MEDALLION WINDOWS.
In the thirteenth century the practice of the earlier glaziers stiffened
into something like a tradition, and design took almost inevitably the
form of (1) the Medallion window, (2) the Single Figure window, (3)
Ornamental Grisaille.
The full-blown thirteenth century Medallion window differed from what
had gone before in that it was more orthodox. The designer begins as
before by marking off a broad border to his glass, defined on the inner
side by an iron bar, and proceeds to fill the space within the border
with medallion shapes. But he now adapts the medallions more regularly
to the spaces between the bars. At most two alternating shapes occur
throughout the length of the light, without break or interruption, such
as occurs in earlier work, and as a rule they keep strictly within the
lines of the border. In all the nine examples here given, taken at
random from Chartres, Bourges, Canterbury, and elsewhere, only in one
case does a medallion cut boldly across the border in the head of the
light. The slight overlapping of the quatrefoils in one case is not
really an overlapping of the border but only of the marginal lines to
it, not shown in the diagram above, but clearly enough explained on page
132, which shows the completion of a corner of the window, less its side
border. In the window with large circular medallions divided into four,
there is no upright bar to define the border, faintly indicated by a
dotted line.
[Illustration: 69. BARS IN EARLY MEDALLION WINDOWS.]
It will be seen from these diagrams, which illustrate at once the main
divisions of the glass and the position of the ironwork, what a change
came over the construction of windows in the thirteenth century. The
window is no longer ruled off by upright and horizontal bars into panels
into which the design is fitted; it is the bars which are made to follow
the main lines of the design, and to emphasise the forms of the
medallions. The rare exceptions to this rule (as at Bourges, overleaf)
may generally be taken to betray either the beginning or the end of the
period; but at Poitiers they seem to have passed through the early
period without ever arriving at shaped bars. The early glazier, it was
said, first blocked out his design according to his leading; here he
begins with the bars. The iron framework forms, itself, in many of these
windows, a quite satisfactory pattern, and one which proudly asserts
itself in the finished window. The designs of the period are not of
course all equally ingenious. Sometimes, in order to strengthen a circle
or quatrefoil of great size, the glazier, instead of breaking up the
shape ornamentally as was the rule, merely supports it by cross bars;
not only that, but he accepts the awkward shapes given by them as
separate picture spaces. Of this comes one of two evils: either he
frames his little pictures with sufficient border lines to keep them
distinct, and so draws attention to the shapes, an attention they do not
deserve; or he has to accept the bars, with perhaps a fillet of colour,
as sufficient frame, which they are not, and his pictures run together,
to the bewilderment of whoever would decipher them.
[Illustration: 70. SPANDRILS OF MEDALLION WINDOW, BOURGES.]
It is matter for regret that the French did not accept the full shape of
even the largest medallion, and fill it with one bold subject; over and
over again one feels that the subjects in medallion windows are not only
too small to be readable, but so small that the figures are out of scale
with the ornamental detail. The scale of the church has, of course, to
be taken into account; but the French churches are big enough to warrant
figures thrice the size of those which ordinarily occur in medallions.
In our narrower "Early English" lancet windows the medallions naturally
came small.
To divide a window into eccentric divisions (halves or quarters of
circles, quatrefoils, and the like) and then to take these awkward
shapes as separate picture frames, is an archaic method of design much
in need of excuse. The more reasonable thing to do would have been to
make use of such incomplete forms only in some secondary position, and
as framework for ornament, or at least quite subsidiary figures.
Apart from shapes which are really only segments of medallions, the only
awkward medallion shapes occurring in Early glass are those which are
broader than they are high, such as occur, for example, at Soissons.
These have always the uncomfortable appearance of having been crushed.
How the iron skeleton of a medallion window is filled out with leaded
glass; how the border and the medallion shapes are strengthened by bands
of colour; how the medallions themselves are occupied with little figure
subjects, and how the interspaces are filled in with ornament, is
indicated opposite and on pages 132, 325.
By way of variation upon the monotony of design, the designer will
sometimes reverse the order of things. At Bourges, for example, you will
find the centre of a light devoted to insignificant and uninteresting
ornament, whilst the figure subjects are edged out into half quatrefoils
at the sides of the window; and, again, at Chartres and Le Mans you may
occasionally see the pictures similarly ousted from their natural
position by rather mechanical ornament. One can sympathise with an
artist's impatience with the too, too regular distribution of the
stereotyped medallion window. There is undoubtedly a monotony about it
which the designer is tempted to get rid of at any price; but
consistency is a heavy price to pay for the slight relief afforded by
the treatment just described.
This striving after strangeness results not only in very ugly picture
shapes--no one would deliberately design such a shape as that which
frames the picture of the Dream of Charlemagne (overleaf)--but it
produces a very uncomfortable impression of perversity. It is quite
conceivable that ornament may be better worth looking at than some
pictures; but a picture refuses to occupy the subordinate position; it
will not do as a frame to ornament. There is no occasion to illustrate
very fully the design of Early figure medallions; they are often of very
great interest, historical, legendary and human, but there is little
variation in the system of design. The picture is of the simplest,
perhaps the baldest, kind. The figures, as before stated, are clearly
defined against a strong background, usually blue or ruby; a strip or
two of coloured glass represents the earth upon which they stand; a
turret or a gable tells you that the scene is in a city; a foliated
sprig or two indicate that it is out of doors, a forest, perhaps; a
waving band of grey ornament upon the blue tells you that the blue
background stands for sky, for this is a cloud upon it. The extremely
ornamental form which conventional trees may assume is shown in Mr. T.
M. Rooke's sketch from a medallion at Bourges, opposite. In the
medallions from Chartres (page 325) are instances of simpler and less
interesting tree forms, and in the upper part of the larger of the two,
a bank of conventional cloudwork. Explanatory inscriptions are sometimes
introduced into the background, as in the dream of Charlemagne (above),
or in the margin of the medallions, as in the Canterbury window on page
132, fulfilling in either case an ornamental as well as an elucidatory
function.
[Illustration: 71. THE DREAM OF CHARLEMAGNE, CHARTRES.]
In the Canterbury glass it will be seen the figures are more crowded
than in the French work illustrated. This is not a peculiarity of
English glass, but a mark of period; as a rule the clump or compact
group of personages proclaims a later date than figures isolated against
the background. There is no surer sign of very early work than the
obvious display of the figures against the background, light against
dark or dark against light. Another indication of the date of the
Canterbury figures is that their draperies do not cling quite so
closely about them as in figures (page 33) in which the Byzantine
tradition is more plainly to be traced.
There is no mistaking a medallion window, the type is fixed: within a
border of foliated ornament a series of circles, quatrefoils, or other
medallion shapes, for the most part occupied by figure subjects on a
rather minute scale, and between these ornament again.
The border might be wider or narrower, according to the proportion of
the window, though a wide border was rather characteristic of quite
early glass. A twelfth century border (Angers) will sometimes measure
more than a quarter of the entire width of the window. The borders from
Canterbury, Beverley, Auxerre, and Chartres (overleaf) are of the
thirteenth. A border of sufficient dimensions will sometimes include
medallion shapes as on pages 115, 325, and even occasionally little
subject medallions at intervals, or it may be half-circles, each
containing a little figure; but such interruption of the running border
is rare. In so far as it counts against monotony it is to the good.
[Illustration: 72. DETAIL FROM AN EARLY MEDALLION.]
In narrower windows, such as more frequently occur in this country,
where, as the Gothic style of architecture supplanted the Norman, lancet
lights took a characteristically tall and slender shape, the border was
reduced to less imposing proportions, as for example at Beverley;--there
was no room for a wide frame to the medallions, nor any fear, it may be
added, that these should be so large as to require breaking up into
segments, as in much French glass, or at Canterbury: there the window
openings, as was to be expected of a French architect, are more
characteristically Norman than English in proportion. In a very narrow
light in the one-time cathedral at Carcassonne the medallions break in
front of a not very wide border; but then this, though a medallion
window, belongs probably by date to the Second Gothic period.
[Illustration: 73. CANTERBURY.]
Medallions themselves may be simple or fantastic in shape. They may be
devoted each to a single picture, or subdivided into a series of four or
five; they may be closely packed, and supported by segments of other
medallions, also devoted to figure work, or they may be separated by
considerable intervals of ornament. The character of that ornament takes
two distinct forms.
[Illustration: 74. BEVERLEY MINSTER.]
In the examples given (pages 132, 325) it takes the form of foliated
scrollwork, very much of a piece with the ornament in the borders,
except that there is more scope for its growth. In actual detail it
varies, according to its date and whereabouts, from something very much
like Romanesque strapwork to the more or less trefoiled foliage typical
of Early Gothic ornament, whether French or English. Further examples of
the last are shown in the borders from Auxerre and Chartres (page 328).
The one from Chartres illustrates the transition from the Romanesque; it
is intermediate between the two. The borders from S. Kunibert's,
Cologne, are quite Romanesque in character, though they are of the
thirteenth century; but then it has to be remembered that the Romanesque
style of architecture was flourishing on the Rhine long after the Gothic
style had developed itself in France and England. Many of the details
from Canterbury--which, by-the-bye, are almost identical with
contemporary French ornament--show a lingering influence of the
pre-Gothic period, but the scroll occupying the spandril on page 132 is
pronouncedly of Early Gothic type. Of much the same character is the
detail from Salisbury on page 117, which forms no part of a medallion
window, but more likely of a tree of Jesse.
[Illustration: 75. AUXERRE.]
[Illustration: 76. CHARTRES.]
It was in this ornamental kind of design that the thirteenth century
glaziers were most conspicuously successful. One no longer feels here,
as one does with regard to their figure work, that they mean much better
than their powers enable them to do. And it is with scrollery of this
kind, either growing free or springing from the margin of the medallion,
that the Early English designers occupied the intervals between the
medallions in their windows. In France it became the commoner practice
to substitute for it a diaper of geometric pattern. Other expedients
were occasionally adopted. There is a window at S. Denis in which there
is foliated scrollwork on a background of geometric diaper, although
this last is so much "restored" that, for all one can tell, Viollet le
Duc may be entirely responsible for it.
[Illustration: 77. S. KUNIBERT, COLOGNE.]
[Illustration: 78. FRENCH MOSAIC DIAPERS.]
At Soissons is a window in which the interspaces between the medallions
are filled with deep blue, broken only here and there by a spot of ruby;
at Poitiers also the ornament in spandrils is often just a quatrefoil or
so, barely foliated, if at all; at Bourges there is an instance of
spandrils (page 125) occupied by bare curling stalks and rosette-like
flowers; at Poitiers the bands which frame the medallions have a way of
interlacing, not in the simple fashion shown in the example from
Canterbury below, but so as to form a kind of pattern in the spandrils
in front of the geometric filling; and there are other variations on the
accustomed medallion tunes; but as a rule the ornament consists either
of the usual Early Gothic foliation, closely akin to that in the
borders, such as is shown on pages 129, 130, 328, 330, or of geometric
pattern, such as is here given. The rarity of the mosaic diaper in this
country may be gathered from the fact that in the whole series of Early
medallion windows at Canterbury it is found only once, its frequency in
France from the fact that in the choir alone of Bourges Cathedral it
occurs in no less than twenty-two instances; again at Chartres, out of
twenty-seven great windows, not more than four have scrollwork; at
Poitiers, on the other hand, there is little geometric diaper, but the
ornament is of the simplest, and barely foliated. This device of
geometric diaper-filling was possibly inspired by the idea of utilising
the small chips of precious glass, which, with the then method of
working, must have accumulated in great quantity. In any case, it
must have been encouraged by that consideration, if not actually
suggested by it. Apart from economy, which is a condition of
craftsmanlike work, there does seem a sort of artistic logic in the use
of merely geometric design for quite subordinate filling, to act as a
foil to figure work; but there was no occasion to put the mosaic of
fragments quite so regularly, not to say mechanically, together, as was
the custom to do.
[Illustration: 79. CANTERBURY.]
[Illustration: 80. FRENCH MOSAIC DIAPERS.]
[Illustration: 81. DETAIL OF MEDALLION WINDOW, CANTERBURY.]
[Illustration: 82. FRENCH MOSAIC DIAPER.]
That is shown in a rather unusual instance in a window of the Lower
Church at Assisi; there occurs there a diaper of circles with blue
interstices, where the circles, though all alike painted with a star
pattern, vary in colour in a seemingly accidental way, and are red,
yellow, green, brown, just as it took the fancy of the glazier.
It follows inevitably from the small scale on which these patterns are
set out, and from the radiation of the coloured light, that unless very
great discretion is exercised the rays get mixed, with a result which is
often the reverse of pleasing. And the worst of it was that the French
glaziers particularly affectioned a combination of red and blue most
difficult to manage. A very favourite pattern consisted of cross bands
of ruby (as above), enclosing squares or diamonds of blue, with dots of
white at the intersection of the ruby bands, which persists always in
running to purple.
Instances of this unpleasant cast of colour are of continual occurrence,
but they are never otherwise than crude and plummy in effect. The rather
unusual combination of red and green mosaic diaper occurs, however,
pretty frequently at Carcassonne. The diapers illustrated indicate the
variety of geometric pattern to be found at Bourges, Chartres, Le Mans,
and Notre Dame at Paris, and elsewhere. In proportion as there is in
them a preponderance of blue and ruby the effect is that of an
aggressive purple. The safest plan seems to be in associating with the
blue plenty of green, or with the ruby plenty of yellow glass; or a
similar result may be obtained by the choice of a deep neutral blue and
of an orange shade of red, taking care always that the two contrasting
colours shall not be of anything like equal strength.
At the best these diapers compare very unfavourably with scrollwork.
They are, in the nature of things, more monotonous and less interesting
than a growth of foliage; they are apt also to run to gaudy colour,
which by its mass overpowers the pictures set in it. Compare, in any
French church, the windows in which there is geometric mosaic and those
in which there is scrollwork; and, though they may be all of the same
period, and presumably the work of the same men, you will almost
certainly have to marvel how artists who at one moment hold you
spellbound by the magic of their colour can in the next disturb your
eyesight with a glare of purple produced by the parody of a Scotch
plaid. Many of these diapers are very minute in scale; the smaller the
scale on which they are designed the greater the certainty of the
colours running together.
[Illustration: 83. S. PETER DELIVERED FROM PRISON, LYONS.]
It is to the very small scale of the figures, also, that the confusion
of effect in medallion subjects, in spite of their comparatively flat
treatment, is to be attributed. At Bourges, at Canterbury, everywhere,
the medallion subjects are on far too minute a scale to be made out by
mortals of ordinary patience, or, to speak accurately, impatience.
Often, even in windows which come close enough to the eye for study, it
is only the more conventionally familiar pictures which explain
themselves readily; and those you recognise almost by anticipation. You
have no difficulty in deciphering the Nativity, the Crucifixion, the
Ascension, and so on, because you expect to find them. A certain muddle
of effect must be accepted as characteristic of medallion windows.
It is not to be wondered at, that, considering the difficulty of making
out the ordinary medallion subjects in the lower windows, where they are
usually found, some other scheme of composition should have been adopted
for clerestory windows where those would have been more than ever
unintelligible. Accordingly, in that position, the single figure
treatment was adopted, and carried further than in the preceding
century. The figure was now, not for the first time, but more
invariably, enclosed in something like an architectural niche--a
practice borrowed from the sculptor, who habitually protected the
carved figures enriching the portals of great churches by a projecting
canopy, giving them at the same time a pedestal or base of some kind to
stand upon.
In glass there was clearly no occasion for such architectural shelter or
support; but the pretended niche and base offered a means of occupying
the whole length of the space within the border, which, without some
additional ornament, would often have been too long in proportion to the
figure, the mere band of inscription under its feet not being enough to
fill out the length. These very rudimentary canopies, specimens of which
are given here, are usually very insignificant. It takes sometimes an
expert to realise that the broken colour about the head of the saint
(page 46) stands for architecture. The forms, when you come to look at
them closely, may be ugly as well as childish, but they go for so little
that it seems hardly worth while to take exception to them. It is only
as indication of a practice (later to be carried to absurd excess) of
making shift with sham architecture for the ornamental setting necessary
to bring the figure into relation and into proportion with the window it
is to occupy, that the device of thus enshrining a figure as yet
deserves attention. As the beginning of canopy work in glass it marks a
very eventful departure in design. All that need here be said about the
Early Gothic canopy is that it would have been easy to have devised
decorative forms at once more frankly ornamental, more interesting in
themselves, and more beautiful, not to say less suggestive of a child's
building with a box of bricks.
[Illustration: 84. LYONS.]
Sometimes, as at Chartres and elsewhere, the base of the canopy would
itself take the form of a little subordinate niche enclosing a figure
in small of the Donor, or perhaps only of his shield of arms. Sometimes
it would take the form of a panel of inscription, boldly leaded in
yellow letters upon blue or ruby.
An alternative idea was to represent the Saints, or other holy
personages, sitting. The figure on page 135 belongs actually to the
beginning of the fourteenth century; but, except for a slightly more
naturalistic character in the drawing of the drapery, it might almost
have belonged to the same period as the standing figure on page 46. In
longer lights two saints are often figured, sitting one above the other.
This may be seen in the clerestory at Canterbury; but the effect is
usually less satisfactory than that of the single figure on a larger
scale. The standing position is also much better suited to the
foreshortened view which one necessarily gets of clerestory windows. A
curious variation upon the ordinary theme occurs in four of the huge
lancets in the south transept at Chartres, where the Major Prophets are
represented each bearing on his shoulders an Evangelist. The same idea
recurs at Notre Dame, Paris, under the south rose. That is all very well
in idea--iconographically it is only right that the Old Testament should
uphold the New--but reduced to picture it is absurd, especially as the
Evangelists are drawn to a smaller scale than the Prophets, and
irresistibly suggest boys having a ride upon their fathers' shoulders.
Dignity of effect there can be none. Not now for the first time,
seemingly, is art sacrificed to what we call the literary idea.
It shakes one's faith somewhat in the sincerity of the early mediæval
artist to find that in the serried ranks of Kings, Prophets, Bishops,
and other holy men, keeping guard over the church in the clerestory
lights, one figure often does duty for a variety of personages, the
colour only, and perhaps the face, being changed. At Reims there are as
many as six in a row, all precisely of the same pattern, though the
fraud may not be detected until one examines them from the triforium
gallery. At Lyons, again, it looks as if the same thing occurred; but
one cannot get near enough to them to be quite certain. None the less
they are fine in colour. Thirteenth century glass was capable of great
things in the way of colour; and the rows of Kings and Prophets looking
down upon you from the clerestory of a great church like Bourges,
archaic though the drawing be, are truly solemn and imposing.