work of Guillaume Barbe, 1459-85, has
much the same arrangement and proportions as the S. Gervais window in
the south choir aisle shown in Plate XXV.; that is to say, a small
figure panel, under a big canopy, is set half-way up each tall light
of which the top and bottom is filled with quarries. There is the same
coloured background to the canopy, ending at the top in the same
arched shape, but in the treatment of the canopy itself one finds a
difference not only from fourteenth century work but from English work
of the fifteenth century. The French canopy, as I have said, had
never, like the English, been reduced to an almost flat pattern of
intricate line work, and in these Rouen windows one finds the artist
already trying to imitate stone-work modelled in relief with results
that are heavy and unsatisfactory. It is not that, in English work,
individual shafts are not given a light and dark side, but the canopy
is not, as in French work, modelled as a solid whole, and the strong
line work seems to keep it right.
[Sidenote: The revival.]
It was not, however, till the second half of the century that any new
life came into French stained-glass work, and when it came it brought
with it a skill in picture-making that was borrowed from contemporary
painting. To this period belong, I think, the fragments from Rouen
shown in Plates XLV. to XLIX. The heads of St. Catherine and the old
man, if compared with those from York, show the strong difference in
facial type between French and English work at this time. The stain
on the hair of St. Catherine is very coarse and inartistic as compared
with English work, but then no other nation ever equalled the English
in their delicate and refined use of stain.
[Sidenote: St. Maclou.]
The two heads of Angels (Plates XLVIII., XLIX.), which are from the
north transept of St. Ouen, are, I think, by the same hand as an
interesting "Assumption of the Virgin," which now occupies two lights
of a window in the north aisle of St. Maclou in the same city. A
significant point about this glass is that the picture, which is
enclosed by a wide, flat-arched canopy, delicately modelled, stretches
right across both lights, completely ignoring the intervening mullion,
one of the first hints that stained glass was forgetting its
architectural mission.[18] The composition is much more ambitious and
pictorial, and the drawing more advanced than in any of the glass we
have hitherto considered. In front is a crowd of kneeling saints in
robes of blue, red, and green, above whom the Virgin kneels before the
Almighty, while the top of the picture is filled with rows of
golden-haired angels with red wings on a blue ground, of a
similar type to those illustrated. I should put the date of the window
at about 1470-80.
[Illustration: PLATE XLVIII
ANGEL'S HEAD, FROM GREAT ROSE WINDOW IN NORTH TRANSEPT OF ST. OUEN'S,
ROUEN
Fifteenth Century]
[Sidenote: The Lady Chapel at Evreux.]
Of about the same date are the side windows of the Lady Chapel of the
Cathedral at Evreux, of which the building was finished, I believe, in
1475. I am surprised that Mr. Westlake, in his notice of the chapel,
only mentions the east window with its Jesse tree, which to me is much
less beautiful than the others, and which I should be inclined to
attribute, at the earliest, to the very end of the century, if not to
the following one. The four side windows tell the story of Christ's
Ministry, Passion, and Resurrection, and show His second coming. Their
arrangement is somewhat English, each window having two tiers of
lights, each of which has a subject enclosed in a white canopy, but
the technique is different from the English. By far the best is the
first window of the series, which contains eight scenes from the
Ministry of Christ, from the Marriage in Cana to the Entry into
Jerusalem. The canopy work with its little figures in niches is
modelled as Van Eyck might have done it; the method would not tell
well at a distance, but owing to the narrowness of the chapel one
cannot get far away from these windows. The figure panels are very
rich in colour, Christ being always dressed in a deep purple, and the
other figures in rich greens, blues, and reds. The other windows of
the series are not quite so good, being thinner and poorer in effect,
and seem to me to have been executed by another hand, possibly from
the designs of the author of the first window, who may have died in
the interval. There is a good deal of similar work in the church of
St. Taurin in the same town.
From the pictorial point of view these windows are much more
accomplished than anything that had so far been done in England. In
comparing English and French fifteenth century work, however, it must
always be remembered that the best English work was done during the
first half of the century, and is far better than the French work of
that time, whereas the best French work was done in the second half of
the century when the English Perpendicular style had for the most part
become stereotyped and dull, and seemed to resist the introduction of
new ideas. These Evreux windows represent the style which, under the
influence of contemporary picture-painting, was growing up on the
Continent, but which did not obtain a foothold in England till the
advent, almost at the end of the century, of the school which produced
the Fairford windows.
FOOTNOTE:
[18] It is true that the glass is not now in its original position,
but I think it must always have filled two lights.
XVI
MALVERN AND FAIRFORD
So great was the quantity of stained glass produced in England in the
fifteenth century, and so much still remains, that it is impossible,
in this book, even to mention all the more important examples. We have
seen the growth and perfection of the Perpendicular style at York. At
Great Malvern Priory you may study its gradual decadence.
[Sidenote: Great Malvern: the "Creation."]
The best of the windows there are undoubtedly the earliest, namely,
those in St. Anne's Chapel which include the famous "Creation," of
which the date is perhaps 1440-50. It cannot, I think, compare with
John Thornton's "Creation" in the east window of York Minster,--the
colour scheme is so much more conventional and less expressive,--but
it is nevertheless very beautiful. The resemblance of some of the
scenes to those in Thornton's window is perhaps no more than one
would expect to find in two representations of the same subject in the
same period, but at the same time the Malvern "Creation" is very much
akin to York work, though rather to the later phase represented by the
St. Cuthbert and the All Saints' windows, than to the work of
Thornton. I may be wrong, but I sometimes suspect that the inhabitants
of the Severn and Avon valleys had more intercourse with the North of
England--to which access would be easy by the Avon and Trent,
navigable most of the way--than with the Thames Valley and South of
England, from which they were cut off by the wild and inhospitable
Cotswolds.
[Sidenote: The north transept window.]
In comparing the later windows in Malvern Priory with the "Creation"
and its neighbours in St. Anne's Chapel, one can trace a decided and
increasing decadence. The forms are the same but stereotyped and dull,
the artists seem timid in their use of colour, and all the life seems
to go out of the style. The great north transept window, given in
1501-2 by Henry VII. (it once contained his portrait and still has
that of his son Prince Arthur and the architect, Sir Reginald Bray),
is, compared with the earlier work, a very poor affair. The yellow
stain in particular is very coarse and overdone, yet such was the
hold which this style had got on our countrymen that in spite of the
late date of the window there is not a hint in it of the new ideas
which were then coming in, although it is probable that before it was
finished, the famous windows of Fairford, not forty miles away across
the Cotswolds, had at least been begun.
[Sidenote: Fairford.]
The old church of Fairford with its square central tower, standing on
a green slope above a rushing trout stream, which, a few miles below,
unites with the baby Thames and makes it a navigable river, occupies a
unique position, not merely as the only village church in England--one
may, perhaps, say in the world--which still retains the whole of its
original set of stained-glass windows almost intact, but from the
quality of the windows themselves. Some, it is true, have suffered
damage, but there is not a subject unrecognizable, nor a window
missing.
[Sidenote: The new style.]
The church was begun by John Tame, merchant of London, and finished by
his son, Sir Edward; but since John Tame's will, dated 1496, while
bequeathing various sums for ornaments to the church, makes no mention
of the glass, it is argued that the glass had been already ordered.
The Fairford windows are usually classed as Perpendicular on the
strength of their association with Perpendicular architecture and the
presence of Perpendicular detail in the canopies and elsewhere, but it
is a wholly different style to the Perpendicular of York, of Malvern,
of Warwick; the style which, with little change, had held the field in
England since the beginning of the century. Fairford, in fact, marks a
revolution in English stained glass. It is an early, if not the first
work of a new school which, throwing away the old native tradition,
based its style on that which had grown up on the Continent and, still
more, upon Flemish painting. The Fairford windows represent a phase of
their art which did not last very long, for their style soon began to
assimilate itself to that of the Renaissance. In the windows of King's
College Chapel at Cambridge you may see the change happening, and in
the latest windows there you may also, alas! see the rapid setting in
of decadence. It was, indeed, a style which contained in itself the
seeds of decay, which germinated all too rapidly; but these, its
first-fruits, at Fairford are magnificent, and disarm criticism.
[Illustration: PLATE XLIX
ANGEL'S HEAD, FROM GREAT ROSE WINDOW IN NORTH TRANSEPT OF ST.
OUEN'S, ROUEN
Fifteenth Century]
They mark, as I say, a complete departure from the older standards of
English fifteenth century glass. It is the same story, once more
repeated, of old conventions of drawing becoming out of date, and
failing to satisfy a newer generation. Of the more advanced schools of
painting, the Flemish was the one that Englishmen were most in touch
with, and it was thence that the new school of English glass-workers
took their inspiration, with the result that a Flemish feeling is
traceable in all their work. One immediate result of the more
pictorial standard now expected of the artist was that he came to
depend in quite a different way on the painting of his glass as
distinct from the glazing. At Fairford, elaborate landscape
backgrounds are put in with the brown enamel alone, helped by yellow
stain, sometimes on white, sometimes on grey-blue glass, to which
latter the stain gives a green for grass and trees. Not as yet,
however, does the painting take precedence of the glazing, the balance
being for a time held equal between the two. Indeed the craft of
glazing, as well as that of painting, was now at its height; the
artist had all the resources of both at his command and used them to
the full, but as yet the limits of the medium were not overstepped.
Another result of the pictorial standard now arrived at, was that the
artist began to feel cramped by the narrow lights he had to fill, and
to let his subjects spread through more than one of them, ignoring
the intervening mullion. At Fairford many of the subjects occupy two
lights, and the "Crucifixion" at the east end and the "Doom" at the
west spread right across the whole width of the window. As yet this is
not so done that one loses the sense of the design decorating the
stone-work; but both these developments are indications of a tendency
which was to increase as time went on, and eventually to ruin the art.
The new point of view naturally affected the canopy, which is shaded
like solid stone-work, giving it a heavy and clumsy effect. In many of
the subject windows, however, the canopy is omitted altogether, the
sky of the picture, which is sometimes white, with clouds and circling
swifts painted on it, continuing right up to the stone-work.
[Sidenote: The problem of the authorship of the windows.]
I agree with Mr. Westlake in finding the work of more than one hand in
the windows. Two there are certainly, and possibly four. The east
window is certainly by a different, and, I think, an older hand than
the west, and the windows of the north aisle, though they may be by
the same hand as the west windows, are certainly by a different one to
the Apostles opposite them, which are the poorest windows in the
church. I think the differences are greater than could be accounted
for by any development that might take place in the same man's style
during the execution of the windows. The west windows are the work of
a different temperament to the east windows. The forms are fuller,
stronger, and more rounded, and show a much stronger sense for the
decorative placing of a line.
There is no record to tell us who these men were, and there has been
much discussion as to whether they were Englishmen or Flemings. Indeed
the wildest theories have been advanced as to the origin of the
windows. They have been attributed to Dürer, without the slightest
internal or external evidence except the presence of an A which does
not resemble his signature. Another story which, though not heard of,
I believe, till the eighteenth century, has obtained wide credence, is
that they were captured at sea, bound for Rome, by Edward Tame, and
the church built to contain them; but the most casual examination of
the windows ought to convince any one that they were made for the
church and not the church for them.[19]
As to the question of the English or Flemish authorship of the
windows, it is true that Flemish details crop up here and there both
in architecture and the costumes; but this is not surprising, for the
style, new then to England, was largely based on Flemish art, and on
the other hand the English characteristics are in excess of the
Flemish.
[Sidenote: Barnard Flower.]
In Henry VII.'s Chapel at Westminster, high up in the central
clerestory window of the apse, is a single figure under a canopy which
bears a most striking resemblance to the series of the Prophets at
Fairford (Plate L.). In the figure, in the scroll he holds, in the
canopy, in the treatment of the drapery, and even in the queer drawing
of the hands, the resemblance is so close that I for one cannot doubt
their common authorship. Now it is on record that the windows of Henry
VII.'s Chapel were glazed by "one Barnard Flower," the king's glazier,
who also is the glazier named in the first contract for the windows in
King's College Chapel at Cambridge, but who died in 1525-26 before
they were finished. A comparison of those windows at Cambridge which
are believed to be his work, especially that over the north door, with
the Fairford windows, reveals many points of resemblance, and,
allowing for the twenty years which probably separate the execution of
the two works, I think we should not be far wrong in assigning to
Flower the whole of the north aisle at Fairford, and perhaps the Latin
Fathers in the south aisle. Whether the west windows are his work too
I do not feel sure, and to the names of the other artists who took
part in the work we have no clue.
[Illustration: PLATE L
THE PROPHETS JOEL, ZEPHANIAH, AMOS, AND HOSEA, FROM THE NORTH AISLE
OF THE NAVE, FAIRFORD
Late Fifteenth Century]
[Sidenote: The general scheme.]
[Sidenote: The "Doom."]
Yet though one may thus trace various hands in the work, the windows
form a connected whole, the planning of which must have been the work
of one mind. The arrangement is the traditional one whereby the whole
church forms an exposition of the foundations of the Christian faith.
The windows of the nave contain single figures, the Prophets on the
north side (Plate L.) facing the Apostles on the south. Each Apostle
holds a verse of the creed, and the Prophet opposite him a
corresponding verse from his writings. The four Evangelists face the
four Latin Fathers. Farther east, within the now vanished screen, the
windows unfold the Gospel story, those on the north leading up to the
Passion in the east window, those on the south showing the Descent
into Hell, the Resurrection, and the events that followed. Then, as
the spectator turns to the west, there faces him, in the great west
window, the tremendous "Doom" or Last Judgment. Do not look at the
upper half where Christ sits enthroned as Judge, surrounded by saints
and angels; it has suffered the fate of the Winchester College glass.
Blown in by a storm in 1703, it was "restored" in the middle of the
nineteenth century, which means that the old glass was removed and a
bad copy substituted. Where the blue ring of Heaven passes through the
tracery lights the original glass remains, and the difference between
it and the new is an object lesson in good and bad stained-glass work.
But below the transom the window is still unspoilt. In the midst
stands Michael with sword and scales, and below him the dead are
rising naked from their graves. Michael himself, it must be confessed,
is a somewhat lackadaisical figure; it was not possible for an artist
of that time and school to give a figure the arresting quality of the
Methuselah in Plate III.; neither does one's eye linger long over the
Saved, who troop up the golden stairs on Michael's right, but is
irresistibly attracted to the other side of the picture, where in a
great glow of ruby glass are seen the Flames of Hell, to which
devils--grey and blue at the outer edge of the fire, but darker and
more purple as they are farther in--are carrying the wretched souls
of the Lost. Just outside the flames an angel and a devil are fighting
in mid-air for the possession of a soul, and a comparison of these
figures with the similar ones in the Descent into Limbo or "Harrying
of Hell," which is by the same hand as the east window, shows at once
the difference between the work of the two men.
[Sidenote: The west windows of the aisles.]
On either side the west windows of the aisles contain, as types of the
Last Judgment, on the north, the Judgment of Solomon, which protected
the innocent; on the south, that of David on the Amalekite, which
condemned the guilty. It seems to me not unlikely that the position of
these windows was originally reversed, Solomon's judgment being on the
side of the Saved in the "Doom" and David's on that of the Lost. They
have both suffered greatly in the storm of 1703 and contain many blank
spaces, but from what remains they seem to me, together with the
"Doom," the most accomplished work in the church.
[Sidenote: The clerestory.]
Very splendid, too, are the Persecutors of the Church, who, clad in
all the bravery of wickedness, fill the north side of the clerestory,
fronting the somewhat insipid row of Martyrs on the other side. Here
is Herod transfixing an Innocent; Nero, if it is he, with the head of
St. Paul; the King of the Huns, and Diocletian, perhaps, with bows and
arrows; and, in a dark blue robe, Judas, with the halter round his
neck and the bag in his hand, between Annas and Caiaphas. In the
tracery lights above the Martyrs are rather commonplace white and gold
angels, but over the Persecutors are fascinating little figures of
devils, grey, blue, and green, on a background of ruby flames. I am
afraid there is no question which series the artist enjoyed doing
most!
Fairford marks the end of mediæval stained glass in England.
Conservative artists might still, as at Malvern and at St. Neots in
Cornwall, try to carry on the older tradition, but their works are
isolated survivals. The Fairford windows themselves represent, as I
have said, a very short-lived phase in English glass, of which they
are the most complete example, others being the fragments in Henry
VII.'s Chapel at Westminster and the remains of Bishop Fox's glazing
in Winchester Cathedral, now collected into the east clerestory window
there. Flower's own work at King's College, Cambridge, twenty years
later than Fairford, shows signs of change, and that of his
successors in the same building, as at Basingstoke, at Balliol College
and elsewhere must be classed as wholly of the Renaissance. With
Fairford, then, these notes on Stained Glass of the Middle Ages may
fitly end.
FOOTNOTE:
[19] This is fully gone into by Canon Carbonel in an article in
_Memorials of Old Gloucestershire_. Another theory he examines and
rejects is that they were the work of the Dutch painter Aeps.
INDEX
Abrasion, 8, 224
Angers--
12th century, 55
Grisaille, 118
Becket, St. Thomas, 69, 74, 80, 87, 91
"Blue Dick" Culmer, 56
Bourges, 112
Brabourne, 24
Byzantine Influence, 24, 52, 69
Canopy--
13th century, 107
14th " 136
15th " 215
Canterbury Cathedral--
12th century, 45, 56
13th " 69
Chalons, 55
Chartres Cathedral--
12th century--
West windows, 48
La Belle Verrière, 51
13th century--
Rebuilding, 92
Guild windows, 98
North Rose, 101
South Rose, 102
Apse, 104
Grisaille, 118
14th century, 188
Chartres, Church of St. Pierre, 185
Chartres, Clement of, 46, 95
His work at Rouen, 114
Chartres, St. Denis and Canterbury, school of, 44
Cloisonné enamel, 23
Denis, St., Abbey of--
12th century medallions, 45, 53
Gryphon windows, 116
Designs, method of drawing, 89
Diaper, mosaic, 76, 80, 96, 103
" painted, 59, 77, 149
Egyptian glass, 16
Enamel, brown, 5, 21
" coloured, 6
Evreux Cathedral--
14th century, 189
15th century--
Clerestory, 246
Lady Chapel, 249
Evreux, Church of St. Taurin, 250
Exeter Cathedral--
East window--
Earliest work, 158
Lyen's work, 227
Grisaille, 160
Fairford, 255
Flower, Barnard, 260
Glass--
Blowing, 14
Colour and quality--
12th and 13th centuries, 32
14th century, 147
15th " 223
Flashed, 8, 224
Making, 13
Cutting, 15
Painting--
General, 5
Beginning of, 21
12th and 13th centuries, 37
14th century, 144
15th " 220
Gloucester Cathedral, 197
Grisaille--
13th century, 115
14th " 132
15th " 222
Combination with figures, 122, 132
Iron-work--
Necessity of, 7
Early, influence of, 35
Bent, 37, 60
14th century, 129
Irradiation, 38
Jesse, Tree of, 50, 53, 72, 168, 178, 235
King's College Chapel, Cambridge, 256, 264
Leading--
General, 5
15th century, 219
Lincoln Cathedral, 77
Line work, 38
Louis, St., 93, 100
Lyen, Robert, 227
Mahommedan windows, 19
Malvern, Great, 253
Mans, Le, Cathedral--
Earliest glass, 24
12th century, 47
Matt shading--
Beginning of, 39
15th century, 220
Mauclerc, Pierre, 99
Medallion windows, 36
Merton College Chapel, Oxford, 153
Monkwearmouth, 22
Montfort, Amaury de, 99
Mosaic character of early glass, 34
" " loss of, 218
Natural plant forms in ornament, 145
" " " abandonment of, 221
New College Antechapel, Oxford, 201
Periods--
The three, 31
The First, 32
The Second, 125
The Third, 213
Peterborough, 111
Pictures, influence of, 243
Pliny's story, 15
Poitiers--
12th century, 26, 43, 64
13th " 122, 166
Process, the, 4
Quarries--
13th century, 121
14th " 135
15th " 222
Rheims, Cathedral, 112
" Church of St. Remi, 118
Roman windows, 17
Rouen--
Cathedral, 114
Church of St. Maclou, 248
Church of St. Ouen--
14th century, 191
15th century, 246
whether Exeter glass bought at, 159
Ruby glass, 33, 49, 223
S-like pose of figures, 141
Sainte Chapelle, 112
Salisbury, 119
Selling, 167
Sens, 87
Shrewsbury, 198
Soissons, 118
Sophia, St., 18
Stain, silver, 8, 130, 240
Suger, Abbot, 45, 53, 98
Tewkesbury, 198, 207
Thomas the Glazier, 201
Thornton, John, 228
Troyes, 77, 166
"Type and antitype" windows, 61, 73, 88
Vendôme, 64
Venetian enamellers, 22
Wells, 198, 200
Westminster Abbey--
13th century grisaille, 119
Henry VII.'s Chapel, 260
Westwell, 112
William of Sens, 57, 87
William of Wykeham, 201, 207
Winchester Cathedral--
West window and nave, 209
East window of clerestory, 264
Winchester College Chapel, 208
York, Cathedral--
12th century, 55, 168
13th century--
"Five Sisters," 120
14th century--
Chapter House, 164
Vestibule of Chapter House, 167
Nave, clerestory, 167
North aisle, 169
South aisle, 176
West end, 179
East window, 229
Lady Chapel, 233
Choir, 235
York, All Saints', North Street--
14th century, 181
15th " 237
York, St. Martin's, Coney St., 237
" St. Martin's, Micklegate, 181
THE END
_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.