WINDOWS
a book about
STAINED
& PAINTED GLASS
by
LEWIS F. DAY
author of Nature
in Ornament &
other Text-books
of Design.
1897 LONDON
B·T·BATSFORD 94 High Holborn, W.C.
BRADBURY, AGNEW, & CO. LD., PRINTERS,
LONDON AND TONBRIDGE.
TO THOSE WHO KNOW NOTHING OF STAINED GLASS; TO THOSE WHO KNOW
SOMETHING, AND WANT TO KNOW MORE; TO THOSE WHO KNOW ALL ABOUT IT,
AND YET CARE TO KNOW WHAT ANOTHER MAY HAVE TO SAY UPON THE
SUBJECT;--I DEDICATE THIS BOOK.
PREFACE.
A stained glass window is itself the best possible illustration of the
difference it makes whether we look at a thing from this side or from
that. Goethe used this particular image in one of his little parables,
comparing poems to painted windows, dark and dull from the market-place,
bright with colour and alive with meaning only when we have crossed the
threshold of the church.
I may claim to have entered the sanctuary, and not irreverently. My
earliest training in design was in the workshops of artists in stained
glass. For many years I worked exclusively at glass design, and for over
a quarter of a century I have spent great part of my leisure in hunting
glass all Europe over.
This book has grown out of my experience. It makes no claim to
learnedness. It tells only what the windows have told me, or what I
understood them to say. I have gone to glass to get pleasure out of it,
to learn something from it, to find out the way it was done, and why it
was done so, and what might yet perhaps be done. Anything apart from
that did not so much interest me. Those, therefore, who desire minuter
and more precise historic information must consult the works of Winston,
Mr. Westlake, and the many continental authorities, with whose learned
writings this more practical, and, in a sense, popular, volume does not
enter into any sort of competition.
My point of view is that of art and workmanship, or, more precisely
speaking, workmanship and art, workmanship being naturally the beginning
and root of art. We are workmen first and artists afterwards--perhaps.
What I have tried to do is this: In the first place (Book I.), I set
out to trace the course of _workmanship_, to follow the technique of the
workman from the twelfth century to the seventeenth, from mosaic to
painting, from archaism to pictorial accomplishment; and to indicate at
what cost of perhaps more decorative qualities the later masterpieces of
glass painting were bought.
In the second place (Book II.), I have endeavoured to show the course of
_design_ in glass, from the earliest Mediæval window to the latest glass
picture of the Renaissance.
Finally (Book III.), I have set apart for separate discussion questions
not in the direct line either of design or workmanship, or which, if
taken by the way, would have hindered the narrative and confused the
issue.
The rather lengthy chapter on "_Style_" is addressed to that large
number of persons who, knowing as yet nothing about the subject, may
want _data_ by which to form some idea as to the period of a window when
they see it: the postscript more nearly concerns the designer and the
worker in glass.
In all this I have tried to put personality as much as possible aside,
and to tell my story faithfully and without conscious bias. But I make
no claim to impartiality, as the judge upon the bench understands it. We
take up art or law according to our temperament. I can pretend to judge
only as one interested, to be impartial only as an artist may.
LEWIS F. DAY.
13, MECKLENBURGH SQUARE, LONDON.
_January 29th, 1897._
_NOTE IN REFERENCE TO ILLUSTRATIONS._
_Theoretically the illustrations to a book about windows should be in
colour. Practically coloured illustrations of stained glass are out of
the question, as all who appreciate its quality well know. It may be
possible, although it has hardly proved so as yet, to print adequate
representations of coloured windows, but only at a cost which would
defeat the end here in view._
_The_ EFFECT _of glass is best suggested by process renderings of
photographs from actual windows or from very careful water-colour
drawings, such as those very kindly placed at my disposal by Mr. T. M.
Rooke (pages 128, 159, 337) and Mr. John R. Clayton (pages 51, 74, 98,
186, 207, 252, 286, 304, 342), an artist whose studio has been the
nursery of a whole generation of glass designers._
_Details of_ DESIGN _are often better seen in the reproductions of
tracings or slight pen-drawings, little more than diagrams it may be,
but done to illustrate a point. That is the intention throughout, to
illustrate what is said, not simply to beautify the book._
_The direction of the pen-lines gives, wherever it was possible, a key
to the colour scheme. Red, that is to say, is represented by vertical
lines, blue by horizontal, yellow by dots, and so on, according to
heraldic custom._
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
BOOK I.
THE COURSE OF CRAFTSMANSHIP.
CHAP. PAGE
I. THE BEGINNINGS OF GLASS 1
II. THE MAKING OF A WINDOW 5
III. GLAZING 15
IV. EARLY MOSAIC WINDOWS 32
V. PAINTED MOSAIC 43
VI. GLASS PAINTING (MEDIÆVAL) 59
VII. GLASS PAINTING (RENAISSANCE) 67
VIII. ENAMEL PAINTING 77
IX. THE NEEDLE-POINT IN GLASS PAINTING 87
X. THE RESOURCES OF THE GLASS WORKER (A RECAPITULATION) 95
BOOK II.
THE COURSE OF DESIGN.
XI. THE DESIGN OF EARLY GLASS 111
XII. MEDALLION WINDOWS 123
XIII. EARLY GRISAILLE 137
XIV. WINDOWS OF MANY LIGHTS 151
XV. MIDDLE GOTHIC DETAIL 162
XVI. LATE GOTHIC WINDOWS 178
XVII. SIXTEENTH CENTURY WINDOWS 201
XVIII. LATER RENAISSANCE WINDOWS 220
XIX. PICTURE WINDOWS 236
XX. LANDSCAPE IN GLASS 251
XXI. ITALIAN GLASS 260
XXII. TRACERY LIGHTS AND ROSE WINDOWS 272
XXIII. QUARRY WINDOWS 283
XXIV. DOMESTIC GLASS 296
XXV. THE USE OF THE CANOPY 311
XXVI. A PLEA FOR ORNAMENT 317
BOOK III.
BY THE WAY.
XXVII. THE CHARACTERISTICS OF STYLE 322
XXVIII. STYLE IN MODERN GLASS (A POSTSCRIPT) 354
XXIX. JESSE WINDOWS, AND OTHER EXCEPTIONS IN DESIGN 360
XXX. STORY WINDOWS 371
XXXI. HOW TO SEE WINDOWS 380
XXXII. WINDOWS WORTH SEEING 385
XXXIII. A WORD ON RESTORATION 404
WINDOWS, A BOOK ABOUT STAINED GLASS
BOOK I.
CHAPTER I.
THE BEGINNINGS OF GLASS.
The point of view from which the subject of stained glass is approached
in these chapters relieves me, happily, from the very difficult task of
determining the date or the whereabouts of the remote origin of coloured
windows, and the still remoter beginnings of glass itself. The briefest
summary of scarcely disputable facts bearing upon the evolution of the
art of window making, is here enough. We need not vex our minds with
speculation.
White glass (and that of extreme purity) would seem to have been known
to the Chinese as long ago as 2300 B.C., for they were then already
using astronomical instruments, of which the lenses were presumably of
glass. Of coloured glass there is yet earlier record. Egyptologists tell
us that at least five if not six thousand years ago the Egyptians made
jewels of glass. Indeed, it is more than probable that this was the
earliest use to which stained glass was put, and that the very _raison
d'être_ of glass making was a species of forgery. In some of the most
ancient tombs have been found scarabs of glass in deliberate imitation
of rubies and emeralds, sapphires and other precious stones. The glass
beads found broadcast in three quarters of the globe were quite possibly
passed off by Phoenician traders upon the confiding barbarian as
jewels of great price. At all events, glass beads, according to Sir
John Lubbock, were in use in the bronze age; and, if we may trust the
evidence of etymology, "bedes" are perhaps as ancient as praying.
Apart from trickery and fraud, to imitate seems to be a foible of
humanity. The Greeks and their Roman successors made glass in imitation
of agate and onyx and all kinds of precious marbles. They devised also
coloured glass coated with white glass, which could be cut
cameo-fashion--a kind of glass much used, though in a different way, in
later Mediæval windows.
The Venetians carried further the pretty Greek invention of embedding
vitreous threads of milky white or colour in clear glass, the most
beautiful form of which is that known as _latticelli_, or _reticelli_
(reticulated or lace glass), from the elaborate twisting and interlacing
of the threads; but nothing certain seems to be known about Venetian
glass until the end of the eleventh century, although by the thirteenth
the neighbouring island of Murano was famous for its production. The
Venetians found a new stone to imitate, aventurine, and they imitated it
marvellously.
So far, however, glass was used in the first instance for jewellery, and
in the second for vessels of various kinds. Its use in architecture was
confined mainly to mosaic, originally, no doubt, to supply the place of
brighter tints not forthcoming in marble.
Of the use of glass in windows there is not very ancient mention. The
climate of Greece or Egypt, and the way of life there, gave scant
occasion for it. But at Herculaneum and Pompeii, there have been found
fair sized slabs of window glass, not of very perfect manufacture,
apparently cast, and probably at no time very translucent. Remains also
of what was presumably window glass have been found among the ruins of
Roman villas in England. In the basilicas of Christian Rome the arched
window openings were sometimes filled with slabs of marble, in which
were piercings to receive glass (which may or may not have been
coloured), foreshadowing, so to speak, the plate tracery of Early Gothic
builders. According to M. Lévy, the windows of Early Mediæval Flemish
churches were often filled in this Roman way with plaques of stone
pierced with circular openings to receive glass.
Another Roman practice was to set panes of glass in bronze or copper
framing, and even in lead. Here we have the beginning of the practice
identified with Mediæval glaziers.
There is no reason to suppose that the ancients practised glass painting
as we understand it. Discs of Greek glass have been found which are
indeed painted, but not (I imagine) with colour fused with the material;
and certainly these were not used for windows.
The very early Christians were not in a position to indulge in, or even
to desire, luxuries such as stained glass windows, but St. Jerome and
St. Chrysostom make allusion to them. It is pretty certain that these
must have been simple mosaics in stained glass, unpainted: one reads
that between the lines of the records that have come down to us.
Stained and painted glass, such as we find in the earliest existing
Mediæval windows, may possibly date back to the reign of Charlemagne
(800), but it may safely be said not to occur earlier than the Holy
Roman Empire. A couple of hundred years later mention of it begins to
occur rather frequently in Church records; and there is one particular
account of the furnishing of the chapel of the first Benedictine
Monastery at Monte Cassino with a whole series of windows in 1066--which
fixes the date of the Norman Conquest as a period at which stained glass
windows can no longer have been uncommon. The Cistercian interdict,
restricting the order to the use of white glass (1134), argues something
like ecclesiastical over-indulgence in rich windows before the middle of
the next century.
Fragments, more or less plentiful, of the very earliest glass may still
remain embedded in windows of a later period (the material was too
precious not to have been carefully preserved); but archæologists appear
to be agreed that no complete window of the ninth or tenth century has
been preserved, and that even of the eleventh there is nothing that can
quite certainly be identified. After that doctors begin to differ. But
the general consensus of opinion is, that there is comparatively little
that can be incontrovertibly set down even to the twelfth century. The
great mass of Early Gothic Glass belongs indubitably to the thirteenth
century; and when one speaks of Early Glass it is usually thirteenth
century work which is meant.
The remote origin of glass, then, remains for ever lost in the mist of
legendary days. There is even a fable to the effect that it dates from
the building of the Tower of Babel, when God's fire from heaven
vitrified the bricks employed by its too presumptuous builders.
Coloured glass comes to us from the East; that much it is safe to
conclude. From ancient Egypt, probably, the art of the glass-worker
found its way to Phoenicia, thence to Greece and Rome, and so to
Byzantium, Venice, and eventually France, where stained glass windows,
as we know them, first occur.
It is probably to the French that Europe owes the introduction of
coloured windows, a colony of Venetian glass-workers having, they say,
settled at Limoges in the year 979.
Some of the earliest French glass is to be found at Chartres, Le Mans,
Angers, Reims, and Châlons-sûr-Marne; and at the _Musée des Arts
Décoratifs_, at Paris, there are some fragments of twelfth century work
which may be more conveniently examined than the work _in sitû_. The
oldest to which one can assign a definite date is that at St. Denis
(1108) but its value is almost nullified by expert restoration.
In Germany the oldest date is ascribed to some small windows at
Augsburg, executed, it is said, by the monks of Tegernsee about the year
1000. There is also a certain amount of twelfth century work
incorporated in the later windows at Strasbourg. The oldest remains of
glass in England are, in all probability, certain fragments in the nave
of York Minster. The more important windows at Canterbury, Salisbury,
and Lincoln are of the thirteenth century.
CHAPTER II.
THE MAKING OF A WINDOW.
Since it is proposed to approach the subject of stained glass in the
first place from the workmanlike and artistic, rather than the
historical or antiquarian, point of view, it may be as well to begin by
explaining precisely what a stained glass window is.
It is usual to confound "stained" with "painted" glass. Literally
speaking, these are two quite distinct things. Stained glass is glass
which is coloured, as the phrase goes, "in the pot;" that is to say,
there is mixed with the molten white glass a metallic oxide which stains
it green, yellow, blue, purple, and so on, as the case may be; for which
reason this self-tinted glass is called "pot-metal." This is a term
which will recur again and again. Once for all, "pot-metal" is glass in
which the colour is _in_ the glass and not painted _upon_ it.
It goes without explanation that, each separate sheet of pot-metal glass
being all of one colour, a varicoloured window can only be produced in
it by breaking up the sheets and putting them together in the form of a
mosaic: in fact, that is how the earliest windows were executed, and
they go by the name of mosaic glass. The glass is, however, not broken
up into tesseræ, but shaped according to the forms of the design. In
short, those portions of it which are white have to be cut out of a
sheet of white glass, those which are blue out of a sheet of blue glass,
those which are yellow out of a sheet of yellow, and so on; and it is
these pieces of variously tinted glass, bound together by strips of
lead, just as the tesseræ of a pavement or wall picture are held in
place by cement, which constitute a stained glass window. The artist is
as yet not concerned in painting, but in glazing--that is to say,
putting together little bits of glass, just as an inlayer does, or as a
mosaic worker puts together pieces of wood, or marble, or burnt clay, or
even opaque glass.
There is illustrated opposite a piece of Old Burmese incrusted
decoration, a mosaic of white and coloured glass bound together by
strips of metal, which, were it but clear instead of silvered at the
back, would be precisely the same thing as an early mosaic window, even
to the completion of the face by means of paint--of which more
presently. In painted glass, on the other hand, the colour is not in the
glass but upon it, more or less firmly attached to it by the action of
the fire. A metallic colour which has some affinity with glass, or which
is ground up with finely powdered glass, is used as a pigment, precisely
as ceramic colours are used in pottery painting. The painted glass is
then put into a kiln and heated to the temperature at which it is on the
point of melting, whilst the colour actually does melt into it. By this
means it is possible to paint a coloured picture upon a single sheet of
white glass, as has been proved at Sèvres.
Strictly speaking, then, stained and painted glass are the very opposite
one to the other. But in practice the two processes of glazing and
painting were never kept apart. The very earliest glass was no doubt
pure mosaic. It was only in our own day that the achievement (scientific
rather than artistic) of a painted window of any size, independent of
glazier's work, was possible. Painting was at first always subsidiary to
glazier's work; after that, for a time, glazier and painter worked hand
in hand upon equal terms; eventually the painter took precedence, and
the glazier became ever more and more subservient to him. But from the
twelfth to the seventeenth century there is little of what we call,
rather loosely, sometimes "stained" and sometimes "painted" glass, in
which there is not both staining and painting--that is to say, stained
glass is used, and there is painting upon it. The difference is that in
the earlier work the painting is only used to help out the stained
glass, and in the later the stained glass is introduced to help the
painting.
[Illustration: 1. INCRUSTED GLASS MOSAIC, BURMESE (B. M.).]
That amounts, it may be thought, to much the same thing; and there does
come a point where staining and painting fulfil each such an important
part in the window that it is difficult to say which is the
predominating partner in the concern. For the most part, however, there
is no manner of doubt as to which practice was uppermost in the
designer's mind, as to the idea with which he set out, painting or
glazing; and it makes all the difference in the work--the difference,
for example, between a window of the thirteenth century and one of the
sixteenth, a difference about which a child could scarcely make a
mistake, once it had been pointed out to him.
Here perhaps it will be as well to describe, once for all, the making of
a mosaic window, and the part taken in it by the glazier and the painter
respectively. It will be easier then to discriminate between the two
processes employed, and to discuss them each in relation to the other.
The actual construction of an early window is very much like the putting
together of a puzzle. The puzzle of our childhood usually took the form
of a map. It has occurred to me, therefore, to show how an artist
working strictly after the manner of the thirteenth century--the period,
that is to say, when painting was subsidiary to glazing--would set about
putting into glass a map of modern Italy. In the first place, he would
draw his map to the size required. This he would do with the utmost
precision, firmly marking upon the paper (the mediæval artist would have
drawn directly on his wooden bench) the boundary line of each separate
patch of colour in his design. Then, according to the colour each
separate province or division was to be, he would take a separate sheet
of "pot-metal" and lay it over the drawing, so as to be able to trace
upon the glass itself the outline of such province or division. That
done, he would proceed to cut out or shape the various pieces of glass
to the given forms. In the case of a simple and compact province, such
as Rome, Tuscany, Umbria (overleaf), that would be easy enough. On the
other hand, a more irregular shape, say the province of Naples, with its
promontories, would present considerable difficulties--difficulties
practically insuperable by the early glazier, to whom the diamond as a
cutting instrument was unknown, and whose appliances for shaping were of
the rudest and most rudimentary.
If with the point of a red-hot iron you describe upon a sheet of glass a
line, and then, taking the material between your two hands, proceed to
snap it across, the fracture will take approximately the direction of
the line thus drawn. That is how the thirteenth century glazier went to
work, subsequently with a notched iron instrument, or "grozing iron" as
it was called, laboriously chipping away the edges until he had reduced
each piece of glass to the precise shape he wanted.
It will be seen at once that the simpler the line and the easier its
sweep the more likely the glass would be to break clean to the line,
whereas in the case of a jagged or irregular line there would always be
great danger that at any one sharp turn in it the fracture would take
that convenient opportunity of going in the way it should not. For
example, the south coast of Italy would be dangerous. You might draw the
line of the sole of the foot, but when it came to breaking the glass the
high heel would be sure to snap off (there is a little nick there
designed as if for the purpose of bringing about that catastrophe), and
similarly that over-delicate instep would certainly not bear the strain
put upon it, and would be bound to give way. It should be mentioned that
even were such pieces once safely cut (which would nowadays be possible)
the glass would surely crack at those points the first time there was
any pressure of wind upon the window, and so the prudent man would still
forestall that event by designing his glass as it could conveniently be
cut, without attempting any _tour de force_, and strengthening it at the
weak points with a line of lead, as has been done in the glass map
opposite. There is a jutting promontory on the coast of Africa, which,
even if safely cut, would be sure to break sooner or later at the point
indicated by the dotted line.
The scale of execution would determine whether each or any province
could be cut out of a single sheet of glass, but the lines of latitude
and longitude would give an opportunity of using often three or four
pieces of glass to a province without introducing lines which formed no
part of the design. That, however, would be contrary to early usage,
which was never to make use of the leads as independent lines, but only
as boundaries between two colours. There is a reason for this reticence.
You will see that in the surface of the sea, where the latitudinal and
longitudinal lines come in most usefully, it is necessary to use also
other leads, which mean nothing but that a joint is there desirable.
These constructional leads, when they merely break up a background, are
quite unobjectionable--they even give an opportunity of getting variety
in the colour of the ground--but when some of the leads are meant to
assert themselves as drawing lines and some are not, the result is
inevitably confused.
[Illustration: 2. THE WAY A WINDOW IS GLAZED.]
All that the glass gives us in our mosaic map is the local colour of
sea and land--the sea, let us say, dark blue, the countries, provinces,
and islands each of its own distinctive tint. When it comes to giving
their names, it would be possible indeed on a very large scale to cut
the letters out of glass of darker colour, and glaze them in as shown in
the title word "Italy." That would involve, as will be seen, a network
of connecting lead lines. On a much smaller scale there would be nothing
for it but to have recourse to the supplementary process, and paint
them. The words Germany, Austria, Turkey, Naples, Sicily, and the rest
would have to be simply painted in opaque colour upon the translucent
glass.
But, once we have begun to use paint, there are intermediate ways
between these two methods of inscription, either of which would be
adopted according to the scale of the lettering. These are shown in the
names of the seas. In the word "Mediterranean" each separate letter
would be cut out of a piece of glass, corresponding as nearly as
possible to its general outline or circumference, and its shape would be
made perfect by "painting out"--that is to say, by obscuring with solid
pigment that part of the glass (indicated by dots in the drawing) which
was meant to retire into the background. Presuming this wording to be in
a light colour and the background darkish, this amount of painting
would, as a matter of fact, be quite lost in the dark colour. In the
lesser descriptions "Tyrrhenian" and "Adriatic Sea," each separate word,
instead of each letter, would be cut out of one piece of glass (or
perhaps two in the longer words), and the background would be painted
out as already described.
Paint would further be used to indicate the rivers, the mountains, the
towns, or any other detail it was necessary to give, as well as to mark
such indentations in the coastline as were too minute to be followed by
the thick lead. As a matter of practice, it is usual to paint a marginal
line of opaque colour round the glass representing just a little more
than that portion eventually to be covered by the flange of the lead, so
as to make sure that that will not by any chance cut off from view what
may be an important feature in the design.
For example, the mere projection of a lead which too nearly approached
the delicate profile of a small face might easily destroy its outline.
The glazier's lead, it should be explained, is a wire of about a quarter
of an inch diameter, deeply grooved on two sides for the insertion of
the glass. Imagine the surfaces exposed to view on each face of the
window to be flattened, and you have a section very much like the letter
=H=, the uprights representing the flanges, and the cross-bar the "core,"
which holds them together and supports the glass mosaic.
The process of painting employed so far is of the simplest; it consists
merely in obscuring the glass with solid paint. This is laid on with a
long-haired pencil or "tracing brush." The paint itself may be mixed
with oil or gum and water, or any medium which will temporarily attach
it to the glass and disappear in the kiln; for the real fixing of the
paint is done solely by the action of the fire. The pigment employed
consists, that is to say, of per-oxides of iron and manganese ground up
with a sufficient amount of powdered flint-glass or some equivalent
silicate, which by the action of the fire is fused with the glass
(reduced to very nearly red heat), and becomes practically part and
parcel of it.
Whenever a glass painter speaks of painted glass that is what he
means--viz., that the colour is thus indelibly burnt in. After the
middle of the sixteenth century various metallic oxides were used to
produce various more or less transparent pigments (enamel colours as
they are called to distinguish them from the pot-metal colours), but in
the thirteenth century transparent enamel colours were as yet unknown to
the glass painter, and he confined himself to the solid deep brown
pigment already spoken of--an enamel also, strictly speaking, but by no
means to be confounded with the enamel colours of later centuries. Those
were colours used for colour's sake; this is simply an opaque substance
used solely on account of its capacity to stop out so much of the colour
of pot-metal glass as may be necessary in order to define form and give
the drawing of detail; and in effect the brown, when seen against the
light, does not tell as colour at all but merely as so much blackness.
The only colour in the window is the colour of the various component
pieces of glass. Thus in the case of an early figure (page 33) the face
would be cut out of a sheet of pinkish glass and the features painted
upon it in brown lines; each garment would be cut out of the tint it was
meant to be, and the folds of the drapery outlined upon the pot-metal.
In like manner a tree would be cut out of green glass, its stem perhaps
out of brown, and only the forms of the leaves, and their veining, if
any, would be traced in paint. In the execution of the map there is no
occasion for further painting than this simplest and fittest kind of
work, little more than the glazier would himself have done had his means
allowed him. And in the very earliest glass the painter was almost as
sparing of paint as this: he did, however--it was inevitable that he
should--use lines, whether in drawing the features of a face or the
folds of drapery, which were not quite solid, and which consequently
only deepened the colour of the pot-metal, and did not quite obscure it:
he went so far even as to pass a smear of still thinner colour, a half
tint or less, over portions of the glass which he wished to lower in
tone. He began, in fact, however tentatively, to introduce shading.
Happily he was careful always to use it only as a softening influence in
his design, and never to sacrifice to it anything of the intrinsic
beauty and brilliancy of his glass.
The glass duly painted and burnt, the puzzle would be put together again
on the bench, and bands of lead, grooved at each side to admit and hold
the glass, would be inserted between the two pieces. These would be
soldered together at the joints where two leads met; a putty-like
composition or "cement" would be rubbed into the interstices between
lead and glass to stiffen it, and make it air-and water-tight; and, that
done, the window was finished.
It would only remain (what would in practice have been done before
cementing) to solder to the leads at intervals sundry loose ends of
copper-wire, eventually to be twisted round the iron saddle bars let
into the stone framework of the window to support it; it would then be
ready to be fixed in its place.
In contradistinction to the mosaic method of execution adopted by the
thirteenth century glazier, a glass painter of the eighteenth century,
and perhaps of the seventeenth, would, even though there were no
necessity for longitudinal and latitudinal lines, cut up his window into
oblong pieces of convenient size, only, of course, parallel and at right
angles to one another.
The sea he might or might not glaze in blue glass; here and there
perhaps, but not necessarily at all, an occasional province might be
leaded in with a piece of pot-metal; but for the most part he would use
panes of white glass, and rely for the colour of the provinces upon
enamel. He would have no need to separate his enamel colours by a line
of lead, and where he wanted a dividing line he would just paint it in
opaque brown. This method of glass painting forms an altogether separate
division of the subject, not yet under discussion. It is referred to
here only by way of contrast, and to emphasise the fact that, though we
are in the habit of using the term stained glass rather loosely--though
a stained glass window is almost invariably helped out to some extent by
painting (unless it be what is technically known as "leaded glass" or
"plain glazing"), and though a painted window is seldom altogether
innocent of glass that is stained--there are, as a matter of fact, two
methods of producing coloured windows, the mosaic and the enamelled; and
that however customary it may be to eke out either method by the other
more or less, windows divide themselves into two broad divisions,
according as it is pot-metal or enamel upon which the artist relies for
his effect.
Between these two widely different ideals there are all manners and all
degrees of compromise, and methods were employed which, to describe at
this point, would only complicate matters. It will be my purpose
presently to describe in detail the steps by which mere glazing
developed into painted glass, and how painting came to supersede
glazing; to show in how far painting was a help to the glazier, and in
how far it was to his hurt; to describe, in short, the progress of the
glass painter's art, to better and to worse; and to distinguish, as far
as may be, the principles which govern or should govern it.
[Illustration: 3. ANCIENT ARAB WINDOW.]
CHAPTER III.
GLAZING.
The art of the glass painter was at first only the art of the glazier.
To say that may seem like self-contradiction. But it is not so. On the
contrary, it is almost literally the truth; and it is difficult to find
words which would more vividly express the actual fact.
We are accustomed to think of a painter as using pigment always in some
liquid form, and applying it to wood or plaster, canvas or paper, with a
brush. Should he lay it on with a palette knife, as he sometimes does,
it is painting still. If he could by any possibility put together his
colours in mid-air without the aid of paper, canvas, or other solid
substance, it would still be painting. This is very much what the worker
in stained glass, by the help of strips of intervening lead, practically
succeeded in doing.
As a painter places side by side dabs of paint, so the glazier put side
by side little pieces of coloured glass. (Glass, you see, was the medium
in which his colour was fixed, just as oil, varnish, wax, or gum is the
vehicle in which the painter's pigment is ordinarily held in
suspension.) He could execute in this way upon the bench or the sloped
easel quite an elaborate pattern in coloured glass; and although, in
order to hold the parts together in a window frame, he had perforce to
resort to some sort of binding, in lead or what not, he may still
reasonably be said, if not actually to have painted in glass, at all
events to have worked in it. In fact, until about the twelfth century,
there were no glass painters, but only glaziers. Nay, more, it is to
glaziers that we owe the glory of the thirteenth century windows, in
which, be it remembered, each separate touch of colour is represented by
a separate piece of glass, and each separate piece of glass is bounded
by a framework of lead connecting it with the neighbouring pieces,
whilst the detail added by the painter goes for not very much.
[Illustration: 4. ARAB WINDOW LATTICE, GEOMETRIC.]
No strictly defined, nor indeed any approximate, date can safely be
given at which the art of the glass-worker sprang into existence. Arts
do not spring into existence; they grow, developing themselves in most
cases very slowly. The art of working in stained glass can only have
been the result of a species of evolution. The germ of it lay in the
circumstance that glass was originally made in comparatively small
pieces (there were no large sheets of glass a thousand years or more
ago), and so it was necessary, in order to glaze any but the smallest
window opening, that these small pieces should be in some way cemented
together. It followed naturally, in days when art was a matter of
every-day concern, the common flower of wayside craftsmanship, that the
idea of putting these pieces together in more or less ornamental
fashion, should occur to the workman, since they must be put together
somehow; and so, almost as a matter of course, would be developed the
mosaic of transparent glass, which was undoubtedly the form stained
glass windows first took.
It has been suggested that in some of the earliest windows the glazing
is meant to take the form of tesseræ; but the examples instanced in
support of that idea afford very little ground for supposing any such
intention on the part of the first glass-workers. It may more reasonably
be presumed that any resemblance there may be between early glass and
earlier wall mosaic comes of working in the same way; like methods
inevitably lead to like results.
It is by no means certain, even, that the first glaziers were directly
inspired by mosaic, whether of marble or of opaque glass. They were
probably much more immediately influenced by the work of the enameller.
That may appear at the first mention strange, considering what has been
said about the absolute divergence between mosaic and enamelled glass.
But it must be remembered that enamelling itself among the Lombard
Franks, the Merovingians, and the Anglo-Saxons, was a very different
thing from what the Limousin made it in the sixteenth century. It was,
in fact, a quite different operation, the only point in common between
the two being that they were executed in vitreous colour upon a metal
ground. The enamel referred to as having probably influenced the early
glazier is of the severer kinds familiar in Byzantine work, and known as
_champlevé_ and _cloisonné_. In the one, you know, the design is scooped
out of the metal ground, in the other its outline is bent in flat wire
and soldered to the ground. In either case the resulting cells are
filled with coloured paste, which, under the action of the fire,
vitrifies and becomes embodied with the metal. In _champlevé_ enamel
naturally the metal ground is usually a distinguishing feature. In
_cloisonné_ the ground as well as the pattern is, of course, in enamel;
but in either case the outlines, and, indeed, all drawing lines, are in
metal. In _cloisonné_ enamel the metal "_cloisons_," as they are called,
fulfil precisely the function of the leads in glass windows; and it
would have been more convenient to have left altogether out of account
the sister process, were it not that, in the painting of quite early
glass, the strokes with which the lines of the drapery and suchlike are
rendered, bear quite unmistakable likeness to the convention of the
Byzantine worker in _champlevé_. For that matter, one sees also in very
early altar-pieces painted on wood, where gold is used for marking the
folds of drapery, the very obvious inspiration of Byzantine enamel--but
that is rather by the way.
[Illustration: 5. ARAB LATTICE, GEOMETRIC.]
The popular idea of an early window is that of a picture, or series of
pictures, very imperfectly rendered. It may much more justly be likened
to a magnified plaque of Byzantine enamel with the light shining through
it. The Byzantine craftsman, or his descendants, at all events, did
produce, in addition to the ordinary opaque enamel, a translucent kind,
in imitation presumably of precious stones; and it might very well be
that it was from thence the glazier first derived the idea of coloured
windows. Quite certainly that was nearer to his thoughts than any form
of painting, as we understand painting nowadays; and, what is more, had
he aimed deliberately at the effect of enamel (as practised in his day),
he could not have got much nearer to it. His proceeding was almost
identical with that of the enamel worker. In place of vitreous pastes he
used glass itself; in place of brass, lead; and, for supplementary
detail, in place of engraved lines, lines traced in paint. Side by side
with the early European window glazing, and most likely before it, there
was practised in the East a form of stained glass window building of
which no mention has yet been made. In the East, also, windows were from
an early date built up of little pieces of coloured glass; but the
Mohammedan law forbidding all attempt at pictorial representation of
animate things, there was no temptation to employ painting; the glazier
could do all he wanted without it. His plan was to pierce small openings
in large slabs of stone, and in the piercings to set numerous little
jewels of coloured glass. The Romans, by the way, appear also to have
sometimes filled window spaces with slabs of marble framing discs of
coloured glass, but these were comparatively wide apart, more like
separate window-lets, each glazed with its small sheet of coloured
glass. The Oriental windows, on the contrary, were most elaborately
designed, the piercings taking the form of intricate patterns, geometric
or floral. Sometimes the design would include an inscription ingeniously
turned to ornamental use after the manner of the Moorish decorators of
the Alhambra (page 15). A further development of the Oriental idea was
to imbed the glass in plaster, a process easy enough before the plaster
had set hard. This kind of thing is common enough in Cairo to this day,
and specimens of it are to be found at the South Kensington Museum.
M. Vogué illustrates in his book, _La Syrie Centrale_, an important
series of windows in the Mosque of Omar (Temple of Jerusalem), erected
in 1528, by Sultan Soliman. The plaster, says M. Vogué, was strengthened
by ribs of iron and rods of cane imbedded in the stouter divisions of
the framework, a precaution not necessary in the smaller Cairene
lattices (measuring as a rule about four superficial feet), in which the
pattern is simply scooped out of the half-dry plaster.
[Illustration: 6. ARAB LATTICE, FLORAL.]
The piercings in these Oriental windows and window lattices are not made
at right angles to the slab of stone or plaster, but are cut through at
an angle, varying according to the position and height of the window,
with a view to as little interference as possible with the coloured
light. The glass, however, being fixed nearest the outside of the
window, there is always both shadow and reflection from the deep sides
of the openings, much to the enhancement of the mellowness and mystery
of colour. In the Temple windows referred to, still further subtlety of
effect is arrived at by an outer screen or lattice of _faïence_. Thus
subdued and tempered, even crude glass may be turned to beautiful
account.
Whence the mediæval Arabs got their glass, and the quality of the
material, are matters of conjecture. If we may judge by the not very
ancient specimens which reach us in this country, the glass used in
Cairene lattices is generally thin and raw; but set, as above described,
in jewels as it were, isolated each in its separate shadow cell, the
poorest material looks rich. The lattices here illustrated are none of
them of very early period; but, where the character of design is so
traditional and changes so slowly, the actual date of the work, always
difficult to determine, matters little.
[Illustration: 7. ARAB GLAZING IN PLASTER.]
It is more than probable, it is almost certain, that the Venetian
glass-workers, who in the tenth century brought their art to France,
were familiar with the coloured lattices of the Levant; for, as we know,
in the middle-ages Venice was the great trading port of Italy, in
constant communication with the East. If that was so, the Italians,
always prone to imitate, would be sure to found their practice, as they
did in other crafts, more or less upon Persian and Arabian models. At
all events, there is every reason to suppose that at first they,
practically speaking, only did in lead what the Eastern artificer did in
stone or plaster, and that the windows which, according to various
trustworthy but vague accounts, adorned the early Christian basilicas as
early as the sixth century, bore strong likeness to Mohammedan
glass--Christianised, so to speak. This is not to unsay what was before
said about the affinity of early glass to enamel. A river has not of
necessity one only and unmistakable source; and though we may not be
able to trace back through the distant years the very fountain of this
craft, we may quite certainly affirm that its current was swollen by
more than one side-stream, and that its course was shaped by all manner
of obstinate circumstances and conditions of the time, before it went to
join the broad and brimming stream of early mediæval art.
[Illustration: 8. ARAB GLAZING IN PLASTER.]
One more source, at least, there was at which the early glazier drew
inspiration--namely, the art of jewel setting. Coloured glass, as was
said a while ago, was itself probably first made only in imitation of
precious stones, and, being made in small pieces, it had to be set
somewhat in the manner of jewellery. In all probability the enameller
himself wrought at first only in imitation of jewellery, and afterwards
in emulation with it.
Just as white glass was called crystal, and no doubt passed for it, so
coloured glass actually went by the name of ruby, sapphire, emerald, and
so on. It is recorded even (falsely, of course) how sapphires were
ground to powder and mixed with glass to give it its deep blue colour;
indeed, this wilful confusion of terms goes far to explain the mystery
of the monster jewels of which we read in history or the fable which not
so very long ago passed for it. Stories of diamond thrones and emerald
tables seem to lead straight into fairyland; but the glass-worker
explains such fancies, and brings us back again to reality.
Bearing in mind, then, the preciousness of glass, and the well-kept
secrecy with regard to its composition, it is not beyond the bounds of
supposition that the glazier of the dark ages not only intended
deliberately to imitate jewellery, but meant that his glass should pass
with the ignorant (we forget how very ignorant the masses were) for
veritably precious stones.
Even though we exempt glaziers from all charge of trickery, it was
inevitable that they should attempt to rival the work of the jeweller,
and to do in large what he had done only in small. That certainly they
did, and with such success that, even when it comes to glass of the
twelfth, and, indeed, of the thirteenth century, when already pictorial
considerations begin to enter the mind of the artist, the resemblance is
unmistakable.
[Illustration: 9. ARAB GLAZING IN PLASTER.]
Try to describe the effect of an early mosaic window, and you are
compelled to liken it to jewellery. Jewelled is the only term which
expresses it. And the earlier it is the more jewel-like it is in effect.
So long as the workman looked upon his glass as a species of jewellery,
it followed, as a matter of course, from the very estimation in which he
held his material, that he did not think of obscuring it by
paint--defiling it, as he would have held. It is not so much that he
would have been ashamed to depend on the painter to put his colour
right, as that the thought of such a thing never entered his mind; he
was a glazier. It was the painter first thought of that, and his time
had not yet come.
Possibly it may have occurred to the reader, _apropos_ of the diagram on
page 10, in which it was shown how far the glazier could go towards the
production of a map in glass, that that was not far. Certainly he does
not go very far towards making a chart of any geographical value, but he
does go a long way towards making a window; for the first and foremost
qualities in coloured glass are colour and translucency--and for
translucent colour the glazier, after the glass-maker, is alone
responsible. It is in some respects very much to be deplored that the
Gothic craftsman so early took to the use of supplementary painting,
which in the end diverted his attention from a possible development of
his craft in a direction not only natural to it but big with
possibilities never to this day realised.
Of richly jewelled Gothic glass all innocent of paint, no single window
remains to us; but there are fairly numerous examples extant of pattern
windows glazed in white glass, whether in obedience to the Cistercian
rule which forbade colour, or with a view to letting light into the
churches--and it is to churches, prevalent as domestic glass may once
have been, we must now go for our Gothic windows.
[Illustration: 10. GLAZING IN PLASTER, SOUTH KENSINGTON MUSEUM.]
Some of this white pattern work is ascribed to a period almost as early
as that of any glass we know; but it is almost impossible to speak
positively as to the date of anything so extremely simple in its
execution; in which there is no technique of painting to tell tales; and
which, when once "storied" windows came into fashion, was probably left
to the tender mercies of lesser craftsmen, who may not have disdained to
save themselves the trouble of design, and to repeat the old, old
patterns.
The earlier glazier, it was said, painted, figuratively speaking, in
glass. It is scarcely a figure of speech to say that he drew in
leadwork.
This mode of draughtsmanship was employed in all strictly mosaic glass;
but it is in the white windows (or the pale green windows, which were
the nearest he could get to white, and which it is convenient to call
white) that this drawing with the leads is most apparent--in patterns,
that is to say, in which the design is formed entirely by the leadwork.
You have only to look at such patterns as Nos. 11 to 17, to see how this
was so; they are all designed in outline, and the outline is given in
lead. It is perfectly plain there how every separate line the glazier
laid down in charcoal upon his bench stood for a strip of lead. And,
looking at the glass, we see that it is the lead which makes the
pattern. It is no straining of terms to call this designing in the
lead. The ingenuity in designing such patterns as those below and
opposite, which is very considerable, consists in so scheming them that
every lead line shall fulfil alike a constructive and an artistic
function; that is to say, that every line in the design shall be
necessary to its artistic effect, that there shall be no lead line which
is not an outline, no outline which is not a lead.
[Illustration: 11. PLAIN GLAZING, BONLIEU.]
It is not always that the glazier was so conscientious as this. M.
Viollet le Duc pointed out, in the most helpful article in his famous
Dictionary of Architecture, under the head of _Vitrail_, how in the
little window from Bonlieu, here illustrated, the mediæval craftsman
resorted to a dodge, more ingenious than ingenuous, by which he managed
to economise labour. Each separate lead line there does not enclose a
separate piece of glass. The lines are all of lead; but some of them are
mere dummies, strips of metal, holding nothing, carried across the face
of the glass only, and soldered on to the more businesslike leads at
each end. The extent of _bonâ fide_ glazing is indicated in the
right-hand corner of the drawing. I confess I was inclined at first to
think that Viollet le Duc might, in ascribing this glass to the twelfth
century, very possibly have dated it too far back; for this is the kind
of trick one would more naturally expect from the later and more
sophisticated workman; but I have since come upon the same device
myself, both at Reims and Châlons, in work certainly as old as the
thirteenth century. You see, cutting the glass was the difficulty in
those days, and sometimes it was shirked.
It should be noted that the subterfuge employed at Bonlieu and in the
specimens from Châlons, opposite, was not in order to evade any
difficulty in glazing--the designs present none--but merely to save
trouble. There would have been more occasion for evasion in executing
the design from Aix-la-Chapelle (14), where the sharp points of the
fleur-de-lys give background shapes difficult for the glazier to cut. It
will be noticed that to the left of the panel one of the points joins
the necking-piece, which holds the fleur-de-lys together. That is a much
more practical piece of glazing than the free point, which presents a
difficulty in cutting the background, indicative of the late period to
which the glass belongs. The earlier mediæval glazier worked with
primitive tools, which kept him perforce within the bounds of simplicity
and dignified restraint.
[Illustration: 12. CHÂLONS.]
In white windows, so called, he did not by any means confine himself
wholly to the use of what it is convenient to call "white glass." From a
very early date, perhaps from the very first, he would enrich it with
some slight amount of colour. Having devised, as it were, a lattice of
white lines, as in the left-hand pattern from Salisbury (overleaf), it
was a very simple thing to fill here and there a division of his design
with a piece of coloured instead of white glass, as in the pattern next
to it in order. The third pattern, to the right, shows how he would even
introduce a separate jewel of colour, perhaps painted, which had to be
connected with the design by leads forming no part of the pattern.
[Illustration: 13. CHÂLONS.]
Colour spots are more ingeniously introduced in the example from
Brabourne Church, Kent, (said to be Norman) where the darker tints are
ingeniously thrown into the background. But here again, although this is
perhaps as early a specimen of glazing as we have in this country, the
glazier resorts in his central rosettes to the aid of paint.
[Illustration: 14. AIX-LA-CHAPELLE.]
[Illustration: 15. SOUTH TRANSEPT, SALISBURY.]
It will be observed that in the marginal lines which frame this window,
and again in the white bands in two out of the three patterns from
Salisbury, leads are introduced which have only a constructional use,
and rather confuse the design. That they do not absolutely destroy it is
due to its marked simplicity, and to the proportion of the narrow bands
to the broad spaces. This is yet more clearly marked in the very
satisfactory glazing designs from S. Serge at Angers. The fact is, there
is a limit to the possibilities of design, such as that from Sens (page
96), in which literally only four leads (viz., those from the points of
the central diamond shape) are introduced wholly and solely for
strength; and when it comes to windows of any considerable size, such as
clerestory windows, to which plain glazing is peculiarly suited, leads
which merely strengthen become absolutely necessary. The art of the
designer consists in so scheming them that they shall not seriously
interfere with the pattern.
[Illustration: 16. BRABOURNE CHURCH KENT.]
Were the pattern in lines of colour upon white, the crosslines
strengthening them would of course be lost in the darker tint; but, as
it happens, we do not find in the earliest glazing lines of interlacing
colour, though they occur by way of border lines, as at S. Serge
(below), where a marginal line of yellow is enclosed between strips of
white.
[Illustration: 17. S. SERGE, ANGERS.]
The interlacing character of several of the white glazing patterns
illustrated betrays of course Romanesque influence; but there would not
have been so many designs consisting of interlacing bands of white upon
a white ground, enclosing, at intervals more or less rare, what had best
be called jewels of colour, had it not been that the forms of
interlacing strapwork lend themselves kindly to glazing.
Every time a strap disappears, as it were, behind another, you have just
the break in its continuity which the glazier desires, and if only the
interlacings are frequent enough (as on page 96) they give him all he
wants.
So far the examples illustrated are, for the most part, in outline; that
is to say, on a ground of white the pattern appears as a network of
leads, flowing or geometric as the case may be, emphasised here and
there by a touch of dark colour, focussing them as it were. Without such
points of colour a design looks sometimes too much like a mere outline,
meant to be filled in with colour, and, in short, unfinished; but as yet
the darker and lighter tints of white are not used to emphasise the
pattern, as they would have done if, for example, the interlacing straps
had been glazed in a slightly purer white than the ground. On the
contrary, notwithstanding the very great variety in the tints of
greenish-white, which resulted from the chemically imperfect manufacture
of the glass, they were employed very much at haphazard, and so far from
ever defining the design, go to obviate anything harsh or mechanical
there may be in it. There is else, of course, a tendency in geometric
pattern to look too merely geometric. One wants always to feel it is a
window that is there, and not just so many feet of diaper.
Another practical form of design is that in which it is not the network
of leads, but the spaces they inclose, which constitutes the pattern;
where lines are not so much thought of as masses; where the main
consideration is colour, and contour is of quite secondary account. The
leads fulfil still their artistic function of marking the division of
the colours, as they fulfil the practical one of binding the bits of
coloured glass together; the glazier still draws in lead lines; but
attention is not called to them especially; indeed, with identically the
same lead lines one could produce two or three quite different effects,
according as one emphasised by stronger colour one series of shapes or
another. In the case of a framework of strictly geometric lines,
straight or curved, one gets patterns such as we see in marble inlay.
The slab of marble mosaic and the stained glass border opposite are more
than alike; the one is simply a carrying further of the other. The glass
design might just as well have been executed in marble, or the marble
design in glass. In the upper church at Assisi are some borders of
geometric inlay, one of which is given on page 96, identical in
character with the minute geometric inlay (which, by the way, was also
in glass, though opaque), with which the Cosmati illuminated, so to
speak, their marble shrines and monuments. This species of pattern work,
appropriate as it is to glass mosaic, transparent as well as opaque,
does not seem to have been much used in glass, even in Italy; where it
does occur it is in association, as at Assisi and Orvieto, with painted
work of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, though from its Byzantine
character it might as well be centuries earlier. It appears that this,
which was, theoretically, the simplest and most obvious form of leaded
pattern work, and might, therefore, well have been the earliest, was
never adopted to anything like the extent to which interlacing ornament
was carried.
[Illustration: 18. MARBLE MOSAIC, ROMAN.]
[Illustration: 19. GLASS, ORVIETO.]
Mediæval glaziers did not attempt anything like foliated ornament in
leaded glass, and for good reason. In such work the difficulty of doing
without lines detrimental to the design is greatly increased, whereas
abstract forms you can bend to your will, as you can bend your strip of
lead. The more natural the forms employed the more nature has to be
considered in rendering them, and nature declines to go always in the
direction of simple glazing. It might seem easy enough (to those who do
not know the difficulty) to glaze together bits of heart-shaped green
glass for leaves, and red for petals, with a dot of yellow for the eye
of the flower, and to make use of the lead not only for outlines but for
the stalks of the leaves and so on, all on a paler ground; but it is not
so easy as that. The designer cannot go far without wanting other
connecting leads (besides those used for the stalk); and when some leads
are meant very emphatically to be seen and some to be ignored, there is
no knowing what the actual effect may be: the drawing lines may be quite
lost in a network of connecting leads. Again, the mediæval glazier did
not, so far as we have any knowledge, build up in lead glazing a boldly
pronounced pattern, light on dark or dark on light. This he might
easily have done. On a small scale plain glazing must perforce be
modest; but, given a scale large enough, almost any design in silhouette
can be expressed in plain glazing. You may want in that case plenty of
purely constructional leads, not meant to be seen, or in any case meant
to be ignored; but if the contrast between design and background be only
strong enough (say colour on white or white on colour), they do not in
the least hurt the general effect. On the contrary, they are of the
utmost use to the workman who knows his materials, enabling him to get
that infinite variety of colour which is the crowning charm of glass.
What the designer of leaded glass had to consider was, in the first
place, the difficulty of shaping the pieces. That is now no longer very
great, thanks to the diamond, which makes cutting so easy that there is
even a danger lest the workman's skill of hand may outrun his judgment,
and tempt him to indulge in useless _tours de force_. The absurdity of
taking the greatest possible pains to the least possible purpose is
obvious. The more important consideration is now, therefore, the
substantiality of the window once made. Think of the force of a gale of
wind and its pressure upon the window: it is tremendous; and glazing
does not long keep a smooth face before it. Except there is a solid iron
bar to keep it in place, it soon bulges inwards, and presents a surface
as undulous, on a smaller scale, as the pavement of St. Mark's; and, as
it begins to yield, snap go the awkwardly shaped pieces of glass which
the glazier has been at such pains to cut. The mediæval artist,
therefore, exercised no more than common sense, when he shaped the
pieces of glass he employed with a view to security, avoiding sharp
turns or elbows in the glass, or very long and narrow strips, or even
very acutely pointed wedge-shaped pieces. No doubt the difficulty of
cutting helped to keep him in the way he should go; probably, also, he
was under no temptation to indulge in pieces of glass so large that,
incapable of yielding, they were bound to break under pressure of the
wind. That he sometimes used pieces so small as in time to get clogged
with dust and dirt, was owing to the natural desire to use up the
precious fragments which, under his clumsy system of cutting, must have
accumulated in great quantity. Where most he showed his mastery was, in
foreseeing where the strain would come, and introducing always a lead
joint where the crack might occur, anticipating and warding off the
danger to come. He was workman enough frankly to accept the limitations
of his trade. Occasionally (as at Bonlieu) he may have shirked work; but
he accommodated himself to the nature of his materials. Never pretending
to do what he could not, he betrayed neither its weakness nor his own.
Mere _glazing_ has here been discussed at a length which perhaps neither
existing work of the kind nor the modern practice of the craft (more is
the pity) might seem to demand. It is the most modest, the rudest even,
of stained glass; but it is the beginning and the foundation of glass
window making, and it affects most deeply even the fully developed art
of the sixteenth century.
The leading of a window is the framework of its design, the skeleton to
be filled out presently and clothed in colour; and, if the anatomy is
wrong, nothing will ever make the picture right. The leads are the
bones, which it is necessary to study, even though they were
intrinsically without interest, for on them depends the form which shall
eventually charm us. Beauty is not skin deep: it is the philosophy of
the poet which is shallow.
CHAPTER IV.
EARLY MOSAIC WINDOWS.
It has been explained already at how very early a period "stained" glass
begins also to be "painted" glass more or less.
But for the fond desire to be something more than an artist--to teach,
to preach, to tell a story--the glazier would possibly have been quite
content with the mere jewellery of glass, and might have gone on for
years, and for generations, using his pot-metal as it left the pot. As
it was, working always in the service of the Church, in whose eyes it
was of much more importance that a window should be "storied" than that
it should be "richly dight," he found it necessary from the first to
adopt the use of paint--not, as already explained, for the purpose of
giving colour, but of shutting it out, or at most modifying it. His work
was still essentially, and in the first place, mosaic. He conceived his
window, that is to say, as made up of a multiplicity of little pieces of
coloured glass, the outlines supplied, for the most part, by the strong
lines of connecting leadwork, and the details traced in lines of opaque
pigment. He still designed with the leads, as I have expressed it, and
throughout the thirteenth century (though less emphatically than in the
twelfth) his design is commonly quite legible at a distance at which the
painted detail is altogether lost; but in designing his leads he had
always in view, of course, that they were to be helped out by paint.
In the late thirteenth century or early fourteenth century figure from
Troyes, on page 336, which depends very little indeed upon any painted
detail to be deciphered, the lighter figure glazed upon a ground of dark
trellis-work is not only readable, but suggestive of considerable
feeling; and in the undoubtedly fourteenth century figure on page 241,
where, with the exception of the hands and face, there is absolutely no
indication of the paint with which the artist eventually completed his
drawing, there is no mistaking the recumbent figure of Jesse, even
without any help of colour. But the earlier the glass, the less was
there of painting, and the more the burden of design fell upon the
glazier. The two figures from Le Mans, here given (generally allowed to
belong to about the year 1100) show very plainly both the amount and the
character of the painting used, and the extent to which the design
depends upon it. There is no mistake about the value of the lead lines
there, or the extreme simplicity of the painted detail.
[Illustration: 20. FIGURES FROM ASCENSION, LE MANS.]
It will be seen that paint is there used for three purposes: to paint
out the ground round about the feet, hands, and faces; to mark the folds
of the drapery, and just an indication of shading upon it; and to
blacken the hair. It was only in thus rendering the human hair that the
earliest craftsman ever used paint as local colour. In that case he had
a way of scraping out of it lines of light to indicate detail. If such
lines showed too bright, it was easy to tone them down with a film of
thinner paint. In these particular figures from Le Mans the artist had
not yet arrived at that process; but from the very first it was a quite
common custom, instead of painting very small ornamental detail, to
obscure the glass with solid pigment, and then scrape out the ornament.
[Illustration: 21. HITCHIN CHURCH.]
The fact is, that in early windows a much larger proportion of the glass
is obscured, and had need to be obscured, than would be supposed. It
will be seen what a considerable area of paint surrounds the feet of the
two apostles on page 33. This is partly owing to the then difficulty of
exactly shaping the pieces of glass employed; but it is largely due to
the actual necessity of sufficient area of dark to counteract the
tendency of the lighter shades of glass, such as the brownish-pink
employed for flesh tints, to spread their rays and obliterate the
drawing. Not only would the extremely attenuated fingers, shown in the
scraps from Hitchin Church above look quite well fleshed in the glass,
but it was essential that they should be so painted in order to come out
satisfactorily--that is, without the aid of shading, to which painters
did not yet much resort. On the contrary, they were at first very chary
of half tint--employing it, indeed, for the rounding of flesh and so on,
but not to degrade the colour of the glass, small though their palette
was.
[Illustration: 22. S. REMI, REIMS.]
Something, however, had to be done to prevent especially the whites,
yellows, and pale blues, and in some degree all but the dark colours,
from taking more than their due part in the general effect. It was not
always possible to reduce the area of the glass of an aggressive tint to
the dimensions required. To have reduced a line of white, for example,
to the narrowness at which it would tell for what was wanted, would have
been to make it so narrow that the accumulation of dust and dirt
between the leads would soon have clogged it and blotted it out
altogether. What they did was to paint it heavily with pattern. For
example, they would paint out great part of a white line and leave only
a row of beads, with so much paint between and around them that
certainly not more than one-third of the area of the glass was left
clear, and the effect at the right distance (as at Angers, page 116)
would be that of a continuous string of pearls. They would in the same
way paint a strip of glass solid, and merely pick out a zig-zag or some
such pattern upon it, with or without a marginal thread of light on each
side (Le Mans). Rather than lower the brightness of the glass by a tint
of pigment they would coat it with solid brown, and pick out upon it a
minute diaper of cross-hatched lines and dots, by that means reducing
the volume of transmitted light without much interfering with its purity
(S. Remi, Reims, below). Diaper of more interesting kind afforded a
ready means of lowering shades of glass which were too light or too
bright for the purpose required, and for supplying in effect the
deficiencies of the pot-metal palette. Overleaf are some fragments of
diaper pattern so picked out, from Canterbury, which would possibly
never have been devised if the designer had had to his hand just the
shade of blue glass he wanted. Something certainly of the elaboration of
pattern which distinguishes the earliest glass comes of the desire to
qualify its colour. Viollet le Duc endeavours to explain with scientific
precision which are the colours which spread most, and how they spread.
His analysis is useful as well as interesting; but absolute definition
of the effect of radiation is possible only with regard to a rigidly
fixed range of colours to which no colourist would ever confine himself.
A man gets by experience to know the value of his colours in their
place, and thinks out his scheme accordingly. He puts, as a matter of
course, more painting into pale draperies than into dark, and so on; but
to a great extent he acts upon that subtle sort of reasoning which we
call feeling. Intuition it may be, but it is the intuition of a man who
knows.
The simple method of early execution went hand in hand with equal
simplicity of design--the one almost necessitated the other--and the
earlier the window the more plainly is its pattern pronounced, light
against dark, or, less usually, (as in some most interesting remains of
very early glass from Châlons now at the _Musée des Arts Décoratifs_ at
Paris) in full, strong colour upon white. In twelfth century work
especially, figures and ornament alike are always frankly shown _en
silhouette_. Witness the design on pages 33 and 115. Similar relief or
isolation of the figure against the background is shown in the
thirteenth century bishops, occupying two divisions of a rose window at
Salisbury, on page 275; and again in the little subject from Lyons,
where S. Peter is being led off by the gaoler to prison.
[Illustration: 23. CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL.]
In proportion as the aim of the artist becomes more pictorial he groups
his figures more in clumps (you see indications of that at Canterbury),
whence comes much of the confusion of effect characteristic of the
thirteenth century as it advances, not in this respect in the direction
of improvement. In his haste to tell a story he tells it less
effectively. Where an early subject is unintelligible (supposing it to
be in good preservation) it is almost invariably owing to the figures
not being clearly enough cut out against the background. Isolation of
the design seems to be a necessary condition of success in glass of the
simple, scarcely painted, kind. In ornament, where the artist had
nothing to think of but artistic effect, he invariably and to a much
later period defined it unmistakably against contrasting colour. That is
illustrated on page 117, part of a thirteenth century window at
Salisbury, and in the border below, as well as various others of the
period, pages 129, 130, and elsewhere.
[Illustration: 24. POITIERS CATHEDRAL. (Compare with 59.)]
It is the almost unanimous verdict of the inexpert that the lead lines
very seriously detract from the beauty of early windows. How much more
beautiful they would be, it is said, without those ugly black lines!
Possibly the expert and the lover of old glass have unconsciously
brought themselves not to see what they do not want to see; and the
leads may, soberly and judiciously speaking, seriously interfere with
the form of the design. But, in the first place, the beauty of early
glass is in its colour, not in its form. That is very clearly shown in
the illustrations to this chapter and the next; which give,
unfortunately, nothing of the beauty and real glory of the glass, but
only its design and execution; they appear perhaps in black and white so
merely grotesque, that it may be difficult to any one not familiar with
the glass itself to understand why so much should be said in its praise.
In reality the lack of beauty, especially apparent in the figure drawing
of the early glass painters when reduced to monochrome, taken in
conjunction with the magnificent effect of many of the earliest windows
(which no colourist has ever yet been known to deny) is proof in itself
how entirely their art depended upon colour--colour, it should be added,
of a quality quite unapproachable by any other medium than that of
translucent glass or actual jewellery. No one who appreciates at
anything like its full value the magnificence of that colour will think
the interference of occasional lead lines a heavy price to pay for it.
[Illustration: 25. S. KUNIBERT, COLOGNE.]
For--and this is the second point to be explained in reference to
leading--the leads, were they never so objectionable, are actually the
price we pay for the glory of early glass. It is by their aid we get
those mosaics of pot-metal, the depth and richness of which to this day,
with all our science of chemistry, we cannot approach by any process of
enamelling. Moreover, though merely constructional leads, taking a
direction contrary to the design, may at times disturb the eye, (they
scarcely ever disturb the effect) they add to the richness of the glass
in a way its unlearned admirers little dream. Not only is the depth and
intensity of the colour very greatly enhanced by the deep black setting
of lead, a veritable network of shade in which jewels of bright colour
are caught, but it is by the use of a multiplicity of small pieces of
glass (instead of a single sheet, out of which the drapery of a figure
could be cut all in one piece--the ideal of the ignorant!), that the
supreme beauty of colour is reached. Examine the bloom of a peach or of
a child's complexion, and see how it is made up of specks of blue and
grey and purple and yellow amongst the pink and white of which it is
supposed to consist. Every artist, of course, knows that a colour is
beautiful according to the variety in it; and a "Ruby" background (as it
is usually called), which is made up of little bits of glass of various
shades of red, not only crimson, scarlet, and orange, but purple and
wine-colour of all shades from deepest claret to tawny port, is as far
beyond what is possible in a sheet of even red glass as the colour of a
lady's hand is beyond the possible competition of pearl powder or a pink
kid glove. Not only, therefore, were the small pieces of glass in early
windows, and the consequent leads, inevitable, but they are actually at
the very root of its beauty; and the artificer of the dark ages was
wiser in his generation than the children of this era of enlightenment.
He did not butt his head against immovable obstacles, but built upon
them as a foundation. Hence his success, and in it a lesson to the
glazier for all time--which was taken to heart (as will be shown
presently) by craftsmen even of a period too readily supposed to have
been given over entirely to painting upon glass.
Let there be no misunderstanding about what is claimed for the earliest
windows. The method of mosaic, eked out with a minimum of tracing in
opaque pigment, does not lend itself very kindly to picture; and it is
in ornament that the thirteenth century glazier is pre-eminent. There is
even something barbaric about the splendour of his achievement. Might it
not be said that in all absolutely ornamental decoration there is
something of the barbaric?--which may go to account for the rarity of
real ornament, or any true appreciation of it, among modern people.
We might not have to scratch the civilised man very deep to reach the
savage in him, but he is, at all events, sophisticated enough to have
lost his unaffected delight in strong bright colours and "meaningless"
twistings of ornament. Be that as it may, the figure work of the
thirteenth century window designer is distinctly less perfect than his
scrolls and suchlike, partly, it is true, because of his inadequate
figure drawing, but partly also because his materials were not well
adapted to anything remotely like pictorial representation. The figures
in his subjects have, as before said, to be cut out against the
background in order to be intelligible. Hence a stiff and ultra-formal
scheme of design, and also a certain exaggeration of attitude, which in
the hands of a _naïve_ and sometimes almost childish draughtsman becomes
absolutely grotesque. This is most strikingly the case in the larger
figures, sometimes considerably over lifesize, standing all in a row in
the clerestory lights of some of the great French cathedrals.
[Illustration: 26. LYONS.]
The scale of these figures gave opportunity (heads all-of-a-piece show
that it did not actually make it a necessity) for glazing the faces in
several pieces of glass; and it was quite the usual thing, as at Lyons
(opposite) to glaze the flesh in pinkish-brown, the beard in white or
grey or yellow or some dark colour--not seldom blue, which had at a
distance very much the value of black--and the eyes in white. Sometimes
even, as at Reims, the iris of the eye was not represented by a blot of
paint but was itself glazed in blue. The effect of this might have been
happier if the lines of the painting had been more of the same strength
as the leads, and so strong enough to support them. As it is, the great
white eyes start out of the picture and spoil it. They have a way of
glaring at you fixedly; there is no speculation in their stare; they
look more like huge goggles than live eyes. And it is not these only
which are grotesque; the smaller figures in subject windows are, for the
most part, rude and crude, to a degree which precludes one, or any one
but an archæologist _pur sang_, from taking them seriously as figure
design. They are often really not so much like human figures as
"bogies," ugly enough to frighten a child. What is more to be deplored
is that they are so ugly as actually to have frightened away many a
would-be artist in glass from the study of them--a study really
essential to the proper understanding of his _métier_; for repellant as
those bogey figures may be, they show more effectually than later, more
attractive, and much more accomplished painting, the direction in which
the glass painter should go, and must go, if he wants to make figures
tell, say, in the clerestory of a great church.
Apart from the halo of sentiment about the earliest work--and who shall
say how much of that sentiment we bring to it ourselves?--apart from the
actual picturesqueness--and how much of that is due to age and
accident?--there _is_ in the earliest glass a feeling for the material
and a sense of treatment seldom found in the work of more accomplished
glass painters. If there is not actually more to be learnt from it than
from later and more consummate workmanship, there is at least no danger
of its teaching a false gospel, as that may do.
From the grossest and most archaic figures, ungainly in form and
fantastic in feature, stiff in pose and extravagant in action, out of
all proportion to their place in the window, there are at least two
invaluable lessons to be learnt--the value of broad patches of
unexpected colour, interrupting that monotony of effect to which the
best-considered schemes of ornament incline, and the value of
simplicity, directness, and downright rigidity of design. Severity of
design is essential to largeness of style; it brings the glass into
keeping with the grandeur of a noble church, into tune with the solemn
chords of the organ. Modern windows may sometimes astound us by their
aggressive cleverness, the old soothe and satisfy at the same time that
they humble the devout admirer.
The confused effect of Early glass (except when the figures are on a
very large scale) is commonly described as "kaleidoscopic." That is not
a very clever description, and it is rather a misleading one. For,
except in the case of the rose or wheel windows, common in France, Early
glass is not designed on the radiating lines which the kaleidoscope
inevitably gives. It is enough for the casual observer that the effect
is made up of broken bits of bright colour; and if they happen to occupy
a circular space the likeness is complete to him. But to know the lines
on which an Early Gothic window was built, is to see, through all
confusion of effect, the evidence of design, and to resent the
implication of thoughtless mechanism implied in the word kaleidoscopic.
Nevertheless, little as the mediæval glaziers meant it--they were lavish
of the thought they put into their art--their glass does often delight
us, something as the toy amuses children, because the first impression
it produces upon us is a sense of colour, in which there is no too
definite form to break the charm. There comes a point in our
satisfaction in mere beauty (to some it comes sooner than to others--too
soon, perhaps) at which we feel the want of a meaning in it--must find
one, or our pleasure in it is spoilt; we even go so far as to put a
meaning into it if it is not there; but at first it is the mysterious
which most attracts the imagination.
And even afterwards, when the mystery is solved, we are not sorry to
forget its meaning for a while, to be free to put our own interpretation
upon beauty, or to let it sway us without asking why, just as we are
moved by music which carries us we know not where, we care not.
CHAPTER V.
PAINTED MOSAIC GLASS.
The glass so far vaguely spoken of as "Early" belongs to the period when
the glazier designed his leads without thinking too much about painting.
[Illustration: 27. CHARTRES.]
There followed a period when the workman gave about equal thought to the
glazing and the painting of his window.
Then came a time when he thought first of painting, and glazing was a
secondary consideration with him.
[Illustration: 28. S. KUNIBERT, COLOGNE.]
According as we contemplate glass painting from the earlier or the later
standpoint, from the point of view of glass or of painting, we are sure
to prefer one period to the other, to glory perhaps in the advance of
painting, or to regret the lesser part that coloured glass eventually
plays in the making of a window. To claim for one or the other manner
that it is the true and only way, were to betray the prejudice of the
partizan. Each justifies itself by the masterly work done in it, each is
admirable in its way. It is not until the painter began, as he
eventually did, to take no thought of the glass he was using, and the
way it was going to be glazed, that he can be said with certainty to
have taken the downward road in craftsmanship. We shall come to that
soon enough; meanwhile, throughout the Gothic period at least, he kept
true to a craftsmanlike ideal, and never quite forsook the traditions of
earlier workmanship; and until well into the fourteenth century he
began, we may say, with glazing. In the fourteenth century borders
overleaf and in the figure on page 47, no less than in the earlier
examples on pages 43 and 46, the glazing lines fulfil a very important
part in the design, emphasising the outlines of the forms, if they do
not of themselves form an actual pattern. Naturally, once the glazier
resorted to the use of paint, he schemed his leads with a view to
supplementary painting, and had always a shrewd idea as to the details
he meant to add; but it will be clear to any one with the least
experience in design that a man might map out the leadwork of such
borders as those shown below with only the vaguest idea as to how he was
going to fill them in with paint, and yet be sure of fitting them with
effective foliage. So the architectural canopies on pages 134, 135, 154,
were pretty surely first blocked out according to their lead lines; and
not till the design was thus mapped out in colour did the designer begin
to draw the detail of his pinnacles and crockets. The invariable
adherence to a traditional type of design made it the easier for him to
keep in mind the detail to come. For he had not so much to imagine as to
remember. He was free, however, always to follow any spontaneous impulse
of design.
[Illustration: 29. S. OUEN, ROUEN.]
It was told in Chapter IV. how, in the beginning, pigment was used only
to paint out the light, to emphasise drawing, and to give detail--such
as the features of the face, the curls of the hair, and so on. That was
the ruling idea of procedure. In practice, however, it is not very easy
to paint perfectly solid lines on glass. At the end of a stroke always,
and whenever the brush is not charged full of colour, the lines
insensibly get thin, not perfectly opaque, that is to say; and so, in
spite of himself, the painter would continually be obtaining something
like translucency--a tint, in fact, and not a solid brown. Not to have
taken advantage of this half tint, would have been to prove himself
something less than a good workman, less than a reasonable one; and he
did from the first help out his drawing by a smear of paint, more or
less in the nature of shading. In flesh painting of the twelfth century
(or attributed to that early date) there are indications of such
shading, used, however, with great moderation, and only to supplement
the strong lines of solid brown in which the face was mainly drawn. The
features were first very determinedly drawn in line ("traced" is the
technical term), and then, by way of shade, a slight scum of paint was
added.
Still, in thirteenth century work, there is frequently no evidence of
such shading; the painter has been quite content with the traced line.
In the fourteenth century a looser kind of handling is observed. The
painter would trace a head in not quite solid lines of brown, and then
strengthen them here and there with perfectly opaque colour, producing
by that means a much softer quality of line. In any case, the painting
until well into the century was at the best rude, and the half tint,
such as it was, used, one may say, to be smeared on. Here again practice
followed the line of least resistance. It was difficult with the
appliances then in use to paint a gradated tint which would give the
effect of modelling; and accordingly very little of the kind was
attempted. Eventually, however, the painter began to stipple his smear
of shadow, at once softening it and letting light into it.
Towards the end of the century this stippling process was carried a step
further. It occurred to the workman to coat his glass all over (or all
of it except what was meant to remain quite clear) with thin brown, and
then, with a big dry brush, dab it until it assumed a granular or
stippled surface (darker or lighter, according to the amount of
stippling). This was not only more translucent than the smeared colour
but more easily graduated, and capable of being so manipulated, and so
softened at the edges, as readily to give a very fair amount of
modelling. This shading was often supplemented by dark lines or
hatchings put in with a brush, as well as by lines scraped out of the
tint to lighten it. But in any case there was for a while nothing like
heavy shading. Even in work belonging to the fifteenth century, and
especially in English glass, as at York, Cirencester, Ross, &c., it is
quite a common thing to find that the drawing is mainly in line, very
delicately done, helped out by the merest hint of shading in tint. This
glass is sometimes a little flat in effect, and it is not equal in force
to contemporary foreign work; but it is peculiarly refined in execution,
and it has qualities of glass-like sparkle and translucency which more
than make amends for any lack of solidity in painting. Solidity is just
the one thing we can best dispense with in glass.
[Illustration: 30. SALISBURY.]
A comparison of the two borders on pages 38 and 175, both German work,
will show how little difference of principle there was between the
thirteenth century craftsman and his immediate successor. The difference
in style between the two is strikingly marked--the one is quite
Romanesque in character, the detail of the other is comparatively
naturalistic; but when you come to look at the way they are executed,
the way the glazing is mapped out, the way the leads emphasise the
outlines, whilst paint is only used to make out details which lead could
not give--you will see that the new man has altered his mind more with
regard to what he wants to do in glass than as to how he wants to do it.
Very much might be said with regard to the two figures on this page and
the opposite. The French designer has departed from the archaic
composition of the earlier Englishman, and put more life and action into
his figure, but there is very little difference in the technique of the
two men, less than appears in the illustrations; for, as it happens, one
drawing aims at giving the lines of the glass, the other at showing its
effect. The fourteenth century figure on page 51 relies more than these
last upon painting. The folds of the saint's tunic, for example, are not
merely traced in outline, but there is some effect of modelling in them.
It will be instructive also to compare the fourteenth century hop
pattern on page 173 with the fourteenth century vine on page 364, and
the fifteenth century example on page 345. In the first the method of
proceeding is almost as strictly mosaic as though it had been a scroll
of the preceding century. Leaves, stalks, and fruits are glazed in light
colour upon dark, and bounded by the constructional lines of lead. In
the second, though the main forms are still outlined by the leads, much
greater use is made of paint: the topmost leaf is in one piece of glass
with the stalk of the tree, and all the leaves are relieved by means of
shading. In the third the artist has practically drawn his vine scroll,
and then thought how best he could glaze it; and the leads come very
much as they may.
This last-mentioned proceeding is typical of a period not yet under
discussion, but the second illustrates very fairly the supplementary use
of paint made in the fourteenth century.
[Illustration: 31. S. URBAIN, TROYES.]
A rather unusual but suggestive form of fourteenth century glazing is
shown on page 176. It was the almost invariable practice at this period,
as in the preceding centuries, to distinguish the pattern, whether of
scroll or border, by relieving it against a background of contrasting
colour, usually light against dark; but here the border is varicoloured,
without other ground than the opaque pigment used for painting out the
forms of the leaves, etc., and filling in between them. The method lends
itself only to design in which the forms are so closely packed as to
leave not too much ground to be filled in. A fair amount of solid paint
about the leaves and stalks does no harm. A good deal was used in Early
work, and it results in happier effects than when minute bits of
background are laboriously leaded in. The main point is--and it is one
the early glaziers very carefully observed--that the glass through which
the light is allowed to come should not be made dirty with paint. It was
mentioned before (page 35) how, from the first, a background would be
painted solid and a diaper picked out of it. Further examples of that
are shown overleaf and on pages 88 and 103, though, as will be seen, a
considerable portion of the glass is by this means obscured, the effect
is still brilliant; and in proportion as lighter and brighter tints of
glass came into use, it became more and more necessary; in fact, it
never died out. The diaper opposite belongs to the fifteenth century,
and the minuter of the three diapers above, as well as those on pages 88
and 103, belong to the sixteenth century.
[Illustration: 32. DIAPERS SCRATCHED OUT.]
Now that the reader may be presumed to have a perfectly clear idea of
the process of the early glazier, and to realise the distinctly mosaic
character of old glass, it is time mention should be made of two
important intermediate methods of glass staining which presently began
to affect the character of stained glass windows.
Allusion has been made (page 2) to the Roman practice of making glass in
strata of two colours, which they carved cameo-fashion in imitation of
onyx and the like; at least, one _tour de force_ of this kind is
familiar to every one in the famous Portland vase, in which the outer
layer of white glass is in great part ground away, leaving the design in
cameo upon dark blue. The mediæval glass-blower seems from the first to
have been acquainted with this method of coating a sheet of glass with
glass of a different colour. As the Roman coated his dull blue with
opaque white glass, so he coated translucent white with rich pot-metal
colour. It was not a very difficult operation. He had only to dip his
lump of molten white into a pot of coloured glass, and, according to
the quantity of coloured material adhering to it, so his bubble of glass
(and consequently the sheet into which it was opened out) was spread
with a thinner or thicker skin of colour. The Gothic craftsman took
advantage of this facility, in so far as he had any occasion for its
use. The occasion arose owing to the density of the red glass he
employed, which was such that, if he had made it of the thickness of the
rest of his glass, it would have been practically opaque. To have made
it very much thinner would have been to make it more fragile; and in any
case, it was easier to make a good job of the glazing when the glass was
all pretty much of a thickness. A layer of red upon white offered a
simple and practical way out of the difficulty.
What is called "ruby" glass, therefore, is not red all through, but only
throughout one half or a third of its thickness. The colour is only, so
to speak, the jam upon the bread; but the red and the white glass are
amalgamated at such a temperature as to be all but indivisible, to all
intents and purposes as thoroughly one as ordinary pot-metal glass.
[Illustration: 33. DIAPER SCRATCHED OUT.]
For a long while glass painters used this ruby glass and a blue glass
made in the same way precisely as though it had been self-coloured. But
in shaping a piece of ruby glass, especially with their inadequate
appliances, they would be bound sometimes to chip off at the edges
little flakes of red, revealing as many little flaws of white. This
would be sure to suggest, sooner or later, the deliberate grinding away
of the ruby stratum in places where a spot of white was needed smaller
than could conveniently be leaded in. As to the precise date at which
some ingenious artist may first have used this device, it may be left to
archæology to speculate. It must have been a very laborious process; and
the early mediæval ideal of design was not one that offered any great
temptation to resort to it during the thirteenth or even the fourteenth
century. It was not, in fact, until the painting of windows was carried
to a point at which there was some difficulty in so scheming the lines
of the lead that they should not in any way mar its delicacy, that the
practice of "flashing" glass, as it is termed, became common. That is
why no mention of it has been made till now. It will be seen that it is
a perfectly practical and workmanlike process, rendering possible
effects not otherwise to be got in glass, but lending itself rather to
minuteness of execution and elaboration of detail than to splendour of
colour or breadth of effect.
[Illustration: 34. QUEEN OF SHEBA, FAIRFORD.]
The second intermediate method of staining glass began earlier to affect
the design and execution of windows; and the character of fourteenth
century glass is distinctly modified by it; and, curiously enough,
whilst flashing applied to red and blue glass, this applies to yellow.
It was discovered about the beginning of the fourteenth century that
white glass painted with a solution of silver would take in the kiln a
pure transparent stain of yellow, varying, according to its strength and
the heat of the furnace, from palest lemon to deepest orange. Observe
that this yellow stain is neither an enamel nor a pot-metal colour, but
literally a stain, the only stain used upon glass. In pot-metal the
stain (if it may be so called) is _in_ the glass, this is _upon_ it. But
it is absolutely indelible; it can only be removed with the surface of
the glass itself; time has no more effect upon it than if the glass were
coated with yellow pot-metal. This silver stain was not only of a
singularly pure and delicate colour, compared to which pot-metal yellows
were hot and harsh, but it had all the variety of a wash of
water-colour, shading off by imperceptible degrees from dark to light,
and that so easily that the difficulty would have been in getting a
perfectly flat tint.
[Illustration: 35. S. GREGORY, ALL SOULS' COLLEGE, OXFORD.]
Moreover, it could be as readily traced in lines or little touches of
colour as it could be floated on in broad surfaces. By its aid it was as
easy to render the white pearls on a bishop's golden mitre as to give
the golden hair of a white-faced angel, or to relieve a white figure
against a yellow ground--and all without the use of intervening lead.
[Illustration: 36. DIAPER IN WHITE AND STAIN, ALL SAINTS' CHURCH, YORK.]
It is not surprising that such a discovery had a very important effect
upon the development of the glass painter's practice. By means of it
were produced extraordinarily beautiful effects, as of gold and silver,
peculiarly characteristic of later Gothic work. The crockets and finials
of white canopies would be touched with it as with gold, the hair of
angels and the crowns of kings; or the nimbus itself would be stained,
the head now being habitually painted on one piece of white glass with
the nimbus. The crown and the pearl-edged head-band of the Queen of
Sheba, from Fairford, (page 50), are stained upon the white glass out of
which the head is cut. In the figure of S. Gregory on page 51 the triple
crown is stained yellow, and so is the nimbus of the bull, whose wings
also are shaded in stain varying from light to dark.
Of the elaborate diapering of white drapery, with patterns in rich
stain, more and more resorted to as the fifteenth century advanced, a
specimen is here given, in which the design is figured in white upon a
yellow ground, outlined with a delicately traced line of brown. Stain
was seldom used on white without such outline.
In the end white and stain predominated. Early glass was likened to
jewellery; now the jewels seem to be set in gold and silver. There was a
loss in dignity and grandeur, but there was a gain in gaiety and
brightness. How far stain encouraged the more abundant use of white
glass which prevailed in the fifteenth century it might be rash to say;
at any rate, it fitted in to perfection with the tendency of the times,
which was ever more and more in the direction of light, until the later
Gothic windows became, in many instances, not so much coloured windows
as windows of white and stain enclosing panels or pictures in colour.
Even in these pictures very often not more than about one-third of the
glass was in rich colour. And not only was more white glass used, but
the white itself was purer and more silvery, lighter, and at the same
time thinner, giving occasion and excuse for that more delicate painting
which perhaps was one great reason for the change in its quality. At all
events, the more transparent character of the material necessitated more
painting than was desirable in the case of the hornier texture of the
older make. Hence the prevalence of diaper already referred to.
By the latter half of the fifteenth century painting plays a very
important part in stained glass windows. We have arrived at a period
when it is no longer subsidiary to mosaic; still it has not yet begun to
take precedence of it. The artist is now a painter, and he relies for
much of his effect upon painting; but he is a glazier, too, and careful
to make the most of what glass can do. He designs invariably with a view
to the glazing of his design, and with full knowledge of what that
means. He knows perfectly well what can be done in glass, and what
cannot. He has not yet carried painting to the perfection to which it
came eventually to be carried, but neither has he begun to rely upon it
for what can best be done in mosaic. He can scarcely be said to prefer
one medium to another; he uses both to equally workmanlike purpose. He
does not, like the early glazier, design in lead any longer, but neither
does he leave the consideration of leading till after he has designed
his picture, as painters came subsequently to do.
It amounts, it might be thought, to much the same thing whether the
artist begins with his lead lines and works up to his painting, as at
first he did, or begins with his painting and works up to the leads, as
became the practice,--so long as in either case he has always in mind
the after-process, and works with a view to it. But the truth seems to
be that few men have ever a thing quite so clearly in their minds as
when they have it in concrete form before their eyes. The glazier may
reckon upon the paint to come, but he does not rely upon it quite so
much as the painter who starts with the idea of painting.
[Illustration: 37. NATIVITY, GREAT MALVERN.]
The later Gothic artists gradually got into the way of thinking more and
more of the painting upon their glass. In the end, they thought of it
first, and there resulted from their doing so quite a different kind of
design, apart from change due to modifications of architectural style;
but so long as the Gothic tradition lasted--and it survived until well
into the sixteenth century, in work even which bears the brand of
typical Renaissance ornament--so long the glazing of a window was in no
degree an after-thought, something not arranged for, which had to be
done as best it might. It is apparent always to the eye at all trained
in glass design that the composition even of the most pictorial subjects
was very much modified, where it was not actually suggested, by
considerations of glazing. As more and more white glass came to be used,
it was more and more a tax upon the ingenuity of the designer so to
compose his figures that his white should be conveniently broken up, and
the patches of colour he wanted should be held in place by leads which
in no way interfered with his white glass; for it is clear that, in
proportion as the white was delicately painted, there would be brutality
in crossing it haphazard by strong lines of lead not forming part of the
design; and to the last one of the most interesting things in mediæval
design is to observe the foresight with which the glass-worker plans his
colour for the convenience of glazing.
There is very skilful engineering in the subject from Ross on page 339.
It is not by accident that the hands of the hooded figure rest upon the
shoulders of S. Edward, or that, together with his gold-brocaded surcoat
and its ermine trimming, his hands, and the gilt-edged book he holds in
them, they fall into a shape so easy to cut in one piece. Scarcely less
artful is the arrangement of the head of the bishop with his crosier and
the collar of his robe all in one. The glass painter has only to glance
at such subjects as the Nativity from Great Malvern (page 54), or the
Day of Creation from the same rich abbey church (page 252), or at the
figure of S. Gregory from All Souls', Oxford (page 51), to see how the
colour is planned from the beginning, and planned with a view to the
disposition of the lead lines. In the Nativity, which is reproduced from
a faithful tracing of the glass, and is in the nature of a diagram, the
actual map of the glazing is very clear, in spite of its disfigurement
by leads which merely represent mending, and form no part of the design.
There, too, may clearly be seen how the yellow radiance from the Infant
Saviour is on the same piece of whitish glass on which the figure is
painted. In the Creation and S. Gregory, which are taken from careful
water-drawings, the effect of the glass is given, and it is perceived
how little the leads obtrude themselves upon the observation in the
actual windows.[A]
Footnote A: These, together with illustrations 35, 44, 54, 142, 156,
174, 191, 207, 234, are from the admirable collection of studies
from old glass very kindly placed at my disposal by Mr. John R.
Clayton, himself a master of design in glass.
The Preaching of S. Bernard from S. Mary's, Shrewsbury, opposite, is
again disfigured by accidental leads, where the glass has been
repaired; but it will serve to show how, even when lead lines are as
much as possible avoided, they are always allowed for, and even
skilfully schemed. Many of the heads, it will be noticed, are painted
upon the same pieces of white which does duty also for architectural
background; or white draperies are glazed in one piece with the
white-and-yellow flooring; yet the lead lines, as originally designed,
seem to fall quite naturally into the outlines of the figures.
[Illustration: 38. S. BERNARD PREACHING, S. MARY'S, SHREWSBURY.]
A very characteristic piece of glazing occurs in the foreground figure,
forming a note of strong colour in the centre of the composition. The
way the man's face is included in the same piece of glass with the
yellow groining of the arch, while his coloured cap connects it with his
body, bespeaks a designer most expert in glazing, and intent upon it
always. The danger in connection with a device of this kind, very common
in work of about the beginning of the sixteenth century--as, for
example, in the very fine Flemish glass at Lichfield--is that, being
merely painted upon a white background, and insufficiently supported by
leads, the head may seem not to belong to the strongly defined, richly
draped figure. It is, of course, very much a question of making the
outline strong enough to keep the leads in countenance. The artist of
the Shrewsbury glass adopts another expedient at once to support the
lead lines, to connect his white and colour, and to get the emphasis of
dark touches just where he feels the want of them. He makes occasional
use of solid black by way of local colour, as may be seen in the hood of
the abbess and the shoes of the men to the right.
[Illustration: 39. S. MARY'S, SHREWSBURY.]
In another subject from Shrewsbury (here given), in the bodice of the
harpist, and the head gear of the figures on page 104, effective use is
made of these points of black. So long as they remain mere points, the
end justifies the means, and there is nothing to be said against their
introduction; they are entirely to the good; but such use of solid
pigment is valuable mainly in subjects of quite small size, such as
these are. It would be obviously objectionable if any considerable area
of white glass were thus obscured.
The glass referred to at Shrewsbury, Malvern, and Oxford is of later
date than much work in which painting was carried further; but there is
here no question of style or period; that is reserved for future
consideration (Book II.). The fact it is here desired to emphasise is,
that there was a time when glazier and painter took something like equal
part in a window, or, to speak more precisely, there were for a while
windows in which the two took such equal part that each seemed to rely
upon the other; when, if the artist was a painter he was a glazier too.
Very likely they were two men. If so, they must have worked together on
equal terms, and without rivalry, neither attempting to push his
cleverness to the front, each regardful of the other, both working to
one end--which was not a mosaic, nor a painting, nor a picture, but a
window.
CHAPTER VI.
GLASS PAINTING (MEDIÆVAL).
The end of the fifteenth century brings us to the point at which
painting and glazing are most evenly matched, and, in so far, to the
perfection of stained-and-painted glass, but not yet to the perfection
of glass painting. That was reserved for the sixteenth century, when art
was under the influence of the Renaissance. Glass painting followed
always the current of more modern thought, and drifted picturewards.
Even in the fourteenth century it was seen that there was a fashion of
naturalism in design, in the fifteenth there was an ever-increasing
endeavour to realise natural form, and not natural form alone; for, in
order to make the figure stand out in its niche, it became necessary to
show the vault in perspective. It was obviously easier to get something
like pictorial relief by means of painting than in mosaic, which
accordingly fell by degrees into subordination, and the reign of the
glass painter began. It must be admitted that at the beginning of the
sixteenth century there was still room for improvement in painting, and
that to the realisation of the then pictorial ideal stronger painting
was actually necessary.
Perhaps the ideal was to blame; but even in Gothic glass, still severely
architecturesque in design, more painting became, as before said,
necessary, as greater use was made of white, and that painting stronger,
in proportion as the material used became thinner and clearer. But
though the aim of the glass painter was pictorial, the pictorial ideal
was not so easily to be attained in glass; and so, though the painter
reigned supreme, his dominion was not absolute. The glazier was in the
background, it is true, but he was always there, and his influence is
very strongly felt. The pictures of the glass painter are, consequently,
still pictures in glass, for the painter was still dependent upon
pot-metal for the greater part of his colour; and he knew it, and was
wise enough to accept the situation, and, if he did not actually paint
his own glass, to design only what could, at all events, be translated
into glass. He not only continued to use pot-metal for his colour, but
he made every possible use of it to his end, finding in it resources
which his predecessors had not developed. His range of colours was
extended almost indefinitely, and he used his glass with more
discretion. He took every advantage of the accidental variety in the
glass itself. No sheet of pot-metal was equal in tint from end to end;
it deepened towards the selvedge, and was often much darker at one end
than the other. It ranged perhaps from ruby to pale pink, from sea-green
to smoky-black.
This gradation of tint wisely used was of great service in giving
something like shadow without the aid of paint, and it was used with
great effect--in the dragons, for example, which the mediæval artist
delighted to depict--as a means of rendering the lighter tones of the
creature's belly. Supposing the beast were red, the glass painter would
perhaps assist the natural inequality of the glass by abrading the ruby,
by which means he could almost model the form in red. If it were a blue
dragon he might adopt the same plan; or, if it were green, by staining
his blue glass at the same time yellow, he could get every variety of
shade from yellow to blue-green.
Every casual variety of colour would be employed to equal purpose. Even
the glass-blower's flukes came in most usefully, not merely, as before,
to break the colour of a background accidentally, but as local colour.
Sheets of glass, for example, which came out, instead of blue or ruby,
of some indescribable tint, streaked and flecked with brighter and
darker colour, until they were like nothing so much as marble, were
introduced with magnificent effect into the pillars of the architecture
which now formed so prominent a feature in window design. The beauty and
fitness of this marble colour is eventually such as to suggest that the
glass-blower must in the end deliberately have fired at this kind of
fluke.
Beautiful as were the effects of white and stain produced in the middle
of the fourteenth century, it was put now to fuller and more gorgeous
use. Draperies were diapered in the most elaborate fashion; a bishop's
cope would be as rich as the gold brocade it imitated; patterns were
designed in two or even three shades of stain, which, in combination
with white and judicious touches of opaque-brown, were really
magnificent. Occasionally, as at Montmorency--but this is rarer--the
painter did not merely introduce his varied stain in two or three
separate shades, nor yet float it on so as to get accidental variety,
but he actually painted in it, modelling his armour in it, until it had
very much the effect of embossed gold.
In some ornamental arabesque, which does duty for canopy work at
Conches, in Normandy, this painting in stain is carried still further,
the high lights being scraped out so as to give glittering points of
white among the yellow. The result of this is not always very
successful; but where it is skilfully and delicately done nothing could
be more brilliantly golden in effect. It is curious that this silver
came to be used in glass just as goldleaf was used in other decorative
painting; in fact, its appearance is more accurately described as golden
than as yellow, just as the white glass of the sixteenth century has a
quality which inevitably suggests silver.
It was stated just now that blue glass could be stained green. It is not
every kind of glass which takes kindly to the yellow stain. A glass with
much soda in its composition, for example, seems to resist the action of
the silver; but such resistance is entirely a question of its chemical
ingredients, and has only to do with its colour in so far as that may
depend upon them.
Apart from glass of such antipathetic constitution, it is quite as easy
to stain upon coloured glass as upon white; and, if the coloured glass
be not too dark in colour to be affected by it, precisely the same
effect is produced as by a glaze or wash of yellow in oil or
water-colour.
Thus we get blue draperies diapered with green, blue-green diapered with
yellow-green, and purple with olive, in addition to quite a new
development of landscape treatment. A subject was no longer represented
on a background of ruby or dense blue, but against a pale grey-blue
glass, which stood for sky, and upon it was often a delicately painted
landscape, the trees and distant hills stained to green. Stain was no
less useful in the foreground. By the use of blue glass stained, instead
of pot-metal green, it was easy to sprinkle the green grass with blue
flowers, all without lead.
It was by the combination of stain with abrasion that the most
elaborately varied effects were produced. The painter could now not only
stain his blue glass green (and just so much of it as he wanted green),
but he could abrade the blue, so as to get both yellow, where the glass
was stained, and white where it was not. Thus on the same piece of glass
he could depict among the grass white daisies and yellow buttercups and
bluebells blue as nature, he could give even the yellow eye of the daisy
and its green calyx; and, by judicious modification of his stain, he
could make the leaves of the flowers a different shade of green from the
grass about them. The drawing of the flowers and leaves and blades of
grass, it need hardly be said, he would get in the usual way, tracing
the outline with brown, slightly shading with half tint, and painting
out only just enough of the ground to give value to his detail.
In spite of the tediousness of the process, abrasion was now largely
used--not only for the purpose of getting here and there a spot of
white, as in the eyes of some fiery devil in the representation of the
Last Judgment, but extensively in the form of diaper work, oftenest in
the forms of dots and spots (the spotted petticoat of the woman taken in
adultery in one of the windows at Arezzo seems happily chosen to show
that she is a woman of the people), but also very frequently in the form
of scroll or arabesque, stained to look like a gold tissue, or even to
represent a garment stiff with embroidery and pearls. Often the pattern
is in gold-and-white upon ruby or deep golden-brown, or in
white-and-gold and green upon blue, and so on. In heraldry it is no
uncommon thing to see the ground abraded and the charge left in ruby
upon white. Sometimes a small head would be painted upon ruby glass, all
of the colour being abraded except just one jewel in a man's cap.
Stain and abrasion, by means of which either of the three primaries can
be got upon white, afford, it will be seen, a workmanlike way of
avoiding leadwork. But there are other ways. There is a window at
Montmorency in which the stigmata in the hands and foot of S. Francis
are represented by spots of ruby glass inlaid or let into the white
flesh, with only a ring of lead to hold them in place. It would never
have occurred to a fourteenth century glazier to do that. He would have
felt bound to connect that ring of lead with the nearest glazing lines,
at whatever risk of marring his flesh painting; but then, his painting
would not have been so delicate, and would not in any case have suffered
so much.
Indeed, the more delicate painting implies a certain avoidance of lead
lines crossing it, and hence some very difficult feats of glazing. This
kind of inlaying was never very largely used, but on occasion not only a
spot but even a ring of glass round it would be let in in this way.
There is a window at Bourges in which the glories of the saints are
inlaid with jewels of red, blue, green, and violet, which have more the
effect of jewellery than if they had been glazed in the usual way.
Whether it was worth the pains is another question.
A more usual, and less excusable, way of getting jewels of colour upon
white glass was actually to anneal them to it. By abrading the ground it
was possible to represent rubies or sapphires, surrounded by pearls, in
a setting of gold, but not both rubies and sapphires. In order to get
this combination they would cut out little jewels of red and blue, fix
them temporarily in their place, and fire the glass until these smaller
(and thinner) pieces melted on to and almost into it; the fusion,
however, was seldom complete. At this date some of the jewels--as, for
example, at S. Michael's, Spurrier Gate, York--are usually missing--but
for which accident one would have been puzzled to know for certain how
this effect was produced. The insecurity of this process of annealing is
inevitable. Glass is in a perpetual state of contraction and expansion,
according to the variation of our changeable climate. The white glass
and the coloured cannot be relied upon to contract and expand in equal
degree; they are seldom, in fact, truly married. The wedding ring of
lead was safer. Sooner or later incompatibility of temper asserts
itself, and in the course of time they fidget themselves asunder.
All these contrivances to get rid of leads are evidence that the painter
is coming more and more to the front in glass, and that the glazier is
retiring more and more into the background. The avoidance of glazing
follows, as was said, upon ultra-delicacy of painting, and dependence
upon paint follows from the doing away with leads. We have thus not two
new systems of work, but two manifestations of one idea--pictorial
glass. The pictorial ideal inspired some of the finest glass
painting--the windows of William of Marseilles, at Arezzo, to mention
only one instance among many. With the early Renaissance glass we arrive
at masterly drawing, perfection of painting, and pictorial design, which
is yet not incompatible with glass. One may prefer to it, personally, a
more downright kind of work; but to deny such work its place, and a very
high place, in art is to write oneself down a bigot at the least, if not
an ass.
It is not until the painter took to depending upon paint for strength as
well as delicacy of effect, trusting to it for the relief of his design,
that it is quite safe to say he was on the wrong tack.
Towards the sixteenth century much more pronounced effects of modelling
are aimed at, and reached, by the painter. Even in distinctly Gothic
work the flesh is strongly painted, but not heavily. In flesh painting,
at all events, the necessity of keeping the tone of the glass
comparatively light was a safeguard, as yet, against overpainting.
The actual method of workmanship became less and less like ordinary oil
or water-colour painting. It developed into a process of rubbing out
rather than of laying on pigment. It was told how the glass painter in
place of smear shadow began to use a stippled tint. The later glass
painters made most characteristic use of "matt," as it was called.
Having traced the outlines of a face, and fixed it in the fire, they
would cover the glass with a uniform matt tint; and, when it was dry,
with a stiff hoghair brush scrub out the lights. The high lights they
would entirely wipe out, the half tints they would brush partly away,
and so get their modelling, always by a process of eliminating shadow.
The conscientious painter who meant to make sure his delicate tints
would stand would submit this to a rather fierce fire, out of which
would come, perhaps, only the ghost of the face. This he would
strengthen by another matt brushed out in the same way as before, and
fire it again. Possibly it would require a third painting and a third
fire; that would depend upon the combined strength and delicacy at which
he was aiming, and upon the method of the man. For, though one may
indicate the technique in vogue at a given time, no one will suppose
that painters at any time worked all in the same way. Some men no doubt
could get more out of a single painting than others out of two; some
were daring in their method, some timid; some made more use than others
of the stick for scraping out lines of light; some depended more upon
crisp touches with the sable "tracer," necessary, in any case, for the
more delicate pencilling of the features; some would venture upon the
ticklish operation of passing a thin wash of colour over matt or
stippling before it was fired, at the risk of undoing all they had
done--and so on, each man according to his skill and according to his
temperament. But with whatever aid of scratching out lights, or touching
in darks, or floating on tints, the practice in the sixteenth century
was mainly, by a process of scrubbing lights out of matted or washed
tints of brown, to get very considerable modelling, especially in flesh
painting and in white draperies.
It is impossible in illustrations of the size here given to exemplify in
any adequate manner the technique of the Early Renaissance glass
painters, but it is clear that the man who painted the small subject
from the life of S. Bonnet, in the church dedicated to that saint at
Bourges, (page 210) was a painter of marked power. A still finer example
of painting is to be found in the head of William de Montmorency
(opposite) from the church of S. Martin at Montmorency near Paris,
really a masterpiece of portraiture, full of character, and strikingly
distinguished in treatment. There is at the Louvre a painting of the
same head which might well be the original of the glass. If the glass
painter painted the picture he was worthy to rank with the best painters
of his day. If the glass painter only copied it, he was not far short of
that, for his skill is quite remarkable; and the simple means by which
he has rendered such details as the chain armour and the collar, and the
Order of S. Michael, supplementing the most delicate painting with
touches of opaque colour, which in less skilful hands would have been
brutal, show the master artist in glass painting.
Here, towards the end of the first quarter of the sixteenth century, we
have glass painting carried about as far as it can go, and yet not
straying beyond the limits of what can best be done in glass. The
apologists for the Renaissance would attribute all such work as this to
the new revival. That would be as far wide of the mark as to claim for
it that it was Gothic. The truth is, there is no marked dividing line
between Gothic and Renaissance. It is only by the character of some
perhaps quite slight monumental or architectural detail that we can
safely classify a window of the early sixteenth century as belonging to
one or the other style. It belongs, in fact, to neither. It is work of
the transition period between the two. Gothic traditions lingered in the
glass painter's shop almost as long as good work continued to be done
there; so much so, that we may almost say that with those Gothic
traditions died the art itself. For all that, it is not to be disputed
that the most brilliant achievements in glass painting were certainly in
the new style and inspired by the new enthusiasm for art.
[Illustration: 40. GUILLAUME DE MONTMORENCY, MONTMORENCY.]
CHAPTER VII.
GLASS PAINTING (RENAISSANCE).
The quality _par excellence_ of Renaissance glass was its painting; its
dependence upon paint was its defect. Until about the middle of the
sixteenth century the painter goes on perfecting himself in his special
direction, neglecting, to some extent, considerations of construction on
the one hand, and of colour upon the other, which cannot with impunity
be ignored in glass, but achieving pictorially such conspicuous success
that there may be question, among all but ardent admirers of glass that
is essentially glass-like, as to whether the loss, alike in depth and in
translucency of colour, as well as of constructional fitness, may not be
fully compensated for by the gain in fulness of pictorial expression.
According as we value most the qualities of glass in glass, or the
qualities of a picture in no matter what material, will our verdict be.
But there comes a point when the painter so far oversteps the limit of
consistency, so clearly attempts to do in glass what cannot be done in
it, so plainly sacrifices to qualities which he cannot get the qualities
which stained glass offers him, that he ceases to be any longer working
in glass, and is only attempting upon glass what had very much better
have been done in some other and more congenial medium.
The event goes to prove the seductiveness of the pictorial idea, and
illustrates once more the danger of calling to your assistance a rival
craft, which, by-and-by, may oust you from your own workshop. The
consideration of the possibilities in the way of pictorial glass is
reserved for a chapter by itself. It concerns us for the moment only in
so far as the pictorial intention affected, as it very seriously did,
the technique of glass painting.
In pursuit of the pictorial the painter strayed from his allegiance to
glass. He learnt to depend upon his manipulation instead of upon his
material; and that facility of his in painting led him astray. He not
only began to use paint where before he would, as a matter of course,
have glazed-in coloured glass, but to lay it on so heavily as seriously
to detract from that translucency which is the glory of glass.
It is rash to say, at a glance, whether glass has been too heavily
painted or not. I once made a careful note, in writing, that certain
windows in the church of S. Alpin, at Châlons, were over-painted. After
a lapse of two or three years I made another equally careful note to the
effect that they were thin, and wanted stronger painting. It was not
until, determined to solve the mystery of these contradictory memoranda,
I went a third time to Châlons, that I discovered, that with the light
shining full upon them the windows were thin, that by a dull light they
were heavy, and that by a certain just sufficiently subdued light they
were all that could be desired. There is indiscretion, at least, in
painting in such a key that only one particular light does justice to
your work; but the artist in glass is always very much at the mercy of
chance in this respect. He cannot choose the light in which his work
shall be seen, and the painter of Châlons may have been more unfortunate
than in any way to blame. There comes, however, a degree of heaviness in
painted glass about which there can be no discussion. When the paint is
laid on so thick that under ordinary conditions of light the glass is
obscure, or when it is so heavy that the light necessary to illuminate
it is more than is good for the rest of the window, the bounds of
moderation have surely been passed. And in the latter half of the
sixteenth century it was less and less the custom to take heed of
considerations other than pictorial; so that by degrees the translucency
of glass was sacrificed habitually to strength of effect depending not
so much upon colour, which is the strength of glass, as upon the relief
obtained by shadow--just the one quality not to be obtained in glass
painting. For the quality of shadow depends upon its transparency; and
shadow painted upon glass, through which the light is to come, must
needs be obscure, must lack, in proportion as it is dark, the mysterious
quality of light in darkness, which is the charm of shadow. The misuse
of shading which eventually prevailed may best be explained by reference
to its beginnings, already in the first half of the century, when most
consummate work was yet being done. For example, in the masterpieces of
Bernard van Orley, at S. Gudule, Brussels--one of which is illustrated
overleaf; it is a mere diagram, giving no idea of the splendour of the
glass, but it is enough to serve our purpose.
The execution of the window is, in its kind, equal to the breadth and
dignity of the design. The painter has done, if not quite all that he
proposed to do, all that was possible in paint upon glass. Any fault to
find in him, then, must be with what he meant to do, not what he did. To
speak justly, there is no fault to find with any one, but only with the
condition of things. We have here, associated with the glass painter, a
more famous artist, the greatest of his time in Flanders, pupil of
Michael Angelo, court painter, and otherwise distinguished. It was not
to be expected that he should be learned in all the wisdom of the glass
painter, nor yet, human nature being what it is, that he should submit
himself, lowly and reverently, to the man better acquainted with the
capacities of glass. All that the glass painter could do was to
translate the design of the master into glass as best he might, not
perhaps as best he could have done had there been no great master to
consult in the matter.
This was not the first time, by any means, that the designer and painter
of a window were two men. There is no saying how soon that much
subdivision of labour entered the glass worker's shop; but so long as
they were both practical men, versed each in his art, and, to some
extent, each in the technique of the other, it did not so much matter.
When the painter from outside was called in to design, it mattered
everything. What could he be expected to care for technique other than
his own? What did he know about it? He was only an amateur so far as
glass was concerned; and his influence made against workmanlikeness. He
may have done marvels; he did marvels; but his very mastery made things
worse. He bore himself so superbly that it was not seen what dangerous
ground he trod on. Lesser men must needs all stumble along in his
footsteps, until they fell; and in their fall they dragged their art
with them.
[Illustration: 41. MOSAIC GLASS, AREZZO.]
The fault inherent in such work as the Brussels windows is neither Van
Orley's nor the glass painter's; it is in the mistaken aim of the
designer striving less for colour in his windows than for relief. He
succeeds in getting quite extraordinary relief, but at the expense of
colour, which in glass is the most important thing. The figures in the
window illustrated are so strongly painted that even the white portions
of their drapery stand out in dark relief against the pale grey sky.
That is not done, you may be sure, without considerable sacrifice of the
light-giving quality of the glass. It is at a similar cost that the
white-and-gold architecture stands out in almost the solidity of actual
stone against the plain white diamond panes above, giving very much the
false impression that it is placed in the window, and that you see
through its arches and behind it into space. Another very striking thing
in the composition is the telling mass of shadow on the soffit of the
central arch. It produces its effect, and a very strong one. The
festoons of yellow arabesque hanging in front of it tell out against it
like beaten gold, and the rather poorish grey-blue background to the
figures beneath it has by comparison an almost atmospheric quality. It
is all very skilfully planned as light and dark; but there is absolutely
no reason why that shadow should have been produced by heavy paint.
Under certain conditions of light there are, it is true, gleams of light
amidst this shadow. You can make out that the roof is coffered, and can
perceive just a glow of warm colour; but most days and most of the day
it is dead, dull, lifeless, colourless. The points to note are: (1) that
this painted shadow must of necessity be dull; and (2) that on work of
this scale at all events (the figures here are very much over lifesize),
this abandonment of the mosaic method was not in the slightest degree
called for. On the contrary, the simpler, easier, and more workmanlike
thing to do would have been to glaze-in the shadow with deep rich
pot-metal glass. That was done in earlier glass, and in glass of about
the same period as this.
[Illustration: 42. RENAISSANCE WINDOW, S. GUDULE, BRUSSELS.]
For example, at Liège, where there are beautiful windows of about the
same period, very similar in design, the glass is altogether lighter and
more brilliant, partly owing to the use of paint with a much lighter
hand, but yet more to greater reliance upon pot-metal. In the Church of
S. Jacques, as at S. Gudule, there are arched canopies with festoons in
bright relief against a background of shadowed soffit; but there the
shadow is obtained by glazing-in pot-metal, which has all the necessary
depth, and is yet luminous and full of colour.
So also the deeply shadowed architectural background to the
representation of the Daughter of Herodias dancing before Herod, in the
Church of S. Vincent, at Rouen (overleaf), is leaded up in deep purple
glass, through which you get peeps of distant atmospheric blue beyond.
And this was quite a common practice among French glass painters of the
early half of the sixteenth century--as at Auch, at Ecouen, at Beauvais,
at Conches, where the architecture in shadow is leaded in shades of
purple or purplish glass, which leave little for the painter to do upon
the pot-metal. At Freiburg, in Germany, there is a window designed on
lines very similar indeed to Van Orley's work, in which the shadowed
parts are glazed in shades of deep blue and purple. In Italy it was the
custom, already in the fifteenth century, to lead-in deep shadows in
pot-metal; and they did not readily depart from it. Surely that is the
way to get strong effects, and not by paint. You may take it as a test
of workmanlike treatment, that the darks have been glazed-in, where it
was possible, and not merely painted upon the glass.
There is some misconception about what is called Renaissance glass.
Glass painting was not native to Italy, and was never thoroughly
acclimatised there, any more than Gothic architecture, to which it
was--the handmaid I was going to say, but better say the
standard-bearer. Much glass was accordingly executed in Italy in
defiance, not only of all tradition, but of all consistency and
self-restraint. But even in Italy you will find sixteenth century glass
as workmanlike as can be. The details from Arezzo and Bologna, above,
overleaf, and on page 266, are pronouncedly Renaissance in type, but the
method employed by the glass painter is as thoroughly mosaic as though
he had worked in the thirteenth century. Not less glazier-like in
treatment are the French Renaissance details from Rouen, on pages 75 and
347, from which it may be seen that a workmanlike treatment of glass
was not confined to Gothic glaziers. It was less a question of style, in
the historic sense, than of the men's acquaintance with the traditions
of good work, and their readiness to accept the situation.
[Illustration: 43. MOSAIC GLASS, AREZZO.]
Possibly the Netherlandish love of light and shade--and especially of
shade--may account for the character of the Brussels glass. Against that
it should be said that, elsewhere in Flanders, splendid glass was being
done about the same time, less open to the charge of being too heavily
painted--at Liège, for example. But everywhere, and perhaps more than
anywhere in the Netherlands, which became presently a great centre of
glass painting, the tendency, towards the latter part of the century,
was in the direction of undue reliance upon paint; of which came
inevitably one of two things--either the shaded parts were heavy, dirty,
and opaque, or they were weak and washy in effect. If, by means of
painting, an artist can get (as he can) something worth getting not
otherwise to be got, though we may differ as to the relative value of
what he gains and what he sacrifices, it would be hard to deny him his
preference, and his right to follow it; but if by painting on glass he
attempts to get what could better be expressed by working in it, then
clearly he has strayed (as Van Orley did) from the straight path, as
glass-workers read the map.
[Illustration: 44. SALOME, S. VINCENT, ROUEN.]
It is rather a curious thing that the avoidance of leading, the
dependence upon glazing and paint, should manifest itself especially in
windows designed on such a scale that it would have been quite easy to
get all that was got in paint, and more, by the introduction of coloured
glass; in windows, for example, on the scale of those at King's College,
Cambridge, with figures much over lifesize, where the artist, you can
see, has been afraid of leading, and has shirked it. Evidently he did
not realise for how little the leads would count in the glass. He
does not in that case fall into the error of painting with too heavy a
hand, but he trusts too much to paint--a trust so little founded that
the paint has oftentimes perished, much to the disfigurement of his
picture.
[Illustration: 45. RENAISSANCE MOSAIC GLASS.]
The French glass painters of about the same period, though working upon
a smaller scale, did not depart in the same way from the use of glazing;
and where they did resort to painting, it was often with a view to a
refinement of detail not otherwise to be obtained, as in the case of the
delicate landscape backgrounds painted upon pale blue, which have a
beauty all their own.
There is here no intention whatever of disparaging such work as that at
S. Gudule. Any one capable of appreciating what is strongest and most
delicate in glass must have had such keen delight in them that there is
something almost like ingratitude in saying anything of them but what is
in their praise. But the truth remains. Here is a branching off from old
use; here the painter begins to wander from the path, and to lead after
him generations of glass painters to come. It takes, perhaps, genius to
lead men hopelessly astray!
CHAPTER VIII.
ENAMEL PAINTING.
The excessive use of opaque paint was not so much a new departure as the
exaggeration of a tendency which had grown with the growth of glass
painting itself. The really new thing in glass painting about this time
was the introduction of enamel.
When glass painters were resorting, not only to opaque painting, but to
abrasion, annealing, or whatever would relieve them from the difficulty
of getting in mosaic glass the pictorial effect which was more and more
their ruling thought, when glazing had become to them a difficulty (to
the early glass-workers it was a resource), it was inevitable that they
should think about painting on glass in colour. Accordingly towards the
middle of the sixteenth century they began to use enamel. This was the
decisive turning-point of the art.
In theory the process of painting in enamel is simple enough. You have
only to grind coloured glass to impalpable dust, mix it with "fat oil,"
or gum-and-water, and paint with it upon white or tinted glass; in the
furnace the medium will be fired away, and the particles of coloured
glass will melt and adhere, more or less firmly, to the heated sheet of
glass to which they have been applied. This theory glass painters began
to put into practice. In the beginning they used enamel only
tentatively, first of all in the flesh tints. It had been the custom
since the fourteenth century to paint flesh always upon white or whitish
glass in the ordinary brown pigment; and something of the simple dignity
and monumental character of old glass is due, no doubt, to that and
similar removedness from nature. Gradually the fashion was introduced of
painting the flesh in red instead of brown. In one sense this was no
such very new thing to do. The ordinary brown pigment spoken of all
along is itself enamel, although it has been thought better not to speak
of it by that name for fear of confusion. Inasmuch, however, as this
was the use of a pigment to get not merely flesh painting but flesh
tint--that is to say, colour--it was a step in quite a new direction.
Pictorially it offered considerable advantages to the painter. He could
not only get, without lead, contrast of colour between a head and the
white ground upon which it was painted, or the white drapery about it,
but he could very readily give the effect of white hair or beard in
contrast to ruddy flesh, and so on. There is a fragment at the _Musée
des Arts Décoratifs_ at Paris, attributed to Jean Cousin, 1531, in which
a turbaned head appears to have been cut out of a piece of purplish-blue
glass, the flesh abraded, and then painted in red, the lips still
redder, whilst the beard is painted on the blue, which shades off into
the cheeks in the most realistic manner. Very clever things were done in
this way, always in the realistic direction; but down to the middle of
the century, and even later, there were always some painters who
remained faithful to the traditional cool brown colour. A rather happy
mean between warm and cold flesh is found at Auch (1513), where warmish
enamel upon grey-blue or greenish glass gives modelling and variety of
colour in the flesh, which is yet never hot. Well-chosen pieces of glass
are made use of, in which the darker half comes in happily for the
bearded part of a man's face. So, also, the head of the Virgin at the
foot of the cross is painted upon grey, which tells as such in her coif,
shaded with a cooler brown, but only deepens and saddens her face, and
intensifies the contrast with the Magdalen. Occasionally one of these
heads comes out too blue, but at the worst it is better than the hot,
foxy flesh painting which became the rule.
Painting in colour upon glass could naturally not stop at flesh red. It
was used for pale blue skies, at first only to get a more delicate
gradation from pale pot-metal colour to white, but eventually for the
sky throughout the picture. In connection with yellow stain it gave a
green for distant landscape.
Enamel was used in ornament to give the colour of fruits and flowers in
garlands and the like, and generally for elaboration of detail, which,
if not trivial, was of small account in serious decoration. For a while
there were glass painters who remained proof against its seduction. It
was not till the latter half of the sixteenth century that glass
painters generally began seriously to substitute enamel for pot-metal,
and to rely upon paint, translucent as well as opaque. Even then they
could not do without pot-metal, avoid it as they might. The really
strong men, such as the Crabeth Brothers, at Gouda, by no means
abandoned the old method, but they relied so much upon paint as to
greatly obscure the glory of their glass. The Gouda windows, which bring
us to the seventeenth century, contain among them the most daring things
in glass extant. They prove that a subject can be rendered more
pictorially than one would have conceived to be possible in glass, but
they show also what cannot be done in it; in fact, they may be said to
indicate, as nearly as can be, the limits of the practicable. What
artists of this calibre could not do we may safely pronounce to be
beyond the scope of glass painting, even with the aid of enamel.
[Illustration: 46. THE BAPTISM, GOUDA.]
No skill of painting could make otherwise than dull the masses of
heavily painted white glass employed to represent the deep shade of the
receding architecture in the upper part of the window on page 242; so,
the mass of masonry which serves in the lower half of the window on this
page as a background to the Donor and his patron saint and some shields
of arms, represented as it is by a thick scum of brown paint, could not
but lack lustre. Think of the extent of all that uninteresting paint;
what a sacrifice it means of colour and translucency!
Enamel painting did not lead to much. The colours obtained by that means
had neither the purity nor the richness and volume of pot-metal. They
had to be strengthened with brown, which still further dulled them; and,
the taste for light and shade predominating as it did in the seventeenth
century, the glass painter was eventually lured to the destruction of
all glass-like quality in his glass.
There are some windows in the cathedral at Brussels, in the chapel
opposite that of the Holy Sacrament, where are Van Orley's windows,
which bear witness to the terrible decline that had taken place during
something like a century--not that they are badly executed in their way.
The texture of silk, for example, is given by the glass painter
perfectly; but, in the struggle for picturesque effects of light and
shade, all consistency of treatment is abandoned. The painter is here
let loose; and he can no more withstand the attractions of paint than a
boy can resist the temptation of fresh fallen snow. The one must throw
snowballs at somebody, the other must lay about him with pigment. Here
he lays about him with it recklessly. He is reckless, that is, of the
obscurity of the glass he covers with it. At moments, when the sun
shines fiercely upon it, you dimly see what he was aiming at;
nine-tenths of the time all is blackness. Slabs of white glass are
coated literally by the yard with dense brown pigment through which the
light rarely shines.
It had become the practice now to glaze a window mainly in rectangular
panes of considerable size. Where pot-metal colour was used at all, it
had of necessity to be surrounded with a leaden line; but within the
area of the coloured mass the leading was usually in these upright and
horizontal lines, and not at all according to the folds of the drapery
or what not. If the glazier went out of his way to take a lead line
round a face, instead of across it, that was as much as he would do; if
it was merely the face of a cherub, however delicately painted, he
would, perhaps, as at S. Jacques, Antwerp, cut brutally across it; and
even where structural lead lines compelled him to use separate pieces of
material, he by no means always took advantage of the opportunity of
getting colour in his glass, but, as at Antwerp, contentedly accepted
his rectangular panes of white, as something to paint on--to the
exclusion of no matter how much light. It simplified matters, no doubt,
for the painter thus to throw away opportunities, and just depend upon
his brush; but it resulted at the best only in an imitation of oil
painting, lacking the qualities of oil paint.
[Illustration: 47. S. MARTIN ÈS VIGNES, TROYES.]
The French glass painters were less reckless. At Troyes, indeed, there
is plenty of seventeenth century glass in which a workman can still find
considerable interest. That of Linard Gontier, in particular, has
deservedly a great reputation. He was a painter who could get with a
wash of colour, and seemingly with ease, effects which most glass
painters could only get at by stippling, hatching, and picking out; and
he managed his enamel very cleverly, floating it on with great
dexterity. But it is rarely that he gets what artists would call colour
out of it. Even in the hands of a man of his prodigious skill the method
proclaims its inherent weakness. The work is thinner, duller, altogether
poorer, than the earlier glass of much less consummate workmen, who
worked upon sounder and severer principles. The strength and the
weakness of the painter are exemplified in the group of Donors above.
The painting is admirable, not only in the heads, but in the texture of
the men's cloaks; those cloaks, however, are painted in black paint.
When the light is quite favourable they look like velvet; they never
look like glass.
There is here the excuse, for what it may be worth, of texture and
perhaps other pictorial qualities. Even that is often wanting in
seventeenth century work, as when, at S. Jacques, Antwerp, the
background to a design in white and stain is glazed in panes of white
glass solidly coated with brown paint. This is obscuration out of pure
wilfulness.
It was not only when the artist sought to get strong effects in enamel
painting that the method fell short of success. The delicacy that might
be got by means of it was neutralised by the necessity of some sort of
glazing, and matters were not mended by glazing the windows in panes. It
is impossible to take much satisfaction in the most delicately painted
glass picture when it is so scored over with coarse black lines of lead
or iron that it is as if you were looking at it through a grill. That is
very much the effect seen in Sir Joshua Reynolds' famous window in the
ante-chapel at New College, Oxford (two lights of which are shown
opposite), where the Virtues are seen imprisoned, you may say, within
iron bars. They look very much better there than in the glass, which,
for all the graceful draughtsmanship of the artist and the delicate
workmanship of the painter, is ineffective to the last degree. It has no
more brilliancy or sparkle than a huge engraving seen against the light;
square feet of white glass are muddied over with paint.
It was not Sir Joshua's fault, of course, that the traditions of the
glazier's craft were in his day well-nigh extinct; but Sir Horace
Walpole was quite right when he described these vaunted Virtues as
"washy." To say that they are infinitely more pleasing in the artist's
designs is the strongest condemnation of the glass.
[Illustration: 48. VIRTUES, BY SIR J. REYNOLDS, NEW COLL., OXFORD.]
There was one use made of enamel which promised to be of real help to
the glazier--that of painting the necessary shadows on pot-metal in
shades of the same colour as the glass. Since enamel of some kind had to
be used, why not employ a colour more akin to the glass itself than mere
brown? It would seem as if by so doing one might get depth of colour
with less danger of heaviness than by the use of brown; but the glass
painted in that way (by the Van Lingen, for example, a family of
Flemings established in England, whose work may be seen at Wadham and
Balliol Colleges, Oxford) was by no means free from heaviness. Enamel
then, it will be seen, was never really of any great use in glass
painting, and it led to the degradation of the art to something very
much like the painting of transparencies, as they are called, on linen
blinds.
Let us note categorically the objections to it. A glazier objects to it,
that it is an evasion of the difficulty of working in glass, and not a
frank solution of it. That may be sentimental more or less. A colourist
objects to it, because it is impossible to get in it the depth and
richness of strong pot-metal, or the brilliancy of the more delicate
shades of self-coloured material. That, it may be urged, remains to be
proved, but the enamel painter practically undertook to prove the
contrary, and failed. Admirers of consistency object to it, that it
succeeds so ill in reconciling the delicacy of painting aimed at with
the brutality of the glazing employed. That, again, is a question of
artistic appreciation, not so easily proved to those who do not feel the
discord. Lovers of good work, of work that will stand, object to it that
it is not lasting. This is a point that can be easily proved.
The process of enamel painting has been explained above (page 77). The
one thing necessary to the safe performance of the operation is that the
various glass pigments shall be of such consistency as to melt at a
lower temperature than the glass on which they are painted. That, of
course, must keep its shape in the kiln, or all would be spoilt. The
melting of the pigment is, as a matter of fact, made easier by the
admixture of some substance less unyielding than glass itself--such as
borax--to make it flow. This "flux," as it is called, makes the glass
with which it is mixed appreciably softer than the glass to which it is
apparently quite safely fixed by the fire. It is thus more susceptible
to the action of the atmosphere; it does not contract and expand equally
with that; and in the course of time, perhaps no very long time, it
scales off. Excepting in Swiss work (to which reference is made in
Chapter IX.) this is so commonly so, that you may usually detect the use
of enamel by the specks of white among the colour, where the pigment has
worked itself free, altogether to the destruction of pictorial illusion.
And it is not only with transparent enamel that this happens, but also
with the brown used by the later painters for shading.
The brown tracing and painting colour was originally a hard metallic
colour which required intense heat to make it flow. The glass had to be
made almost red-hot, at which great heat there was always a possibility
that the pigment might be fired away altogether, and the painter's
labour lost. In the case of the thirteenth century painter's work the
danger was not very serious. Thanks to the downright and sometimes even
brutal way in which he was accustomed to lay on the paint, solidly and
without subtlety of shade, his work was pretty well able to take care of
itself in the kiln. It was the more delicate painting which was most in
danger of being burnt away; and in proportion as men learnt to carry
their painting further, and to get delicate modelling, they became
increasingly anxious to avoid all possibility of any such catastrophe.
The easiest way of doing this was (as in the case of transparent enamel)
to soften this colour with flux. That enabled them to fire their glass
at a much lower heat, at which there was no risk of losing the painting,
and they were able so to make sure of getting the soft gradations of
shade they wanted; and the more the painter strove to get pictorial
effects the more he was tempted to soften his pigment; but, according as
the flux made the colour easier to manage in the fire, it made it less
to be depended upon afterwards; and the later the work, and the more
pictorial its character, the more surely the painting proves at this
date to have lost its hold upon the glass. In many a seventeenth century
window the Donors were depicted in their Sunday suits of black velvet
and fur, the texture quite wonderfully given; now their garments are
very much the worse for wear, more than threadbare. The black or brown
is rich no longer, it is pitted with specks of raw white light;
sometimes the colour has peeled off _en masse_. Time has dealt
comparatively kindly with the gentlemen on page 81, but in the glass
there is an air of decay about their sable cloaks which takes
considerably away from their dignity. It is one characteristic of
enamelled windows that they do not mellow with age, like mosaic glass,
but only get shabby.
Any one altogether unacquainted with the characteristics of style is apt
to be very much at fault as to the date of a window. The later windows
are in so much more dilapidated a condition than the earlier that they
are quite commonly mistaken for the older.
It has to be borne in mind that most of the devices adopted by the glass
painters--the use, namely, of large sheets of fragile glass, and the
avoidance of strengthening leads, no less than the resort to soft
enamel, whether for colour or for shading--all go to make it more
perishable.
It may be said that the decay of the later painting is due not so much
to the use of enamel as to the employment of soft flux. That is true.
But when it comes to the painting of texture and the like, the
temptation to use soft colour has generally proved to be irresistible.
One is forced to the conclusion that the aim of the later glass painter
was entirely wrong; that for the sake of pictorial advantages--which
went for very little in a scheme of effective church decoration, even if
they did not always detract from the breadth of the work--he gave up the
qualities which go at once to make glass glorious, and to give it
permanence. Whatever the merits of seventeenth century glass painting
they are not the merits of glass; there is little about it that counts
for glass, little that is suggestive of glass--except the breakages it
has suffered.
What is said of seventeenth century glass applies also to that of the
eighteenth century, only with more force. Sir Joshua and Benjamin West
were quite helpless to raise the art out of the slough into which it had
fallen, for they were themselves ignorant of its technique, and did not
know what could be done in glass. It was not until the Gothic revival in
our own century, and a return to mosaic principles, that stained glass
awoke to new life.
CHAPTER IX.
THE NEEDLE POINT IN GLASS PAINTING.
Allusion has been made to the glass painter's use of the point for
scraping out lights, and especially diapers upon glass coated with
pigment. These are often quite lace-like in their delicacy. That would
be a poor compliment if it meant that the glass painter had had no more
wit than to imitate the effects produced in a material absolutely unlike
glass. But it is not merely for want of a better word that the term
lace-like is used. It is strictly appropriate, and for a very good
reason. It was explained how from the first the glass painter would use
the stick end of his brush to scrape out sharp lights in his painting,
or even diaper patterns out of a tint. The latest glass painters made
more and more use of the point, and of a finer point than the brush end,
until, in Swiss work, they adopted the pen and the needle itself. It is
not surprising, then, that point-work should resemble point-work, though
the one be in thread and the other on glass. The strange thing would
have been if it were not so. Thus it comes about that much of the Swiss
diaper work is most aptly described as lace-like in effect.
The field of a small shield is frequently diapered with a pattern so
fine that it could only have been produced with a fine point. Some of
the diapers opposite may be identified as portions of heraldic shields.
On a shield it may be taken to represent the engraving of the metal
surface of the thing itself; and, indeed, here again is a significant
resemblance between two technical processes.
To scratch with a needle or with a graver is much the same thing; and
thus many a Swiss diaper suggests damascening, and might just as well
have been executed in bright lines of gold or silver filigree, beaten
into lines graven in steel or iron, as scraped out of a tint on glass.
[Illustration: 49. EXAMPLES OF SCRATCHING OUT.]
But the use of the point was by no means reserved for ornamental detail.
It became the main resource of the painter, and so much so, that this
technique, or this development of technique, is the most striking
characteristic of Swiss glass painting--if that should be called
painting which has really more affinity with etching.
For the laying on of the paint in the form of solid colour, or of matted
tint, or of skilfully floated wash, is only the groundwork of the Swiss
glass painter's method. It scarcely needs to be explained how admirably
the point adapted itself to the representation of hair, fur, feathers,
and the like. The familiar bears, for example, the device of the city of
Berne, which occur very frequently in Swiss heraldic work, are rendered
at Lucerne in the most marvellously skilful manner. First a juicy wash
of colour is floated all over the body of the beast, more or less
translucent, but judiciously varied so as to give _à peu près_ the
modelling of the creature. Then with a fine point the lines of the fur
are scraped out, always with an eye to the further development of the
modelling. Finally, the sharp lights are softened, where necessary, with
delicate tint, and a few fine hair-lines are put in with a brush in dark
brown.
By no conceivable method of execution could certain textures be better
rendered than this. A similar process is adopted in rendering the
damascened surface of slightly rounded shields; but in that case the
modelling of the ground is first obtained by means of matt, not wash.
Black as a local colour, whether by way of heraldic tincture or to
represent velvet in costume, was very generally used; but in such small
quantities always as entirely to justify its use. The practice, that is
to say, referred to on page 57, with reference to the German work at
Shrewsbury, was carried further. This was quite a different thing from
what occurs, for example, in a late window at Montmorency, where four
brown Benedictine monks are frocked in muddy paint: that is a fault of
judgment no skill in execution could make good. In the case of black
used by way of local colour the drawing lines were of course scraped out
in clear glass, and toned, if need were, with tint. The hair, cap, and
feathers of the figure opposite illustrate the processes of execution
above described; the chain armour about the man's neck is also very
deftly suggested.
[Illustration: 50. NEEDLE POINT WORK, SWISS.]
The use of the point went further than rendering the texture of hair,
and so on. It was used for the rendering of all texture and the
completion of modelling everywhere. The Swiss glass painter did very
much what is done in large when one draws on brown or grey paper in
white and black; only instead of black chalk he used brown paint, and
instead of putting on white chalk he scraped away a half tint with which
he had begun by coating the glass; and of course he worked in small.
One knows by experience how much more telling the white crayon is than
the black, how much more modelling you seem to get with very little
drawing; and so it is in glass; and so it was that the glass painter
depended so much more upon taking out lights than upon putting in darks.
The difference between the Swiss manner and the process already
described in reference to Renaissance church glass was mainly that,
working upon so much smaller a scale, the artist depended so much more
upon the point. His work is, in fact, a kind of etching. It is the exact
reverse of drawing in pen and ink, where the draughtsman works line by
line up to his darkest shadow. Here he works line by line to clearest
light, precisely as the etcher draws his negative upon copper, only on
glass it is the positive picture which is produced. So far as
manipulation is concerned the two processes are identical. It is indeed
quite within the bounds of possibility that the method of the glass
painter (and not that of the damascener, as generally supposed) may
first have put the etcher upon the track of his technique.
The method of workmanship employed by the painter is shown pretty
clearly on page 90. In spite of a certain granular surface given by the
stone employed by the lithographer in reproducing the design, it is
quite clearly seen how the man's armour and the texture of the silk in
his sleeves is all obtained by the point. The trace of the needle is not
clearly shown in the flesh, except in the hand upon his hip; but on page
93 it is everywhere apparent--in the shading of the architecture, at the
top of the page, in the damascening of the tops of shields below, in the
drawing of the pastoral staff, in the modelling of the mitre and the
representation of the jewels upon it, no less than in the rendering of
the texture of the silk.
This ultra-delicacy of workmanship was naturally carried to its furthest
extent upon white glass or upon white and stain, but the same method was
employed with pot-metal colour; and, during the early part of the
sixteenth century at least, pot-metal colour was used when it
conveniently could be, and the leading was sometimes cleverly schemed,
though the glass employed was often crude in colour. Eventually, in
Switzerland as everywhere, enamel colour succeeded pot-metal, by which,
of course, it would have been impossible correctly to render the
tinctures of elaborately quartered shields on the minute scale to which
they were customarily drawn. At Lucerne, for example, there are some
small circular medallions with coats of arms not much bigger than occur
on the back of an old-fashioned watchcase. Needless to say that there
the drawing is done entirely with a point. This kind of thing is, of
course, glass painting in miniature; it is not meant to say that it is
effective; but it is none the less marvellously done. It was at its
best, roughly speaking, from 1530 to a little later than 1600. Some of
the very best that was ever done, now at the Rath-haus at Lucerne, bears
date from 1606-1609; there is some also at the Hof-kirche there; but
that is out of the reach of ordinary sight, and this is placed where it
can conveniently be studied. The point-work, it should be understood, is
still always scraped out of brown, or it may be black. The enamel that
may be used with it is floated on independently of this; and as time
went on enamel was of course very largely used, especially in the
seventeenth century. To the credit of the Swiss it should be said that,
alone among later glass painters, they were at once conscientious and
expert in the chemistry of their art, and used enamel which has been
proof against time. They knew their trade, and practised it devotedly.
Possibly it was the small scale upon which they worked which enabled
them to fuse the enamel thoroughly with the glass. It is due to them
also to say that, though their style may have been finikin, there was
nothing feeble about their workmanship; that was masterly. And they
remain the masters of delicate manipulation and finish in glass
painting.
Although the needle point was used to most effective purpose in Swiss
glass it did not of course entirely supersede other methods. At the
Germanic Museum at Nuremberg (where there is a fair amount of good work,
1502-1672) there is some matted tint which is shaded and then lined in
brown, much after the manner of one of Dürer's woodcuts. It has very
much the appearance of a pen drawing shaded, as many of the old masters'
drawings were, in brown wash.
[Illustration: 51. NEEDLE-POINT WORK, SWISS.]
A fair amount of simple figure work in white and stain continued to be
done, in which outline went for a good deal, and matted shadow was only
here and there helped out with the point. In landscape backgrounds shade
tint was sometimes broadly and directly floated on. But as often as not
shading was executed to a great extent with the needle, whilst local
colour was painted with enamel. Even in association with admirable
heraldry and figure work, one finds distant figure groups and landscapes
painted in this way. They look more like coloured magic-lantern slides
than painted window glass.
Sometimes subtlety of workmanship was carried rather beyond the bounds
of discretion, as when at Nuremberg (1530) faces were painted in tint
against clear glass, without outline, the mere shading, delicate as it
is, being depended upon to relieve them from the ground. It must be
confessed that, near to the eye, it does that; but the practice does not
recommend itself.
It is remarkable how very faint a matt of colour on the surface of
transparent glass gives a sort of opacity to it which distinguishes it
from the clear ground. Sometimes white enamel is used, sometimes perhaps
a mere coat of flux: it is difficult to say what it is, but there is
often on the lightest portions of the painted glass no more than the
veriest film, to show that it has been painted.
It is obvious that glass of the most delicate character described must
be the work of the designer; and it seems clear, from numerous drawings
extant, which are evidently the cartoons for Swiss window panes, that
the draughtsman contemplated carrying out his design himself. At all
events, he frequently left so much out of these drawings, that, if he
trusted to the painting of another, no little of the credit of the
draughtsmanship was due to that other, and he was at least part designer
of the window. In glass where painting is carried to a high state of
perfection it goes without saying that the painter must be an artist
second only to the designer. Invention and technical power do not always
go together. But if the designer can paint his own glass, and will, so
much the better. It is more than probable that the best glass is the
autograph work of the designer.
CHAPTER X.
THE RESOURCES OF THE GLASS PAINTER--A RECAPITULATION.
Having followed the course of technique thus far, it may be as well to
survey the situation and see where we now stand. Suppose an artist
altogether without experience in glass had occasion to design a window.
The first thing he would want to know would be the means at his command
at this present moment, and what dependence he could place upon them.
That is what it is intended briefly to set forth in this chapter, quite
without reference to date or style or anything but the capacities of the
material. The question is, what can be done with it? Not until a man
knows that is he in a position to make up his mind as to what he will
do.
If he ask, as artists will, why cannot he do just what he likes, and as
he likes, the answer is: because glass was not made for him, and will
only do what he wants on condition of his demands upon it being
reasonable. He might find it pleasanter if the world revolved round him;
but it does not. If he would make a window he must go the way of glass;
and the way of glass is this:--
In the first place, it is mosaic. It may be a mosaic of white glass or
of the pearly tints which go to make what is termed grisaille, in which
case the leads which bind the glass together form the pattern, or, at
all events, a feature in it. Or it may be of coloured glass, or of white
and colour, in which case the glass forms the pattern, and the lead
joints are more or less lost in the outline of the design.
If the pattern is in white upon a deep-coloured ground the lead joints
crossing the pattern and not forming part of it are, as it were, eaten
up by the spreading rays of white light, and, supposing them to be
judiciously contrived, do not count for much. On the other hand, the
lead joints crossing the coloured ground are lost in its depth.
Advantage is taken of this to break up the ground more than would be
necessary for convenience of glazing, or of strength when glazed, and so
to get that variety of pot-metal upon which so much of the beauty of
glass colour depends.
[Illustration: 52. PLAIN GLAZING, EARLY FRENCH.]
To give satisfactory colour the best of pot-metal glass is essential.
Structural conditions which a man is bound to take into account in his
design are--that the shapes he draws must be such as can readily be cut
by the glazier; that his lead joints must be so schemed as, where not
lost in the glass, to form part of the design, strengthening, for
example, the outlines; that his plan must at intervals include provision
for substantial iron bars which shall not interfere with the drawing.
He must understand that each separate colour in his composition is
represented by a separate piece of glass, cut out of a sheet of the
required colour. There may, and should, however, be variety in it. A
sheet of glass varies in depth of tone according to its thickness, which
in the best glass is never even; moreover, it may be streaked or
otherwise accidentally varied; and so considerable play of tint may be
got in a well-selected piece of pot-metal. Should a tint be required
which the palette of the glazier does not supply it may sometimes be
obtained by leading up two thicknesses of glass together. This expedient
is called "plating."
[Illustration: 53. MOSAIC GLASS, ASSISI.]
There are two very workmanlike ways in which white and colour may be
obtained in one piece of glass. If the glass is not coloured throughout
its thickness, but only a part of the way through, the coloured part may
be eaten away in places by acid (it used formerly to be tediously
abraded); and so a pattern of white may be traced upon a ground of blue,
for example, or, as is more common, ruby.
A piece of white or pale coloured glass may further be _stained_, but
only, so far, of one colour, yellow. The window opposite is all in white
and golden-yellow. This result is produced by the action of silver upon
it, which, at a sufficient temperature, develops a tint varying from
lemon to orange of beautiful quality, and as imperishable as the glass;
but one cannot be quite certain always as to the precise shade it will
take in the fire. On blue it gives green, and so on.
By the combination of these two processes three tints may be obtained,
or even four upon the same piece of glass--say white, green, and yellow
all upon a blue ground.
There is a third method of avoiding lead glazing. If little jewels of
coloured glass be cut out of various sheets and placed upon white glass
they become fused at a sufficient heat in the kiln, and adhere more or
less firmly to the glass on which they are laid; but this process of
"annealing" is not very safe. Still less to be depended upon is the
fourth process of "enamelling." In that case the coloured glass is
applied in the form of a paint upon a sheet of white. Fusing at a
comparatively low temperature, it rarely gets quite firmly fixed. Nor
has it the depth of pot-metal colour. The three processes of staining,
annealing, and enamelling, entail, it will be seen, the burning of the
glass. Literally this is the limit of what can be done in stained glass.
[Illustration: 54. WINDOW IN WHITE AND STAIN, WARWICK CASTLE.]
The term stained glass, however, is generally used to include painting,
which from the first has been associated with it. This painting (not to
be confounded with the above mentioned enamelling) is a second process,
which the glass undergoes after it is cut and before it is fired. It is
not in the least what a painter understands by painting. It is, in the
first place, a means of giving in solid brown pigment, which effectually
stops out the light, detail smaller than mere glazing would permit, such
as the features of a face or the veining of a leaf: it gives the foils
of the foliage, and marks the individual berries in the border overleaf.
In the next it is used partially to obscure the glass, so as to give
shading. The pigment is not used as colour, but for drawing and shading
only. Local colour is represented by the pieces of pot-metal glass
employed; the painting fulfils precisely the part of the engraving in a
print coloured by hand. The various methods of painting are explained
on pages 45, 64, 89. In some respects they have more affinity with line
drawing, mezzotint, and etching than with oil or water-colour painting.
[Illustration: 55. AUXERRE.]
It is extremely difficult to get delicacy of modelling or high finish at
one painting--to all but a consummate glass painter impossible. Many a
time the work has to be painted several times over, each painting being
separately burnt in, always at some risk. Painting that is not
sufficiently fired peels off in time. If it is fired too much it may be
burnt quite away.
The effect of paint in the form of shading is naturally to obscure the
glass. Up to a certain point there is not much harm in that; it counts
for nothing as compared with the facilities of expression it affords.
But that point is soon reached. Then it becomes a question of the
relative value of, on the one hand, purity and translucency of glass
colour, and, on the other, of pictorial qualities. The problem is to get
the utmost of modelling or expression with the minimum of obscuration.
Much depends upon the method of painting adopted. So long as the light
is allowed to get through it, one may indulge in a fair amount of
shading, but a deep even tint, leaving none of the glass clear, is
inevitably heavy. The more one can represent shadows by deeper tinted
glass the more brilliant the result will be.
This painting, although, strictly speaking, in brown enamel, is not, as
was said, what is usually meant by enamel painting: that is described on
page 77. A window may be painted altogether in enamel; and, when the
mosaic method went out, designs were painted in enamel upon panes of
plain white glass; but, for the most part, since the pieces had to be
connected by lead, it was found convenient to use pot-metal for some of
the stronger colours. In recent times, however, owing to the
introduction of large sheets of thicker glass, to improved glass kilns,
and also to more accurate knowledge of the chemistry of enamel colours,
it is possible to paint a picture-window on one sheet of glass. That has
been done with extraordinary skill at Sèvres. You may see really
marvellous results in this kind in the Chapel of the Bourbons at Dreux.
If you want neither more nor less than a picture upon glass, and are
content with a picture in which the shadows are opaque and the lights
transparent, that is the way to get it. You will not get the qualities
of glass. Within the last two or three years there seems to have been
very considerable improvement in the purity, translucency, and depth of
enamel colours. How far they are lasting remains to be proved. Anyway,
brilliant as they are, they have not by any means the intensity of
pot-metal glass, and it does not seem, humanly speaking, possible that a
film of coloured glass upon a sheet of white can ever compete in
strength and volume with colour in the body of the glass itself.
If, therefore, we want the qualities of deep, rich, luminous and
translucent colour, which glass better than any other medium can give,
we must resort to the use of pot-metal--that is to say, to
glazing--assisted more or less by brown paint, used, not to get colour,
but to stop it out, or to tone it down.
According to the more or less of your dependence upon paint your method
may be described as mosaic or pictorial.
Starting upon the mosaic system, you rough out your design in coloured
glass (or what stands for it upon paper), and then consider how, by use
of paint, as above mentioned, you may get further detail, shading,
harmony of tone.
Starting upon the pictorial system you sketch in your design, shade it,
and colour it, and then bethink you how you can get the glass to take
those lines.
In either case you have, of course, from the first, a very distinct idea
as to the assistance you will get from the supplementary process; but it
makes all the difference whether you think first of the glass or of the
painting. Upon that will depend the character of your window. If you
want all that glass can give in the way of colour, begin with the
mosaic. If you want pictorial effect, think first of your painting. If
you want to get both, balance the two considerations equally in your
mind from the first. Only, to do that, you must be a master of your
trade.
A first consideration in the design of a window are the bars which are
to support it. The skilled designer begins by setting these out upon his
paper, nearer or closer together, according to the width of the opening,
from nine to eighteen inches asunder. In a wide window it may be as well
to make every second or third bar extra strong. Upright stanchions may
also be introduced. Exigencies of design may make it necessary to alter
the arrangement of bars with which you set out. You may have
occasionally to bend one of them to escape a face, or other important
feature; but, if you begin with them, this will not often be necessary.
Bars may be shaped to follow the lines of the design. There is nothing
against that, except that it is rather costly to do; and, on the whole,
it is hardly worth doing. In big windows, such as those at King's
College, Cambridge, raised some feet above the level of the eye, stout
bars have, in effect, only about the value of strong lead lines, whilst
lead lines disappear.
The points to be observed with regard to glazing are these: Since leads
must form lines, it is as well to throw them as much as possible into
outlines. In a cleverly glazed window the design will tell even when the
paint has perished. To glaze a picture in squares, regardless of the
drawing, is mere brutality. Because by aid of the diamond glass may
actually be cut to almost any shape, it is not advisable, therefore, to
design shapes awkward to cut, but rather to design the lead lines of a
window with a view to simplicity of cutting and strength of glazing.
Pieces of glass difficult to cut are the first to break. It is the
business of the designer to anticipate breakage by introducing a lead
just where it would occur. _Tours de force_ in glazing are not worth
doing. It is a mistake to be afraid of leads. Skilfully introduced, they
help the effect; and, except in work which comes very near the eye, they
are lost in the glass.
The quality of pot-metal glass is all important. It should never be
mechanically =flat= and even. The mechanically imperfect material made in
the Middle Ages is so infinitely superior to the perfect manufacture of
our day, that we have had deliberately to aim at the accidents of colour
and surface which followed naturally from the ruder appliances and less
accurate science of those days. There are legends about lost secrets of
glass making, to which much modern produce gives an appearance of truth.
But, as a matter of fact, though old glass undoubtedly owes something of
its charm to weathering, better and more beautiful glass was never made
than is now produced; but it is not of the cheapest, and it wants
choosing.
The choice of glass is a very serious matter. What are called "spoilt"
sheets are invaluable. It takes an artist to pick the pieces. But
without experience in glass the judgment even of a colourist will often
be at fault. Some colours spread unduly, so that the effect of the
juxtaposition of any two is not by any means the same as it would be in
painting. It is only by practical experiment that a man learns, for
example, how much red will, in conjunction with blue, run into purple,
and which shade of either colour best holds its own. Effects of this
kind have been more or less scientifically explained--by M. Viollet le
Duc for one--but, in order to profit by any such explanation, a man must
have experience also.
Referring to "flashed" glass, all kinds of double-glass are now made:
red and blue = purple, yellow and blue = green, and so on; but there is
not, except, perhaps, in work on quite a small scale, much to be gained
by this. In fact, it is not well in work on a fairly large scale to
depend too much upon etching pattern out of coated glass. In a window
breadth of effect is of more account than minuteness of detail. Damask
or other patterns in draperies might, more often than they are, be
leaded up in pot-metal. It would compel simplicity on the part of the
designer, and the effect of the glass would be richer.
With the increasing variety of coloured glass now made, plating becomes
less necessary than once it was. The drawback to the practice is that
dust and dirt may insinuate themselves between the two pieces of glass,
and deaden the colour. The safe plan is to fuse the two pieces of glass
together.
Good glass is more than half the battle. Raw glass may be toned down by
paint, but poor glass cannot be made rich by it. The Italian glass
painters often used crude greens and purples, and softened them with
brown. They might do that with comparative safety under an Italian sky;
but the deeper tones produced that way have not the purity and
lusciousness of juicy pot-metal, and the paint is liable to peel off and
betray the poverty of the cheap material. It is the fundamental mistake
of the painter, because by means of paint he can do so much, to depend
upon it for more than it can do. The toning of local colour with brown
paint is only a makeshift for more thoroughly mosaic work; but it is an
ever-present temptation to the painter, and one against which he should
be on his guard.
The actual technique of glass painting, it has been explained already,
is quite different from painting as the painter understands it; often it
is not so much painting as scraping out paint. The artist may, nay must,
choose his own technique. He will get his effect in the way most
sympathetic to him. What he has to remember is, that, except where he
wants actually to stop out light, he must get light into his
shadows--whether by stippling the wet colour, or by scrubbing it when
dry with a hog tool, or by scraping with a point, is his affair. For
example, if he wants to lower the tint of a piece of glass, the worst
thing he could do would be to coat it with an even film of paint. It
would be better to stipple it so that in parts more light came through.
But the best way of preserving the brilliancy of the glass would be
either to paint the glass with cross-hatched lines, or to scrape bright
lines out of a coat of paint.
In draperies, backgrounds, and so on, this is most effectively done in
the form of a diaper, often as minute as damascening, which scarcely
counts much as pattern. Bold or delicate, a diaper is quite the most
effective means of lowering colour; even hard lines seldom appear hard
in glass, owing to the spreading of the light as it comes through; but
the inevitable hardness of lines scraped out may be mitigated by dabbing
the wet paint so as to make it uneven, or by rubbing off part of the
paint after the lines have been scraped out. Another and yet another
delicate film of paint may be passed over the painted diaper by a
skilful hand, but out of each film lights should be scraped if the full
value of the glass is to be preserved.
[Illustration: 56. SCRATCHED DIAPER.]
Solid pigment as local colour is a thing to indulge in only with extreme
moderation. The strong black lead lines often want lines or touches of
black strong enough to keep them in countenance (that is not
sufficiently remembered, and it is when it is forgotten that the leads
assert their harshness in white glass), and here and there, in work on a
small scale, a point of black (a velvet cap, a bag, a shoe, as shown
overleaf,) is very valuable as local colour; but, when the scale allows,
it is better always to get this mass in dark-toned glass, which gives
the necessary depth of colour most easily, most safely, and with most
luminous effect.
The thing not to do, is to paint the robes of black-draped figures in
black, a common practice in the seventeenth century. On the other hand,
a robe of black richly embroidered with gold and pearls may quite well
be rendered, as it was in late Gothic work, by solid paint, because the
pearls being only delicately painted, and the gold being in great part
perfectly clear yellow stain, plenty of light shines through.
As to the means of getting delicate painting in glass, the utmost
delicacy can be got, but it costs patient labour, and there is risk of
its going for nothing.
The only quite safe way of getting very delicate effects of painting is
to paint much stronger than it is meant to appear. A very fierce fire
will then reduce that to a mere ghost of what it was; possibly it will
burn it away altogether. Upon this ghost of your first painting you may
paint once again, strengthening it (and indeed exaggerating it) in all
but quite the most delicate parts. A strong fire will, as before, reduce
this without affecting the first painting. Possibly a third or even a
fourth painting may be necessary to an effect of high finish. When you
have it, it is as lasting as the glass itself.
[Illustration: 57. S. MARY'S, SHREWSBURY.]
This painstaking process, however, is found to be tedious. A much easier
plan is to add to the pigment a quantity of borax, or other substance
which will make it flow easily in the kiln. That necessitates only a
gentle fire, in which there is no risk of burning away the work done,
and enables you to do in one or two operations what would have taken
three or four. But the gentle fire required to fix soft flux only fixes
it gently. Securely to fix the pigment, the glass should have been
raised to almost red heat, to the point, in fact, at which it just
begins to melt, and the colour actually sinks into it, and becomes one
with it. A heat anything like that would have wiped out soft colour
altogether. Moreover, the borax flux itself is very readily decomposed
by the moisture of a climate like ours. Accordingly the more easily
executed work cannot possibly be fast. It fades, they say. That is not
the case. It simply crumbles off, sooner or later; but eventually the
atmosphere has its way with it. That is how we see in modern windows
faces in which the features grow dim and disappear.
We have got to reckon with this certainty, that if we want our painting
to last we must fire it very severely. What will not stand a fierce oven
will not stand the weather.
In view of the labour and risk involved in very delicate painting it
becomes a question how far it is worth while. That will depend upon the
artist's purpose. But the moral seems to be that, for purposes of
decoration generally, it would be better not to aim at too great
delicacy of effect, which is after all not the quality most valuable,
any more than it is most readily attainable, in glass.
Only those who have had actual experience in glass appreciate the value
of silver stain. It gives the purest and most beautiful quality of
yellow, from lemon to orange, brilliant as gold. There is some risk with
it. One kind of glass will take it kindly, another will reject it; you
have to choose your glass with reference to it. The fire may bring it to
a deeper colour than is wanted. It may even come out so heavy and
obscure that it has to be removed with acid, and renewed. Some all but
inevitable uncertainty as to its tint, renders this peculiar yellow more
suitable for use where absolute certainty of tint is not essential.
Nevertheless, the skilled glass painter makes no difficulty of doubling
the process, and staining a dark yellow upon a lighter, with very
beautiful results. Occasionally a master of his craft has gone so far as
literally to paint in stain, scraping out his high lights in white, and
giving, for example, the very picture of embossed goldsmith's work.
In the diapering of draperies and the like stain is of great service,
and again in landscape upon blue. But it has not been used for all it is
worth as a means of qualifying colour which is not precisely right,
apart altogether from pattern. Many a time where a scum of paint has
been employed to reduce a tint, a judicious blur of stain, not
appreciable as such, would have done it more satisfactorily, without in
the least obscuring the glass.
Nowhere is silver stain more invaluable than in windows of white glass
or _grisaille_, the quality of which is not sufficiently appreciated.
The mother-of-pearl-like tints of what is called white glass lend
themselves, in experienced hands, to effects of opalescent colour as
beautiful in their way as the deeper pot-metal tones.
There is no great difficulty in combining _grisaille_ and colour,
provided the white be not too thin nor the colour too deep; but the
happiest combinations are where one or the other is distinctly
predominant. With very deep rich glass, such as that used in the
thirteenth century, it is most difficult to use white in anything like a
patch (for the flesh, for example, in figure work). Unless very heavily
painted it asserts itself too much, and heavy paint destroys its
quality. Practically the only thing to do is to use glass of really
rather strong tint, which in its place has very much the value of white.
The "whites" in Early windows are a long way from purity. They are
greenish, bone colour, horny; but they have much more the effect of
white than has, for example, pure white glass reduced by paint to a
granular tint of umber.
Flesh tints present a difficulty always, unless you are content to
accept a quite conventional rendering of it. In connection with strong
colour you may use flesh-tinted glass; but that is just the one tint
which it is most difficult to get in glass. It is usually too pink.
Painting on white glass in brown produces the most invariably happy
results, and in windows into which white largely enters that is quite
the best expedient to adopt. In practice it proves ordinarily a mistake
to adopt a warmer brown for flesh tint, or to paint it in brown and red,
as was done in the sixteenth century and after that. It looks always
unpleasantly hot. When flesh wants relieving against white it is better
to use a colder white glass for the background. The only condition under
which warm-tinted flesh is quite acceptable is when it is in the midst
of strong red and yellow. The use of red enamel for flesh seems to be a
weak, unnecessary, and unavailing concession to the pictorial. It does
not give the effect of actual flesh, and it does not help the effect of
the window. Since you cannot get actual flesh tones it is as well to
accept the convention of white flesh, which gives breadth and dignity
to the glass. There is a sort of frivolity about enamelled flesh-pink.
It is, in a way, pretty, but out of key with the monumental character of
a window. Glass lends itself best to strong, large work. The quality of
pot-metal gives the colour chord. The leads give the key to the scale of
design--the pitch, as it were, of the artist's voice. That these are
strong (it is seldom worth while resorting to extra thin leads) does not
argue that design must be coarse. You have to balance them with strong
work, with patches, perhaps, as well as strong lines, of dark paint, to
carry off any appearance of brutality in them. This done, much delicate
detail may be introduced. A strong design need not shout any more than a
speaker need, who knows how to manage his voice. That is the condition:
you must know your instrument, and have it under control.
Experience seems to show that a certain formality of design befits
stained glass. Formality of colour arrangement soon becomes tedious; but
it is seldom, if ever, that the design of glass strikes one as unduly
formal.
Mosaic glass is designed, it was said above, with a view to glazing. The
skilled artist designs, so to speak, in leads; but they are not the
design; in fact, they count only as contours, and, except in mere
glazing, they should not be expected to give lines. It is a common fault
to make leads take a part in the design which they will not play in the
glass.
In drawing, strong, firm, even angular lines are valuable, if not
imperative. The radiating light softens them. Drawing which is already
suave is likely to be too soft in the glass, to want accent. Only
experience will tell you how much you must attenuate fingers and the
like in your drawing in order that the light shall fill them out, and
give them just their normal plumpness. The beginner never allows enough
for the spreading of light.
Glass painters who know what they are about use plenty of solid painting
out; but it takes experience to do it cunningly. An artist whose
_métier_ is really glass is not careful of the appearance of his
drawings. Cartoons are nothing but plans of glass, not intrinsically of
any account. Really good glass is better than the drawings for
it--necessary as good sketches may be to please the ignorant patron.
New departures in technique will suggest themselves to every inventive
mind. They may even be forced upon a man--as, by his own confession,
they were forced upon Mr. Lafarge--by the inadequacy of the materials
within his reach, or the incompetence of the workmen on whom he has to
depend. Mr. Lafarge's glass is sometimes very beautiful in colour, and
is strikingly unlike modern European manufacture; but it is not so
absolutely original in method as Americans appear to think. He seems to
have discovered for himself some practices which he might have learnt
from old or even modern work, and to have carried others a step further
than was done before. The basis of his first idea, he explains, was in a
large way to recall the inlay of precious stones that are set in jade by
Eastern artists. That was practically the notion of the earliest
Byzantine workers in glass. His use of other materials than glass in
windows he might have learnt from China, Java, or Japan, where they use
oyster, tortoise, and crocodile shell; or from ancient Rome, where mica,
shells, and alabaster were employed. There is nothing very new in
blended, streaked, or even wrinkled glass, except that moderns do by
deliberate intention what the mediæval glass-maker could not help but
do, and carry it farther than they. In chipping flakes or chunks out of
a solid lump of glass, Mr. Lafarge certainly struck out an idea which
had probably occurred to no one since, in prehistoric ages, man shaped
his arrow heads and so on out of flint. He has produced very beautiful
and jewel-like effects by means of this chipping, though the material
lends itself best to a more barbaric style of design than the artist has
usually been content to adopt. He has appreciated, no one better, the
quality of glass, but not the fact that so characteristic a material as
he adopts must rule the design. The attempt to get pictorial,
atmospheric, or other naturalistic effects by means of it, soon brings
you to its limitations. At the rendering of flesh it comes to a full
stop.
The experiment has been tried by Mr. Lafarge of a minute mosaic of
little pieces of glass between two sheets of white, all fused into one;
but it appears to be too costly, if not too uncertain an expedient, to
be really practical as a means of rendering the human face, more
especially if you want to get expression, which is there of more
importance than natural colour. Another new departure, the device of
blowing glass into shapes, so as to get modelling in them, results so
far in rather dumb and indeterminate form.
It is quite possible to melt together a mosaic of glass without the use
of lead. That practice may yet come into use in window panes, but they
will be as costly as they are fragile. In larger work there is no real
artistic reason why lead or its equivalent should be avoided. How much
old glass would have remained to us if it had been executed in huge
sheets? Here and there perhaps a broken scrap in a museum.
It is not meant to suggest that we should do in the nineteenth century
only what was done in times gone by. Our means are ampler now, our wants
are more. We can follow tradition only so far as it suits our wants;
and, in carrying it further, we are sure to arrive at something so
different that it may be called a new thing. If old methods do not meet
new conditions we must invent others. The problem of our day is how to
reconcile manufacture with anything like art; or failing that, whether
there is a livelihood for the independent artist-craftsman?
Whoever it may be that is to make our stained glass windows in the
future, he will have to make them fit the times. He may discover new
materials. Meanwhile it is of no use quarrelling with those he has. He
must know them and humour them. Bars have to be accepted as needful
supports, leads to be acknowledged as convenient joints; glass must be
allowed its translucency, and painting kept to what it can best do. A
window should own itself a window.
And what is the aim and use of a stained glass window? To "exclude the
light," said the poet, sarcastically. Yes, to subdue its garishness,
soften its glare, tinge it with colour, animate it with form perhaps.
The man who means to do good work in windows will devote as serious
study to old glass as a painter to the old masters. He will not rest
satisfied without knowing what has been done, how it was done, and why
it was done so; but he will not blind himself to new possibilities
because they have never yet been tried. The pity is that often the
antiquary is so bigoted, the glass painter so mechanical, the artist so
ignorant of glass. The three men want fusing into one. The ideal
craftsman is a man familiar with good work, old and new, a master of his
trade, and an artist all the while; a man too appreciative of the best
to be easily satisfied with his own work, too confident in himself to
accept what has been done as final; a man experimenting always, but
basing his experiments upon experience, and proving his reverence for
the great men who light the way for him by daring, as a man has always
dared, to be himself.
BOOK II.