Stained Glass of the Middle Ages in England and France Part 1

Stained Gla.s.s of the Middle Ages in England and France.

by Hugh Arnold.

PREFACE

The Cathedral verger, conducting his flock of tourists round the building, while giving them plenty of really interesting and valuable information about it (for the verger of to-day is a different man from his predecessor, and is often very intelligent and well informed), remarks briefly, "The gla.s.s is of the thirteenth century"--or fourteenth or fifteenth, as the case may be; the procession gazes carelessly at it, and pa.s.ses on. Yet from out of that dazzling and glowing labyrinth of coloured jewels a past age is speaking far more articulately, if one stops to unravel the message, than ever in stone or wood, and it is for those who can be induced to take that second look which will be followed by a third and a fourth and many more that I have written this book.

It is impossible in a book of this size to give an adequate review of all the important windows even within the limits of place and time which I have set myself. I have therefore chosen for study certain typical windows in each century, and have written about them some of the things which interest me and which, I hope, will interest others.

The work of the countries and period I have chosen is of course the most important of all. There is beauty, it is true, in much Renaissance work (only a prig could resist the gaiety and charm of the windows of St. Vincent at Rouen), but it is for the most part beauty achieved in spite of, and not through, the material. There is beautiful mediaeval work in Germany and Italy, but the Germans, till the Renaissance, clung to a rather lifeless and archaic convention, and the Italians were hampered by their greater knowledge of painting.

The art has found its n.o.blest expression in the work of the great school which for nearly the whole of the Middle Ages was common to France and England.

There is especial reason why we English should study the work of our own mediaeval gla.s.s painters. They are the chief representatives of our primitive school of painting. It is true that there are English ma.n.u.scripts in the museums, and there are the painted rood screens of Norfolk, including the superb example at Ranworth, and there is the portrait of Richard II. at Westminster; but of the painting which must once have covered the walls of our churches, there is little left but patches of faded colour clinging here and there to the plaster, and the occasional dim outline of a figure. Of our gla.s.s, on the other hand, in spite of four hundred years of destruction, a considerable quant.i.ty remains, and is worth far closer study than it has ever had.

I must gratefully acknowledge the help I have had from my brother, Mr.

T. K. Arnold, especially in writing of the Canterbury gla.s.s of which he has made a very close study. My thanks are also due to Mr. Noel Heaton for information on the chemical composition of gla.s.s.

The publishers are fortunate in having been able to reproduce, for the ill.u.s.trations, the very beautiful coloured drawings of Mr. Lawrence B.

Saint, which are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

H. A.

I

THE MAKING OF A WINDOW

The making of stained-gla.s.s windows is one of the arts which belong wholly to the Christian Era. Its traditions do not extend back beyond the great times of Gothic architecture, and it is to the work of those times that the student must turn, as the student of sculpture and architecture turns to that of the ancient world, to learn the basic principles of the art.

In the Middle Ages stained gla.s.s formed an important part, but still only a part, of that interior colour decoration without which no church was considered complete; but in spite of its fragile nature it has on the whole survived the attacks of time, the fury of the Puritan, the apathy and neglect of the eighteenth century, and the sinister energies of the nineteenth-century restorer better than the painting which once adorned the walls and woodwork, and for this reason has come to be considered in these days as peculiarly appropriate to churches. So much so, indeed, that whereas I have sometimes found in country parishes a certain amount of opposition to any attempt to revive wall-painting as savouring of popery, no such feeling seems to exist with regard to coloured windows.

[Sidenote: The process.]

Stained gla.s.s is not one of the arts in which the method of production reveals itself at the first glance. Indeed, so few people when looking at a stained-gla.s.s window, whether a gorgeous and solemn one of the thirteenth or fifteenth century, or a crude and vulgar one of the nineteenth, realize the long and laborious process by which the result, good or bad, has been obtained, that a short description of that process as finally perfected some five hundred years ago may not be out of place here.

One hears it so often spoken of as "painted gla.s.s"--Mr. Westlake calls his book _A History of Design in Painted Gla.s.s_--that it is not surprising that there should be a good deal of misconception on the point. It must be clearly understood then that the colour effects which are the glory of the art are not directly produced by painting at all, but by the window being built up of a mult.i.tude of small pieces of white and coloured gla.s.s--gla.s.s, that is, coloured in the making, and of which the artist must choose the exact shades he needs, cut them out to shape, and fit them together to form his design, using a separate piece for every colour or shade of colour.

In twelfth and thirteenth century windows many of these pieces are only half an inch wide and from one to two inches long, and few are bigger than the palm of one's hand; so the reader can amuse himself, if he wishes, in trying to calculate the number of pieces in one of the huge windows of this date in the Cathedral of Canterbury, York, or Chartres, and the labour involved in this, the initial stage of the process.

When the window is finished these pieces are put together like a puzzle and joined by grooved strips of lead soldered at the joints, just as any "lattice" window is put together (and until gla.s.s was made in large pieces this was the only way of filling a window); but before this is done the details of the design--features, folds of drapery, patterns, and so on--are painted on the gla.s.s in an opaque brownish enamel made of oxide of iron and other metals ground up with a "soft"

gla.s.s (_i.e._ gla.s.s with a low melting-point). This is mixed with oil or gum and water in order to apply it, and then the gla.s.s is placed in a kiln and "fired" till the enamel is fused on and, if well fired, becomes part of the gla.s.s itself. This is the only "painting" involved in the production of a stained-gla.s.s window, and its effect, in the hand of an artist, besides enabling him to express more than could be done merely with gla.s.s and lead, is to decorate and enrich what would otherwise be somewhat crude and papery in effect.

[Sidenote: The two parts of the process.]

The process thus consists of two parts. The cutting and putting together of the gla.s.s is called _glazing_, and it is this that gives the window colour; while the enamel work is spoken of as _painting_, and gives detail, richness, and texture.

I shall presently show that the glazing and painting are really two separate crafts, having separate origins and development, and that stained gla.s.s as we know it, or as it should be called in strict accuracy "stained-and-painted" gla.s.s, is the product of their union.

There is another method, far inferior in the beauty of its results, by which pictures can be produced in gla.s.s, which is to paint on white gla.s.s with transparent coloured enamels. As, however, this method was not used till the seventeenth century, and is now once more almost wholly abandoned, it does not concern us here.

The softness of lead which makes it the only practicable metal for joining pieces of gla.s.s of complicated shapes, has the disadvantage that a stained-gla.s.s window when leaded up has a considerable degree of flexibility, and, if held by the edges alone, would be quite unable to resist the pressure of the wind, which on a big window is enormous,--think of the power even of a fresh breeze on a boat's sail.

[Sidenote: The iron-work.]

It would not even be able to support its own weight for long, and so it follows that it must be held up by a system of short metal bars fixed firmly into the stone-work. Naturally the design of the window must be so arranged that these bars either do not interfere with it or form an integral part of it. In early windows, especially those of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and even to some extent in those of the fourteenth, the bars are sufficiently important to form the governing factor in the design.

It must not be thought that stained gla.s.s loses in beauty by the presence of these black lines of lead and iron. On the contrary it gains enormously. Large pieces of unrelieved colour in windows are thin in effect and trying to the eye, which needs the continual contrast of the solid black of the lead all over the window to enable it to appreciate the colour and brilliance of the gla.s.s. The painting when rightly used is directed to the same end, for it may be said that the smaller and more divided the s.p.a.ces of clear gla.s.s, the more brilliant and jewel-like is the effect.

[Sidenote: Silver stain.]

To the rule that a separate piece of gla.s.s must be used for every change of colour, there are, in later work, two exceptions. The most important, which was discovered early in the fourteenth century, is the use of silver stain. It was then found that if white gla.s.s is painted with a preparation of silver--either oxide or chloride of silver will do--and then "fired" in the kiln used for the enamel painting, it will be stained a clear and indelible yellow, varying from pale lemon to deep orange, according to the strength of the painting.

[Sidenote: Abrasion.]

The other exception was Abrasion, effected by the use of what is called "flashed" gla.s.s. Flashed gla.s.s is gla.s.s so made that instead of being coloured all through, it consists of a thin film or "flash" of colour on a backing of white. With this gla.s.s it is possible to chip with a burin, or grind away, the coloured film in places (we do it now with hydrofluoric acid) so as to get white and colour on the same piece of gla.s.s.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE II PART OF CRUCIFIXION WINDOW, POITIERS Late Twelfth Century]

In the Middle Ages only red and certain shades of blue were made in this way, so the use of the process was very much restricted. The invention of silver stain, on the other hand, by enabling the artist to decorate his white gla.s.s and make it interesting, led him at once to use a larger quant.i.ty of white in his window, and so, as will be seen later, had a considerable influence on design.

These, however, are the exceptions which prove the rule, and, broadly speaking, a stained-gla.s.s window must consist, to the eye, of flat patches of colour, large or small, worked on with dark monochromatic line work and shading. These patches of colour must each be separated from the next by a black line--the leading--varying from a quarter to half an inch in thickness, and crossed at intervals by still thicker black lines--the iron bars.

[Sidenote: Limitations of the art.]

It follows from this that anything like illusion is impossible in stained gla.s.s, and no artist with any sympathy for the medium would attempt it. Unwise persons in decadent times have wasted much ingenuity in the endeavour, but the result has always been disastrous and ridiculous. Apart from its higher mission,--the expression of ideas and emotions,--which it shares with every other branch of art, the mission of stained gla.s.s is to beautify buildings and nothing else. It is the handmaid of architecture, and can only justify itself by loyal service of its mistress. The ideal of the stained-gla.s.s artist must not be a picture made transparent, but a window made beautiful.

Let no one suppose, however, that the artist is hampered by these limitations on the higher side of his work. On the contrary, they set him free to tell his story his own way. Ruskin--poor Ruskin, out of date, ridiculed, forgotten--pointed out long ago, in writing of Giotto's frescoes, the advantage which the pure colourist has over the chiaroscurist in his power of telling a story. In our times the fact has been rediscovered with a flourish of trumpets by the Post-Impressionists. I have no great enthusiasm, I confess, for the way in which they have carried out their principles, but I do know two perfect tellings of the story of the Creation. One is in mosaic on the ceiling of the narthex of St. Mark's at Venice, and the other is in the upper part of the east window of York Minster; and in each case the language used consists of flat forms and colour only.

II

THE BEGINNINGS OF STAINED GLa.s.s

I have said that stained-gla.s.s work is the product of the union of two crafts, the glazier's and the enameller's. The glazier's work being the groundwork of a window, I will take it first.

[Sidenote: Gla.s.s-making.]

What, to begin with, is gla.s.s? It is sand melted and run together. The best sand for the purpose is that which is most largely composed of the substance called silica, such as sand formed of powdered quartz, or flint. For some reason, the silica when melted does not recrystallize on cooling as might have been expected, but forms an even transparent substance, plastic while still hot. Think of the tremendous effect this one natural fact has had on the architecture, dress, and, probably, the physique of the nations of northern Europe.

Given sufficient heat, gla.s.s can be made by this means alone, but the heat required is so great that it has only been done in recent years for special purposes by means of the electric furnace. Failing this, the sand must be induced to melt at a lower temperature by means of a flux, for which either potash or soda may be used, and to which lime or lead must be added, to enable the gla.s.s to resist moisture.