ITALIAN GLASS.
In the course of the preceding chapters the reader has been rather
unceremoniously carried from country to country, in a way which may have
seemed to him erratic. But there was a reason in the zig-zag course
taken. The progress of the glass painter's art was not by any means a
straight line. Nor did it develop itself on parallel lines in the
various countries in which it throve. It advanced in one place whilst it
was almost at a standstill in another.
That is easily understood. It was inevitable that glass painting, though
it arose in France, should languish there during the troublous times
when English troops overran it under Edward III. and throughout the
Hundred Years' War, that it should revive in all its glory under Francis
the First, and that during the disturbances of the Fronde it should
again decline. The extremity of France was England's opportunity; and
our greatest wealth of stained glass windows dates from the reign of the
later Plantagenets. The Wars of the Roses do not appear greatly to have
affected art; but after the Reformation we were more busy smashing glass
than painting it.
In Germany the course of art ran smoother. Glass throve under the Holy
Roman Empire, and it was not until the Reformation that it suffered any
very severe check. Mediæval Swiss glass may be classed with German.
In the Netherlands glass painting blossomed out suddenly under the
Imperial favour of Charles V. It continued to bear fruit under the Dutch
Republic, until it ran to seed at the end of the seventeenth century.
So it happens that, in following the development of glass painting, it
has been necessary to seek the best and most characteristic
illustrations first in one country and then in another, to travel from
France to England, from England to Germany and back to France, thence to
Flanders, to France again, and finally once more to the Netherlands, to
say nothing of shorter excursions from one place to another, as occasion
might demand. In each separate locality there was naturally some sort of
progress, but we cannot take any one country as all-sufficient type of
the rest; and to have traversed each in turn would have been tedious.
There were everywhere differences of practice and design; in each
country, for that matter, there were local schools with marked
characteristics of their own. Some of the characteristic national
differences have been pointed out in passing. To describe them at length
would be to write a comparative history of glass, of which there is here
no thought. What concerns us is the broadly marked progress of glass
painting, not the minor local differences in style.
Something more, however, remains to be said of Italian glass than was
possible in any general survey. The mere facts, that the Renaissance
arose in Italy so long before it reached this side the Alps, and that
glass painting was never really quite at home in Italy (any more than
the Gothic architecture which mothered it), sufficiently account for the
difficulty, nay, the impossibility, of classing it according to the
Gothic periods. Indeed, one is reminded in Italian glass less often of
other windows of the period, English, French, or German, than of
contemporary Italian painting.
The comparative fitness of the works of the "Primitive" painters for
models of glass design has already been pointed out. It is so evident
that the Italian sense of colour could find more adequate expression
than ever in glass, that one is inclined to wonder, until it is
remembered that Italian churches were at the same time picture
galleries, that it did not more commonly find vent in that medium. Even
as it is, Italian painters did found a school of glass painting,
comparatively uninfluenced by the traditional Gothic types of design,
whilst observing the best traditions of glazier-like technique. Hence it
is that we find in Italy windows such as are nowhere else to be seen,
windows which at their best are of the very best.
There are resemblances in Italian glass to German work; and some of it
is said to have been executed by Germans. It is none the less Italian.
Though it were executed in Germany, glazier and painter must have worked
under the direct influence of the Italian master, and in complete
accord with him, putting at his service all their experience in their
craft, and all their skill. So well did they work together, that it
seems more likely that the executant not only worked under the eye of
the master, but was at his elbow whilst he designed. That alone would
account satisfactorily for the absolutely harmonious co-operation of
designer and glass-worker. One thing is clear, that the artist, whatever
his experience in glass, great or little, had absolute sympathy with his
new material, felt what it could do, saw the opportunities it offered
him, and seized them.
An Englishman, or a Frenchman, who found himself for the first time in
Italy, would be puzzled to give a date to the windows at Pisa or Milan,
or in either of the churches of S. Francis at Assisi. Even an expert in
the glass of other countries has to speak guardedly as to Italian work,
or he may have to retract his words. Italian Gothic is so Italian and so
little Gothic, it is of no use attempting to compare it with Northern
work. To those, moreover, who have been in the habit of associating the
Renaissance with the sixteenth century, the forms of Quattro-Cento
ornament will persist at first in suggesting the later date--just as the
first time one goes to Germany the survival of the old form of lettering
in inscriptions throws a suspicion of lingering Gothic influence over
even full-blown Renaissance design. It takes some time to get over the
perplexity arising from the unaccustomed association of an absolutely
mosaic treatment of glass (which with us would mean emphatically Gothic
work) with distinctly Renaissance detail, such as one finds at the
churches already mentioned, at the Certosa of Pavia, or at Florence.
At Assisi the glass means, for the most part, to be Gothic. One is
reminded there sometimes of German work, both by the colour of the glass
and by the design of some of the medallion and other windows. The
ornament generally inclines to the naturalistic rather than to the
Quattro-Cento arabesque, or to the geometric kind shown on page 96; and
though it includes a fair amount of interlacing handwork of distinctly
Italian type, and is sometimes as deep in colour as quite Early glass,
it is approximately Decorated in character. That is so equally with the
brilliant remains in the tracery lights of Or San Michele at Florence.
But it is characteristic of Italian glass of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries that, both by the depth of its colour and the very
quality of the material, it should continually recall the thirteenth
century. Sometimes, as at Milan, for example, you find even sixteenth
century glass in which there is practically no white at all except what
is used for the flesh tint.
In the cathedral at Pisa are some windows with little subjects, framed
in ornament, all in richest and most brilliant colour, which are at
first sight extremely perplexing. The leading is elaborately minute, and
there is no modelling in the figures, which yet have nothing of archaic
or very early character. It turns out that the paint upon the glass has
perished, and there is hardly a vestige of it left to show that this was
not intended for mere mosaic. The effect, nevertheless, is such as to
prove how much can be done in pot-metal glass, and how little it depends
upon the painting on it.
[Illustration: 177. ASSISI.]
Elsewhere, as at Arezzo (in work earlier than that of William of
Marseilles), the paint has often peeled off to a very considerable
extent, revealing sometimes patches of quite crude green and purple,
which go to show that the Italians habitually used glass of a raw
colour, where it suited their convenience, and just toned it down with
brown enamel. The result proves that it was a dangerous practice; but,
where the paint has held, the effect is not dull or dirty, as with us it
would be. The Italian sun accounts probably both for the use of this
scum of paint and for its not injuring the effect of colour.
The same quality of deep rich pot-metal colour associated with
Renaissance design, is the first thing that strikes one in the windows
at Bologna, in the cathedral at Milan, and in Florence everywhere. At
Milan in particular there are compositions, in which blue and red
predominate, magnificently rich and deep, in spite of recent cleaning.
The cunning way in which green is occasionally used to prevent any
flowing together of red and blue into purple, is a lesson in colour. Two
schemes of design prevail in the nave windows (the old glass in the
choir is so mixed up with new that it does not count), both equally
simple. In the one the rectangular divisions formed by the mullions and
the stouter bars are accepted, without further framing, as separate
picture spaces; in the other the main form of the window is taken as
frame to a single picture, the mullions being only so far taken into
account that the prominent figures are designed within them. Some of
these windows are late enough in the century to show a falling off in
treatment. In the Apostle window (attributed to Michel Angelo?) the
white glass is all reduced to a granular tint of umber; and in the one
illustrating the Life of the Virgin there is a most aggressively
foreshortened figure, which may have been effective in the cartoon, but
is absurd in the glass. It is not, therefore, at Milan that typically
Italian glass is best to be studied, though there is enough of it to
startle the student of glass whose experience had not hitherto extended
so far as Italy. Neither is Italian glass at its best at Bologna, though
the city was noted for glass painting, which was practised there by no
less a person than the Blessed James of Ulm. But, truth to tell, the
best windows at Bologna (they are most of them fairly good) are not
those of the Saint but of Pellegrino Tibaldi and Lorenzo Costa. It is at
Florence that the distinctive quality of Italian glass is best
appreciated. There is a vast quantity of it, varying in date from the
early part of the fifteenth to the latter part of the sixteenth century,
but it is uniformly Italian, and, with few exceptions, it is extremely
good.
Figures under canopies are of common occurrence in Florentine windows;
but the canopies differ in several respects, both from the ordinary
Gothic canopy and from the shrine-like structure of the later
Renaissance. In the first place, the canopy returns in Italy to its
primitive dimensions. It may or may not be architecturally interesting,
but there is in no case very much of it. The Italians never went
canopy-mad; and they kept the framework of their pictures within
moderate dimensions. The Italian canopy of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, then, was just a niche, sometimes of Renaissance design,
sometimes affecting a more Gothic form with pointed or cusped arch and
so on, under which, or in front of which, the figures stood. It bore
definite relation to the figures, and it was neither impossible of
construction nor absurd in perspective. Occasionally, in later work, as
at the Certosa at Pavia, it was delicate in colour, but, as a rule, it
was strong and rich. It was not merely that the shadowed portions were
glazed in pot-metal, as when, at Santa Croce, the coffered soffits of
the arches are one mosaic of jewellery, but that the canopy throughout
was in colour.
[Illustration: 178. S. MARIA NOVELLA, FLORENCE.]
That is the most striking characteristic of Italian canopy work, and
indeed of other ornamental setting--that it is as rich as the picture, a
part of it, not a frame to it. Constructionally, of course, it is a
frame; but the colour does away with the effect of framework. It serves
rather to connect the patches of contrasting colour in the figures, than
to separate one picture from another. Occasionally this results in too
much all-overishness, more commonly it results in breadth, making you
feel that the window is one. It was explained what use was made of white
canopy work in Gothic glass, judiciously to break up the surface of the
window. In Italy the surface is judiciously left unbroken, and in that
case also the result is most admirable.
With the exception of an occasional brassy yellow canopy, recalling
German colour, the same system of connecting canopy and subject together
by colour is adopted alike at S. Croce, at S. Maria Novella, and at the
Duomo at Florence. The composition of the windows is simple: within a
border of foliage or other ornament, two or three tiers of figures,
under modest canopies, separated perhaps by little medallions containing
busts or demi-figures. That occurs at S. Domenico, Perugia, as well as
at Florence.
[Illustration: 179. FLORENCE.]
A modification of the canopy occurs in the nave windows of the Duomo.
The space within a narrow border which frames the broad lancet, is
divided into two by a strong upright bar, and the divisions thus formed
are treated as separate trefoil-arched lancets, each with another border
of its own, the space above being treated much as though it were
tracery. (Something like this occurs, it will be remembered, already in
the thirteenth century, at Bourges.) In the tall spaces within the
borders are the usual tiers of figures under canopies. Again, in the
chapel of the Certosa in Val d'Ema, near Florence, there is a window
with double-niched canopies and pronounced central shaft dividing the
broad lancet into two narrow ones.
[Illustration: 180. S. GIOVANNI IN MONTE, BOLOGNA.]
The Italian canopy is not of so stereotyped a character as in Decorated
or Perpendicular design; and generally it may be said that there is,
both in the design and colour of Italian glass, more variety than one
finds out of Italy. The plan is less obvious, the scheme less cut and
dried; you know much less what to expect than in Northern Gothic, and
enjoy more often the pleasure of surprise.
Elaborately pictorial schemes of design are less common in Italian glass
than might have been expected. There is a famous window in the church of
SS. Giovanni e Paolo, at Venice (1473), in which the four lights below
the bands of tracery which here takes the place of transom are given
over to subject. There green trees and pale blue water against a deep
blue sky and deeper blue hills, anticipate a favourite sixteenth century
colour scheme; but the glass is a mere wreck of what was once probably a
fine window.
Figure groups on a considerable scale are chiefly to be found in the
great "bull's-eye" windows, which are a striking feature in Italian
Gothic churches, occupying a position where in France would have been a
rose--over the West door, for example.
[Illustration: 181. AREZZO.]
These great circular windows, which occur at Arezzo, at Bologna, at
Siena, and especially at Florence, are usually surrounded by an
arabesque border. Occasionally the border consists of a medley of
cherubic wings and faces; occasionally, as at Siena, it is in white,
more in the form of mouldings; in one case, at least, it disappears, as
it were, behind the figure group in the lower part of the window; but,
as a rule, it consists of Renaissance pattern, such as are shown here
and on page 70, large in scale, simple in design, and as mosaic in
execution as though it had been twelfth century work. The centre of
these circular lights may have, as at the Duomo at Florence, a single
upright figure, enthroned, occupying a sort of tall central panel,
supported by angels in the spandrils at the sides; or it may have a
subject running across it, as in the case of Perino del Vaga's "Last
Supper" (1549) at the West end of the cathedral at Siena. But very often
it enclosed one big figure subject, such as the "Descent from the Cross"
at Santa Croce, attributed to Ghiberti. An earlier manner of occupying a
bull's-eye is shown in the East window at Siena, dating probably from
about the beginning of the fourteenth century. This is subdivided by
four huge cross bars (two horizontal and two vertical) into nine
compartments, or a cross consisting of one central square, four squarish
arms, and four triangular spandrils. Each of these divisions is taken as
though it were a separate light, and has its own border, enclosing a
separate subject. The bars, it is true, are of great size, wide enough
almost to have been of stone; but the scheme rather suggests that the
designer was not quite aware, when he designed it, how much less
significant they would appear in the glass than they did in his drawing.
Unquestionably the finest windows in Florence are the great lancets in
the apse and south apsidal transept of the Duomo, finer than the three
lights at the East end of S. Maria Novella, which are so much more often
spoken of, possibly because they are seen to so much more advantage in
the dark-walled Lady Chapel. It is difficult to trace in these Duomo
windows the hand of Ghiberti or Donatello (1434), their reputed
designers. They are planned on the simplest lines. In the upper series,
the space within a narrowish border is divided, by a band of ornament or
inscription, into two fairly equal parts, in each of which stand two
figures facing one another (opposite) under the simplest form of canopy,
if canopy it can be called. It is a mere frame, at the back of which is
a two-arched arcade, with shafts disappearing behind the figures. They
stand, that is to say, not under but in front of it.
In the lower series the arrangement is the same, except that the upper
compartment contains a single figure, larger in scale, and seated, under
a canopy of rather more architectural pretensions. Some of the canopies
have cusped arches, and some of the borders are foliated in a more or
less Gothic way; but obviously the Gothicism throughout is only in
deference to prevailing fashion. In feeling and effect the work is
Renaissance.
The design here given shows about one half of a window; but it gives,
unfortunately, no hint of the colour. The depth of it may be imagined
when it is told that the only approach to white in it is in the beaded
line round the nimbus of the figure to the right, and that is of the
horniest character. The flesh is of a rich brownish tint.
The head on page 270 goes nearer to suggesting colour. There again the
face is brown, the hair and beard dark and bluish; against it the band
round the head, which is ruby, tells light. The orange-yellow nimbus,
rayed, is rather lighter still, the beaded fillet edging it bone-white.
The drapery is of brightest yellow diapered with occasional blue
trefoils, each of which has in its centre a touch of red. The background
is of very dark blue, the architecture nearest it bright green, beyond
that it is dark red.
[Illustration: 182. FIGURES, DUOMO, FLORENCE.]
This short explanation will serve to indicate the key in which the
colour is pitched. The glass itself, it has been said, is as rich as
French work of the twelfth century, as deep as German of the fourteenth,
but more vivid than either; there are no low-toned greens or inky blues.
The blue is sapphire, the green has the quality of an emerald. In
this palette of pure colour the artist revelled. Nowhere as in the Duomo
at Florence is one so impressed with the feeling that the designer was
dealing deliberately always with colour. Plainly that, and no other, was
his impulse, colour--broad, large, beautiful, impressive, solemn colour
masses. Elsewhere the story-teller speaks, or the draughtsman, here the
colourist confesses himself. The grand scale of his figures allows him
to treat his colour largely, and its breadth is no less notable than its
brilliancy. There is infinite variety in it; but the general impression
is of great masses of red, blue, yellow, green, purple, brown, and so
on, held together by the same colours distributed in smaller threads and
spots, as in diapers on drapery. The broad mass of any one colour is
itself made up of many various tints of glass. The accidental fusion of
colour, as of red and blue into purple, is guarded against by framing,
say, the blue with green, or the ruby with brownish-yellow. At other
times neutral tones are deliberately produced by the combination of, for
example, red and green lines.
[Illustration: 183. FLORENCE.]
The event proves that in this way, and by the choice of deep rather than
low tones, not only mellowness but sobriety of colour is to be obtained.
The artist would certainly have chosen rather to be crude than dull; but
it is very rarely that a false note occurs, and then most likely it is
due to the decay of the brown paint upon which he relied to bring it
into tone.
At Arezzo one was disposed to think nothing could be finer than the
glass of William of Marseilles; at Florence one is quite certain that
nothing could be more beautiful than the glass in the Duomo. Each is,
after its kind, perfect. But at Florence, at all events (_les absents
ont toujours tort_), one finds that this is not only the more decorative
kind, but the more dignified. One is disposed to ask, whether it is not
better that in glass there should be no deceptive pictures, no
perspective to speak of, only simple and severely disposed figures,
which never in any way disturb the architectural effect, which give to
the least attractive interior--the Duomo is as bare as a barn and as
drab as a meeting-house--something of architectural dignity.
[Illustration: 184. PRATO.]