LANDSCAPE IN GLASS.
At once a distinguishing feature of picture-glass, and a characteristic
of later work generally, is the _mise-en-scène_ of the subject.
[Illustration: 173. FROM THE ENTRY INTO JERUSALEM, FAIRFORD.]
In quite the earliest glass the figures, it was shown, were cut out
against a ground of plain colour (pages 33, 127), or diapered perhaps
with a painted pattern, or leaded up in squares, or broken by spots of
pot-metal (page 37), which, by the way, being usually of too strongly
contrasting colour, assert themselves instead of qualifying its tone.
Sometimes the ground was leaded up in the form of a more or less
elaborate geometric diaper (page 336). Occasionally it was broken by the
simplest possible conventional foliage. The figure stood on a cloud, an
inscribed label, a disc or band of earth. In the fourteenth century
spots breaking the ground took very often the form of badges,
_fleurs-de-lys_, heraldic animals, cyphers, and so on (page 156), and
even in the fifteenth it was quite common to find figures against a flat
ground, broken only by inscription, either on white or yellow labels
(pages 186, 339), or leaded in bold letters of white or yellow into the
background itself (page 196). But simultaneously with this the figure
was frequently represented against a screen of damask (page 191), above
which showed the further background, usually more or less architectural
in character. In the Fairford windows (page 187) is shown this
treatment together with the label which helps to break the formality of
the horizontal line. Sometimes the line is curved, as though the figure
stood in a semicircular niche, or broken, as though the recess were
three-sided. Sometimes the figure stood upon a pedestal (page 391), but
more usually, as time went on, upon a pavement. Certain subjects were
bound to include accessory architecture, but at first it was as simple
as the scenery in the immortal play of _Pyramus and Thisbe_. But even in
the fifteenth century it was rendered, one may judge how naïvely, from
the little Nativity on page 54, a subject hardly to be rendered without
the stable. Again, the quite conventional vinework, also from Malvern,
shown in the upper part of page 345 (a jumble of odds and ends), forms
really part of the scene depicting Noah in his vineyard--see the hand
holding the spade handle. The Fairford scenery (pages 251, 372), quaint
as it is, goes much nearer to realism than that; and towards the
sixteenth century, and during its first years, there was a good deal of
landscape in which trees were leaded in vivid green against blue, with
gleaming white stems suggestive of birch-bark, always effective, and
refreshingly cool in colour. There is something of that kind in the
window facing the entrance to King's College, Cambridge; but the more
usual English practice in the fifteenth century was to execute the
landscape in white and stain against a coloured ground. That is the
system adopted in the scene of the Creation at Malvern (page 252), where
trees, water, birds, fishes, are all very delicately painted and
stained. In the left-hand corner it will be seen that solid or nearly
solid brown is used for foliage in order to throw up the white and
yellow leafage in front of it. There is some considerably later work
very much in this manner at S. Nizier, Troyes. But that kind of thing
was not usual in French glass.
[Illustration: 174. FROM THE CREATION, MALVERN ABBEY.]
The sky had of course from the first been indicated by a blue
background; but, the blue ground being used, in alternation with ruby,
for all backgrounds, except a few in white, it was not distinctive
enough to suggest the heavens, without some indication of clouds, which
accordingly were leaded up upon it, sometimes in mere streaks of colour,
sometimes in fantastically ornamental shapes. It was a later thought,
which came with the use of paler glass, to paint the blue with clouds,
indicating them, that is to say, more or less in the form of diaper. As
with the sky so with the sea. It was at first glazed in wave pattern;
eventually the wave lines were painted on the blue.
The blue background, which had gradually become paler and paler, became
soon in the sixteenth century pale enough to stand approximately for a
grey-blue sky, on which was painted, with marvellous delicacy, distant
landscape, architecture, or what not, always in the brown tint used
generally for shading, although a tint of green was given to grass and
trees by the use of yellow stain. This distant view painted upon blue
was a beautiful and most characteristic feature of sixteenth century
glass. The French painters adopted it, and made it peculiarly their own,
though it occurs also in German and Flemish glass. Backgrounds of this
kind, which in themselves suffice to mark the departure from Gothic use,
are shown on pages 207, 213, and on a larger scale opposite. The wintry
landscape there with the bare tree trunks against the cold grey sky,
forms the upper portion of the subject shown on page 207, in which Our
Lord gives His charge to Peter; the paler grey behind the heads of the
group stands for the sea. The wintry effect of the scene is not
suggestive of the Holy Land, but it brings the subject innocently home
to us. The leads, it will be seen, take the lines of the larger limbs of
the trees, whilst the lesser branches and small twigs are painted on the
glass. There is ingenuity in the glazing as well as delicacy in the
painting. This is a very different thing from the landscape painted in
enamel colours. The propriety, the beauty, the decorative quality of
such work as this, comes of the acceptance of the necessary convention
of treating the painted background, of rendering it, that is, always
more or less in monochrome, and not attempting anything like realism in
colour.
The painted landscapes illustrated are of the simplest. The French
painters went much further than that, associating with their painting
broad masses of pot-metal colour, but still keeping distinctly within
the convention of deliberately simple colour. By the use of
silvery-white and shades of pot-metal blue and purple and green, they
produced the most pleasing and harmonious effects. There was no great
variety in the tune they played, but the variations upon it were
infinite. Let us picture here a few of them.
1. _Ecouen._--A distant city, in white, and beyond that more distant
architecture, painted on the pale blue of the sky.
2. _Conches._--Against a pale blue sky, broken by cumulous white clouds,
a grey-blue tower.
3. _Conches._--A grey-blue sea and deeper sky beyond: from the waves
rises a castle, in white, breaking the sky-line, the pointed roofs of
its turrets painted in black upon the background.
[Illustration: 175. BACKGROUND TO THE CHARGE OF S. PETER, S. VINCENT,
ROUEN. (COMP. 156.)]
4. _Freiburg, 1528._--A smoke-grey sea, fading away towards the horizon
into pale silver, the sky beyond dark blue, its outline broken by a
range of deeper blue mountains.
5. _Conches._--Beyond the foreground landscape in rich green, a pale
blue sea, with slightly deeper grey-blue sky beyond, a tower in darker
blue against it; a strip of deep blue shore divides the sky and sea, and
gives support to the dark tower; against that a smaller tower catches
the light, and stands out in glittering white.
6. _Montmorency._--A canopied figure subject in gorgeous colour; the
foreground a landscape with rich green herbage, separated by a belt of
white cliffs from buildings of pale grey, amidst trees stained greenish,
backed by purple hills; further a pale blue sky; against the sky,
overshadowed beneath the canopy arch by a mass of purple cloud, the
stained and painted foliage of a tree, growing from this side the hill.
7. _Montmorency._--S. Christopher crossing the stream; blue water
painted with waves and water plants, the foliage stained.
8. _S. Nizier, Troyes._--A vineyard, very prettily managed; the vines
painted on the blue, their leaves stained to green, the grapes
grey-blue, whilst grey stakes are leaded in pot-metal.
Sometimes, as at Ecouen, far-off architecture would be painted not upon
blue but upon a pale purple hill. At Laigle figures and animals are
painted upon green, but they do not hold their own. On the other hand,
at Alençon, some distant figures appearing in very pale grey against a
delicate greenish landscape (stained upon the grey), are charming in
effect.
White backgrounds painted as delicately as the blue are not rare. At
Groslay, for example, steely-white architecture is separated from white
sky beyond by grey-blue hills, a church with blue steeple breaking the
sky. But white does not lend itself so readily to combination with
colour as blue; and, as a rule, such backgrounds are grisaille in
character, relieved, of course, with stain.
The great sea-scape at Gouda (page 223), representing the taking of
Dalmatia in Egypt (a very Dutch Dalmatia), is nearly all in grisaille,
against quarries of clear white, with only a little stain in the flags
and costumes, and one single touch of poor ruby (about two inches
square), which looks as if it might be modern. The port in perspective,
the ships, the whole scene, in fact, is realistically rendered, and
comes as near to success as is possible in glass.
Delightful peeps of landscape are sometimes seen through the columns and
arches of an architectural background. Whether the architecture be in
purple of divers shades, or in white with only shadows in purple, or
whether the nearer architecture be in white and the more distant in
purple, in any case a distance beyond is commonly painted upon the
grey-blue sky seen through it. Possibly, as at Conches, further vistas
of architecture may be stained greenish upon it--any colour almost, for
a change. But whatever it may be, and wherever it may be, in the best
work it is colour; and it is always more effective than where the shadow
is represented by paint, even though the brown be not laid on with a
heavy hand, infinitely more effective than when blue or other coloured
enamels are relied upon, as in some instances at Montmorency. Enamel
may, for all one can tell, have been used in some of the landscapes here
commended--it is impossible to say without minute examination of the
glass, which is rarely feasible--but it never asserts its presence; and
in any case it has not been used in sufficient quantity to damage the
effect.
It will be gathered from the descriptions of early sixteenth century
glazed and painted distances, that they were as carefully schemed with a
view to glazing (though in a very different way) as a Gothic picture.
Sometimes, as at Conches, they are rather elaborately leaded; and where
that is the case there is not so much danger of incongruity between the
delicacy of the painting and the strength of the leads--which assert
themselves less than where they occur singly. It stands to reason also
that the more mosaic the glass the less fragile it is. Painting alone
upon the blue is best employed for small peeps of distance. It adapts
itself to smaller windows; and it must be done (as for a while it was
done) so well, that it seems as if the designer must himself have
painted it. Were the artist always the glass painter, and the glass
painter always an artist, who knows what case pictorial glass might not
make out for itself?
It is a coarser kind of distance than the French that we find at King's
College, Cambridge. There the landscape backgrounds are in white and
stain, grey-blue being reserved for the sky beyond, broken more or less
by white clouds, or, occasionally, by the white trunks of trees, the
foliage of which is sometimes glazed in green glass, sometimes painted
upon the blue and stained. Here and there a distant tree is painted
entirely upon the blue. This treatment is not ill adapted to subjects on
the large scale of the work at King's College, but one does not feel
that the painters made anything like the most of their opportunity. The
inexperience of the designers is shown in their fear of using leads, a
most unnecessary fear, seeing that, at the distance the work is from the
eye, the bars themselves have only about the value of ordinary lead
lines.
[Illustration: 176. THE RELIEF OF LEYDEN, GOUDA.]
Stronger and more workmanlike, but not quite satisfactory, is the much
later landscape (1557) of Dirk Crabeth at Gouda. There the sky is blue,
leaded in quarries, on which are trees, painted and stained, and some
rather florid clouds. In the later work generally the lead lines are no
longer either frankly acknowledged or skilfully disguised. The outline
of a green hill against the sky will be feebly softened with trivial
little twigs and scraps of painted leafage. The decline of landscape is
amply illustrated at Troyes. At Antwerp again there is a window bearing
date 1626, in which the landscape background of a quite incomprehensible
subject extends to a distant horizon, above which the sky is glazed in
white quarries, with clouds painted upon it. This is an attempt to
repeat the famous feat of glass painting which had been done some twenty
years before at Gouda. The Relief of Leyden, of which a diagram is here
given, is in its way a most remarkable glass picture. In the foreground
is a crowd of soldiers and citizens, upon the quay, about lifesize. They
form a band of rich colour at the base of the composition; but the
design is confused by the introduction of shields of arms and their
supporters immediately in front of the scene. Beyond are the walls and
towers of the city of Delft, and the adjacent towns and villages, and
the river dwindling into the far distance where Leyden lies--in the
glass a really marvellous bird's-eye view over characteristically flat
country. The horizon extends almost to the springing line of the window
arch, and above that rises a sky of plain blue quarries, broken only
towards the top by a few bolster-like and rather dirty white clouds.
Absolute realism is of course not reached, but it is approached near
enough to startle us into admiration. It is astonishing what has here
been done. But the painter has not done what he meant to do. That was
not possible, even with the aid of enamel.