PICTURE-WINDOWS.
The course of glass design was picture-ward. Picture design, however,
did not stand still, and hence arises some confusion in the use of the
word "pictorial." It is time to try and clear that up. Stained glass, it
may be truly said, has been from the very first pictorial. The earliest
glass, therefore, and the latest, the best and the worst, may alike be
termed pictorial. The difference is in the conception as to what
constituted a picture, say, in the thirteenth century and the
seventeenth. It all depends upon the kind of picture attempted.
Archaic art aims already at nature. We probably do not give the early
painter credit enough for his intention of rendering natural things
naturally. In part at least the stiffness of his design comes from lack
of skill, and often where we find him quaint he meant no doubt to be
perfectly serious and matter-of-fact. But it was not alone incompetence
that held his hand. He was restrained always by a decorative purpose in
his work. Here again he was not conscious of sacrificing to any higher
rule of art; he bothered himself as little about that as a bee about the
way it shall fashion its cell; he worked in the way to which he was
born; but the idea had not yet developed itself that a picture could be
painted quite apart from the decoration of something, and it never
entered his mind to do anything but adapt himself to the decorative
situation.
A picture, then, in mediæval times was a work of decorative art,
designed to fit a place, to fulfil part of a scheme of decoration, in
which it might more often than not take the first place, but no more; it
had no claim to independence.
In glass the picture obeyed two conditions which more or less pulled
together: as art it subserved to decorative and architectural effect; as
craftsmanship it acknowledged and accepted the limitations of glass
painting. In the course of years the ideal of architectural fitness
underwent successive changes, and the limitations of the glass painter
grew less; his scope, that is to say, was widened, and his art took
what we call more pictorial shape. Still, so long as the pictorial ideal
itself was restrained within the limits of mediæval ambition, glass
painting might safely approach the pictorial. It was not until painting
broke loose from traditional decorative trammels and set up, so to
speak, on its own account, until pictorial came to mean something widely
different from decorative, that the term became in any way distinctive
of one kind of art or another. It is in that later sense that the word
pictorial is here used.
Artists still differ, and will continue to differ, as to the precise use
of the term. There are artists still who contend that, since in old time
art was decorative, and since in their opinion all art should be
decorative, therefore the picture which is not decorative is not art.
Arguing thus in a circle, they would say (the pictorial including in
their estimation the perfection of decorative fitness, and all art which
overshot the mark ceasing to count with them) that art was always at its
best when it was most pictorial. But that is a species of quibbling
about words which not only leads us no further, but hinders mutual
understanding. It is wiser to accept words in the sense in which they
are generally understood, and to try and see where the real difference
of opinion is.
Difficult it may be, impossible even, to draw the line between a picture
which is decorative and decoration which is pictorial; but there is no
difficulty in drawing a band on one side of which is decoration and on
the other picture. You have only to draw it wide enough. If we can
succeed in defining a picture as distinguished from a work of decorative
art, and can then show how a stained glass window, in attempting to
conform to conditions which we have agreed to call pictorial, fails of
its decorative function, it will then not be so difficult to see how, in
proportion as glass aims at the pictorial, it falls short of making good
windows. Granted, then, that a picture may fulfil all decorative
conditions, and that a decoration may sometimes rightly be pictorial,
that the two go, as historically they did, a long way hand in hand, it
is contended that there is a point at which decoration and picture part
company and take distinctly different ways; thenceforth, if either is
led away by the other, it is at the cost of possible success in the
direction more peculiarly its own.
Now, the first point at which picture definitely parts company with
decoration is where the painter begins to consider his work apart from
its surroundings. The problems the artist may set himself to solve are
two. "How shall I adorn this church, this clerestory, this chancel, this
window, with stained glass?"--that is distinctly a problem of the
decorator; "How shall I realise, on canvas or what not, this thought of
mine, this fact in nature, this effect seen or imagined?"--that is
distinctly a problem of the painter. Each, it is granted, may be swayed
more or less by the other consideration also, but according as a man
starts with the one problem or the other, and seeks primarily to solve
that, he is painter or decorator. Suppose him seriously to endeavour to
combine pictorial and decorative qualities in his work, there will come
times when he has perforce to choose between the two. Upon the choice he
makes will hang the final character of his work, decorative or
pictorial.
We are too much in the habit of laying down laws as to what a man may or
may not do in art. He may do what he can. He may introduce as much
decorative intention into his picture, as much pictorial effect into his
decoration, as it will stand; it is not till he overweights one with the
other, attempts more than his means or his power allow him, and fails to
do the thing that was to be done, that we can say he has gone wrong.
When the two ideals of decoration and painting were more nearly one, and
in proportion as that was so, success in the two directions was
possible; when painting aimed at effects, of painting--in proportion,
that is, as it became pictorial--it was impossible. It is safe to say,
since masters attempted it and failed--since, for example, the finest
work in glass which aims at the pictorial and depends upon painting ends
always in being either thin or opaque in effect--that the happy medium
was not found. The fact is, the time came when a painter, in order to
design successfully for glass, was called upon to relinquish some of the
effects he had come greatly to value in painting: effects of light and
shade, atmosphere, reflected light, relief, perspective, violent
foreshortening. To seek these at the expense of qualities proper to
decoration and to glass, was to attempt picture; to sacrifice such
pictorial qualities to considerations of architectural fitness, to the
quality of the glass, its translucency, its colour, its consistent
treatment, was to attempt decoration; and in proportion as the sacrifice
is not made, the work of the glass painter may be characterised as
"pictorial." There should now be no possible misunderstanding as to what
is meant by the word. It implies something of reproach, but only as
applied to glass. Let the pictorial flourish, in its place--that is, in
picture. All it is here meant to assert is that, pictures being what
they are, what they were already by the end of the sixteenth century,
the pictorial element in stained glass is bound to spoil the window.
There are two respects in which a stained glass window differs from a
picture: first, in that it is a window; second, in that it is glass.
Suppose we take these two points separately. It scarcely needs showing
that the designing of a window is a very different thing from the
painting of a picture. In the first place, the architectural frame of
the window is there, arbitrarily fixed, whereas the painter chooses his
frame to suit his picture. The designer of a window has not only to
accept the window-shape, but to respect both it and the architecture of
the building. The scale of his work, the main lines of its composition,
if not more, are practically determined for him by architectural
considerations, just as the depth of colour in his scheme is determined
by the position of his window and the amount of light he desires "or is
allowed" to shut out. Moreover, he has to accept the window plane, to
acknowledge it as part of the building, to let you feel, whatever he
does, that it is a window you see, and not something through the window
or standing in it. That was tried, as we have seen, at Gouda and S.
Gudule; but, even if the illusion had been achieved, it would have been
destructive of architectural effect. The idea of a picture seen through
the mullions of a window is one of the will-o'-the-wisps which led glass
painters astray. They did not succeed; and, had they done so, they would
have given a very false, and to some of us a very uncomfortable,
impression of not being protected from the outer air.
Mullions are in any case a very serious consideration. It has been shown
already (page 197) how the artist sought continuity of subject through
the lights of his window, and gradually extended his picture across
them. And if he is at liberty to occupy a four-light window with the
Virgin and Child and the Three Kings, and if it is lawful to introduce
more than one figure into a light, why may not each king be accompanied
by an attendant, holding his horse or bearing gifts; why should not the
Kings kneel in adoration; why should not Joseph be there, the manger,
and the cattle; why should there not be one landscape stretching behind
the Magi, binding the whole into one picture? So with the Crucifixion.
If the Virgin and S. John may occupy sidelights, why not introduce as
well in a larger window the two thieves, the Magdalene at the foot of
the cross, the good centurion, the soldiers, the crowd? Obviously there
is no reason why the subject should not be carried across a window; and
from the time that windows were divided into lights it was done, at all
events in the case of certain subjects, such as the Tree of Jesse, which
spread throughout the window, or the Last Judgment, for which the
available space was yet never enough.
But there is a wide difference between designing a subject which extends
through the whole width of a window and designing it so that it appears
to be seen through the window. In the one case the mullions are
seriously taken into account; in the other they are ignored. If you were
looking at a scene through a window, of course the mullions would
interfere. Why, therefore, consider them if you wish to produce the
effect of something seen through? Naturally you would not allow the
stonework to cut across the face of a principal personage, or anything
of that kind; but, apart from that, its intervention would only add to
the air of reality. The problem of dealing with the mullions is thus
rather shirked than solved. Its solution is not really so difficult as
would seem. Mullions count for much less in the window than one would
suppose. The eye, for example, follows naturally the branches of a Tree
of Jesse from one light into another, and it is not felt that the
stonework interferes with it at all seriously, whilst the scheming of
the figures, each within a single light, is a very distinct
acknowledgment of its individuality. So in the case of a subject. If the
design is so planned that the important figures are grouped in separate
lights, the landscape or other continuous background helps to hold the
picture together, and is not hurt by the mullions.
The important thing is that mullions should be considered; only on that
condition do they cease to interfere with the design. There is no
reason always to put a border round each light, or even to keep every
figure within the bounds of a single light. A reclining figure, such as
that of Jesse at the base of the window (below), Jacob asleep and
dreaming, or the widow's son upon the bier, may safely cross two or
three lights, if it be designed with reference to the intervening
stonework.
Further, it seems desirable that the shape of each separate window
opening should be acknowledged by at least a narrow fillet of white or
pale colour next the masonry, broken, it may be, here and there by some
feature designed to hold the lights together, but practically clearing
the colour from the stonework, and giving to the division of the window
the slight emphasis it deserves. It is not worth while dividing a window
into lights and then effacing the divisions in the glass. Given a window
of four or five lights, the decorator has no choice but to design a four
or five-light window. He must render his subject so that the
constructional divisions of the window keep their proper architectural
place; if his subject will not allow that, he must abandon his subject,
or give very good reason why not. The reason of mere pictorial ambition
will not hold good. The test of a good picture-window is, how the
mullions affect the design. If to take them away would make it look
foolish, then it has probably been designed as a window, decoratively;
if to take them away would improve it, then it has been designed
pictorially; and, however good a picture it might have been, it is a bad
window design.
[Illustration: 171. S. MARY'S, SHREWSBURY.]
It is quite possible, nay, probable, that in connection with any given
window, or series of windows, there will be architectural features
which deserve to be emphasised. It may be the springing of the arch
which calls for accentuation; it may be a string-course in the walls
that asks for recognition; it may be that the proportion of the window
wants correction. Whatever it be, it is the part of the decorator to
feel the want and to meet it, to grasp the situation and to accept it.
In not doing so, he shows perhaps pictorial, certainly not decorative,
instinct. So with regard to the plane of a glass picture. It is not
necessary to restrict one's design to silhouette, to make one's picture
as flat as the first glass painters or the Greek vase painters made
theirs. How much of distance and relief a man may indulge in is partly
his own affair. It depends upon what he can manage to do without
destroying the surface of his window. So long as he preserve that, he
may do as he pleases, and yet not lay himself open to the charge of
being unduly pictorial; only it is as well to remember that on the
simplest and severest lines grand work has been done, and may still be
done, without falling into archaism; whilst the Crabeths, and the rest
of the astoundingly clever glass painters of Gouda fail to reconcile us
to the attempt to render the sky beyond (page 258) or distant
architectural vistas in glass.
It has sometimes been contended that all lines of perspective (which in
the sixteenth century begin to take a very important place in design)
are amiss in glass, inasmuch as they destroy its flatness. That is
surely to go too far. So long as no effect of relief is sought, no
effect of distance attempted, no illusion aimed at, one can hardly find
fault with lines indicating the perspective necessary perhaps to the
expression of the design--assuming, of course, that the lines of
perspective take their place in the decorative scheme, and help the
composition of the window. They do that very cleverly in Crabeth's
picture of "Christ Purifying the Temple" (page 244). Our complaint is
rather with the strong relief attempted, the abuse of shadow, and
especially of painted shadow. The case is far worse where, as at S.
Eustache, Paris, the architectural background is shown obliquely. In
that case, no uncommon one in the seventeenth century, when the painter
would just as likely as not choose his point of view as best suited his
picture, without any reference whatever to its architectural setting,
the painter shows himself, as glass painter, at his most pictorial and
worst.
So much for the window as an architectural feature, now let us look at
it as glass.
It becomes here very much a question of craftsmanship. To a workman it
seems so natural, and so obvious, that the material he is working in,
and the tools he is using, must from beginning to end affect the
treatment of his design, that it appears almost unnecessary to insist
upon such a truism. Experience, however, goes to show that only the
workman and here and there a man who ought, perhaps, to have been one,
have any appreciation of what artists call treatment. The rest of the
world have heard tell that there is such a thing as technique, to which
they think far too much importance is attached. That is so, indeed, when
artists think technique is enough; but not when they look upon it as
indispensable, the beginning of all performance, not when they insist
that a man shall know the grammar of his art before he breaks out into
poetry.
Now the A, B, C, of workmanship is to treat each material after its
kind. It is a truism, therefore, to say that glass should be treated as
glass. Yet we find that a man may be enthusiastic to a degree about an
art, learned above most men in its history, and yet end in entirely
misconceiving its scope. "What is to be condemned on canvas," said
Winston, "ought not to be admitted on glass." As well might he have
said, that what would be condemned on glass should not be allowed on
canvas, or that language and behaviour which would be unbecoming in
church should not be tolerated on the platform, or at the dinner-table.
The fallacy that one rule applies to all forms of art is responsible
alike for the muddiness of seventeenth and eighteenth century windows
and for the thin transparent tinting of nineteenth century Munich glass.
That "art is one" is a fine saying, rightly understood. So is humanity
one, and it is well to remind ourselves of the fact; but race, climate,
country, count for something; and to speak with effect we must speak the
language of the land. Each separate craft included in the all-embracing
title of art, and making for its good and its glory, works under
conditions as definite as those of climate, has characteristics as
marked as those of nationality, and speaks also a language of its own.
And, to express itself to full purpose, it must speak in its own tongue.
The only pictures, then, which prove satisfactory in glass are the
pictures of the glass painter; and by glass painter is not meant any one
who may choose to try his hand at glass painting, but the man who has
learnt his trade and knows it from end to end, to whom use has become
second nature, who thinks in glass, as we say. Now and again, perhaps,
where a draughtsman and a glass painter are in unusual sympathy, it may
be possible for the one to translate the design of the other into the
language of his craft; but good translators are rare, and translation is
at best second-hand. Success in glass is achieved mainly by the man to
whom ideas come in the form of glass, who sees them first in his mind's
eye as windows. Even such a man may lack taste, insight, discretion; he
may be led away by a misplaced ambition--it is not merely on the stage
that the low comedian aspires to play Hamlet--but only the man who knows
so well the dangers ahead that he insensibly avoids them, who knows so
surely what can be got out of his material that he makes straight for
that, who does, in short, the best that can be done in glass, can dare
to be "pictorial" without danger of being false to his trade.
A painter without experience of glass might, of course, be coached in
the technique of the material; but he would never get the most out of
it. Conditions which to the glass painter would be as easy as an old
coat, would be a restraint to him, and the greater his position the more
impatient he would be of such restraint, the more surely his will would
override the better judgment of the subordinate who happened to know.
[Illustration: 172. CHRIST PURGING THE TEMPLE, GOUDA.]
It was unfortunate that at a critical period in the history of glass,
just when great painters from the outside began to be called in to
design for it, knowledge was in rather an uncertain state. The use of
enamel had been discovered; it offered undoubted facilities to the
painter; it was believed in; it was the fashion. Any one who had
protested the superiority of the old method would possibly have been set
down as an old fogey, even by glass painters. At that moment, very
likely, a glass painter, anxious of course to conciliate the great man,
but flushed also with faith in his new-found method, would have said to
Van Orley, in reply to any question about technique:--"Never you mind
about glazing and all that; give us a design, and we will execute it in
glass." And he did execute it in a masterly and quite wonderful way.
Still the success of it is less than it would have been had the designer
known all about glass: in that case his artistic instinct would have led
him surely to trust more to qualities inherent in glass, and less to
painting upon it. Van Orley's picture scheme depended too much upon
relief to be really well adapted to glass, but it was splendidly
monumental in design, and to that extent admirably decorative. Something
of decorative restraint we find almost to the end in sixteenth century
work; the picture had not yet emancipated itself entirely, and the
pictorial ideal did not therefore necessarily go beyond what glass could
do; in any case, it did not take quite a different direction.
It may be as well to define more precisely the ideal glass picture. The
ideal glass picture is, the picture which gives full scope for the
qualities of glass, and does not depend in any way upon effects which
cannot be obtained in glass, or which are to be attained only at the
sacrifice of qualities peculiar to it.
And what are those qualities? The qualities of glass are light and
colour, a quality of light and a quality of colour to be obtained no
other way than by the transmission of light through pot-metal glass.
Compare these qualities with those of oil painting, and see how far they
are compatible. Something depends upon the conception of oil painting.
The qualities of glass are compatible enough with the pictorial ideal of
the oil (or more likely tempera) painters whom we designate by the name
of "primitives"; and, indeed, fifteenth century Italian windows often
take the form of circular pictures which one of the masters might have
designed. A painting by Botticelli, Filippo Lippi, Mantegna, or
Crivelli, might almost be put into the hands of a glass painter to
translate. It is quite possible that some of the Florentine windows
were executed in Germany from paintings by Italian masters; the odd
thing is that they are attributed sometimes to sculptors. Ghiberti and
Donatello may, for all one knows, have been great colourists; but it is
so universal a foible to ascribe works of decorative art to famous
painters or sculptors who could never by any possibility have had a hand
in them, that one never has much faith in such reputed authorship.
The severity of the "primitive" painters' design, the firm outline, the
comparatively flat treatment, the brilliant, not yet degraded,
colour--all these were qualities which the glass painter could turn to
account. Without firm and definite outline, of course, a design does not
lend itself to mosaic. But it is especially the early painter's ideal of
colour which was so sympathetic to the glass painter. A designer for
glass must be a colourist; but the colour he seeks is _sui generis_. Not
every colourist would make a glass designer. Van Thulden may not have
been a colourist of his master's stamp, but Peter Paul Rubens himself
could not have made a complete success of those windows in the Chapel of
Our Lady in S. Gudule. Reynolds was a colourist, but he came
conspicuously to grief in glass. Velasquez was a colourist, but one
fails to see how by any possibility the quality of his work could be
expressed in glass.
On the other hand, colour in which the simple artist delighted, as in
light and sunshine, in the sparkle of the sea, in the purity of the sky,
in the brilliancy of flowers, in the flash of jewels, in the deep
verdure of moss, in the lusciousness of fruit or wine, colour as the
early Florentine painters saw it and sought it--this is what glass can
give, and gives better than oil, tempera, or fresco, on an opaque
surface. How far these early painters deliberately sacrificed to pure
bright colour qualities of light and shade, aerial perspective, and so
on, may be open to question. The certain thing is that, if we want the
quality of glass in all its purity and translucency, we have to
sacrifice to it something of the light and shade, the relief, the
atmospheric effect, the subtlety of realistic colour, which we are
accustomed nowadays to look for in a picture. Happy the men who could
contentedly pursue their work undisturbed by the thought that there were
effects to be obtained in art beyond what it was possible for them to
get.
Even the Italian painters soon travelled beyond the limits of what could
possibly be done in glass. Flesh-painting, as Titian understood it, or
Correggio, or Bonifacio, is hopelessly beyond its range. But it was the
Dutch who formed for themselves the idea most widely and hopelessly
beyond realisation in glass. The Crabeths, like good glass painters,
struggled more or less against it; but they could not keep out of the
current altogether; and in proportion as their work aims at anything
like chiaroscuro it loses its quality of glass. Rembrandt, to have
realised his ideal in glass, would have had to paint out of it every
quality which distinguishes it and gives it value. In proportion, as the
painter's aim was light and shade rather than colour, and especially as
it was shade rather than light (or perhaps it would be fairer to say, as
it was light intensified by obscuring light around it) it was
diametrically opposed to that of the glass painter. His pursuit of it
was a sort of artistic suicide. It led by quick and sure degrees to what
was to all intents and purposes the collapse of glass painting. Realism
of a kind was inevitable when once the painter gained the strength to
realise what he saw, but when the glass painter, seeking the strength of
actual light and shade, began to rely upon painted shadow for his
effects, the case was hopeless. Glass asks to be translucent.
The point of perfection in glass design is not easily to be fixed. Glass
painting, it must be confessed, as it approaches perfection of
technique, is always dangerously near the border line; the painter is so
often tempted to carry his handiwork a little further than is consistent
with the translucency of glass. It happens, therefore, that one expects
almost to find consummate drawing and painting marred by some
obscuration of the glass. If on the other hand we travel back to the
time when the evil does not exist, we find ourselves at a period when
neither drawing nor painting were at their best. It is by no means
surprising that this should be the outcome of the association of glazier
and painter. According as one cares more for glass or for painting one
will be disposed to shift, backwards or forwards, the date at which
glass painting began to decline. It may safely be said, however, that
pictorial glass painting was at its best during the first half of the
sixteenth century. That is the period during which you may expect to
find masterly drawing, consummate painting, and yet sufficient
recognition of the character of glass to satisfy all but the staunch
partisan of pure mosaic glass--who, by the way, stands upon very firm
ground.
In Flanders, as has been said, and in France, are to be found exquisite
pictures in glass, admirably decorative in design, glowing with
jewel-like brilliancy of colour, not seriously obscured by paint, the
figures modelled with a delicacy reminding one rather of sculpture in
very low relief than of more realistic painting and carving, the colour
delicate and yet not thin, the effect strong without brutality.
But it is in Italy that are to be seen probably the finest glass
pictures that have ever been painted; the work, nevertheless, of a
Frenchman--William of Marseilles--who established himself at Arezzo, and
painted, amongst other glass, five windows for the cathedral there,
which go about as far as glass can go in the direction of picture. The
man was a realist in his way--realist, that is, so far as suited his
artistic purpose. Not merely are his figures studied obviously from the
life, but they are conceived in the realistic spirit, as when, in the
scene of the Baptism, he draws a man getting into his clothes with the
difficulty we have all experienced after bathing, or when, in the
Raising of Lazarus (page 397), he makes more than one onlooker hold his
nose as the grave-clothes are unwrapped from the body. In design the
artist is quite up to the high level of his day (1525 or thereabouts);
but you see all through his work that it was colour, always colour, that
made his heart beat (we have here nothing to do with the religious
sentiment which may or may not be embodied in his work), colour that
prompted his design, as in the case of so many a great Italian master.
This man possibly did in glass much what _he_ would have done on canvas;
but he could never have got such pure, intense, and at the same time
luminous, effects of colour in anything but glass, and he knew it, never
lost sight of it, and tried to get the most out of what it could best
give him--that is to say, purity of colour, and translucency and
brilliancy of glass. Whatever amount of pigment he employed (probably
more than it seems, the light is so strong in Italy) it seldom appears
to do more than just give the needful modelling. Now and again, in the
architectural parts of his composition, the white is lowered by means of
a matt of paint, where a tint of deeper-coloured glass had better have
been employed; but even there the effect is neither dirty nor in the
least heavy. And in the main, for all his pictorial bias, the system of
the artist is distinctly mosaic; his colour is pot-metal always or
purest stain. The sky and the landscape, for example, in which the scene
of the Baptism is laid, are leaded up in tints of blue and green. In the
scene where Christ purges the Temple the pavement is of clear
aquamarine-tinted glass, against which the scales, moneybags, overturned
bench, and so on, stand out in quite full enough relief of red and
yellow, without any aid of heavy shading, or cast shadow, such as a
Netherlander would have used.
And, for all that, the difficulty even of foreshortening is boldly
faced. Not even in the most violently shaded Flemish glass would it be
easy to find a figure more successfully foreshortened than the kneeling
money-changer, scooping up his money into a bag. That a designer could
do this without strong shading, means that he was careful to choose the
pose or point of view which allowed itself to be expressed in lightly
painted glass. There is no riotous indulgence in perspective, but
distance is sufficiently indicated; and the personages in the
background, drawn to a smaller scale than the chief actors in the scene,
keep their place in the picture. Everywhere it is apparent that the
figures have been composed with a cunning eye to glazing.
These are not pictures which have been done into glass; they are no
translations, but the creations of a glass painter--one who knew all
about glass, and instinctively designed only what could be done in it,
and best done. This man makes full use of all the resources of his art.
His window is constructed as only a glazier could do it. He does not
shirk his leads. He uses abrasion freely, not so much to save glazing,
as to get effects not otherwise possible. Thus the deep red skirt or
petticoat of the woman taken in adultery is dotted with white in a way
that bespeaks at a glance the woman of the people, whilst more sumptuous
draperies of red and green are, as it were, embroidered with gold, or
sewn with pearls. These are the effects he aims at, not the mere texture
of silk or velvet. He delights in delicate stain on white, and revels in
most gorgeous stain upon stain. In short, these are pictures indeed, but
the pictures of a glass painter.
Work like this disarms criticism. One may have a strong personal bias
towards strictly mosaic glass, and yet acknowledge that success
justifies departure from what one thought the likelier way. Things of
beauty decline to be put away always in the nice little pigeon-holes we
have carefully provided for them. Shall we be such pedants as to reject
them because they do not fit in with our preconceived ideas of fitness?
Alas!--or happily?--alas for what might have been, happily for our
wavering allegiance to sterner principles of design, it is seldom that
the glass painter so perfectly tunes his work to the key of glass. In
particular, he finds it difficult to harmonise his painting with the
glazing which goes with it. He is incapable in the early sixteenth
century of the brutalities of his successors, who carry harsh lines of
lead across flesh painting recklessly; but the very association of
ultra-delicate painting with lead lines at all demands infinite tact. An
idea of the point to which painting is eventually carried may be
gathered from the representation of little nude boys blowing bubbles in
which are reflected the windows of the room where they are supposed to
be playing. That is an extreme instance, and a late one. Short, however,
of such frivolity, and in work of the good period, painting is often so
delicate that bars and leads unquestionably hurt it. It is so even in
the very fine Jesse window at Beauvais (page 368).
Occur where it may it is a false note which stops our admiration short;
and, after all our enthusiasm, we come back heart-whole to our delight
in the earlier, bolder, more monumental, and more workmanlike mosaic
glass. The beautiful sixteenth century work at Montmorency or at Conches
does not shake the conviction of the glass-lover, that the painter is
there a little too much in evidence, that something of simple, dignified
decoration is sacrificed to the display of his skill. The balance
between glass decoration and picture is perhaps never more nearly
adjusted than in some of the rather earlier Italian windows.