Stained Glass of the Middle Ages in England and France Part 12

As at Merton, small coloured panels containing figures under low canopies are made to decorate long lights of grisaille. For the most part, as at Merton, the figures consist of donors in the outer lights, kneeling to their patron saints in the inner ones, though occasionally one finds subjects, such as the part of a Life of St.

Martin in one of the northern chapels. One of the chapels in the apse is remarkable for the charming use of heraldry in the border. The windows contain figures of the Count of Evreux kneeling to the Virgin.

His arms are the lilies of France with a bend "componee" of argent and gules, and the fleur-de-lis and the bend are repeated alternately all the way up the border, on a ground of blue, with delightful effect.

Later than these is the Harcourt window, the earliest apparently of those in the clerestory, which must date from between 1310 and 1327, though I am inclined to think it is nearer the later date. Here again one has the arrangement, so characteristic of the fourteenth century, of kneeling donors in the outer lights and their patron saints in the inner,--the first idea in nearly every fourteenth century window is the safety of the donor's soul,--but here the coloured panels are placed at the very bottom of the window, with grisaille above, an arrangement which one finds again in later work at Rouen. It has the advantage of bringing the figures nearer the eye, but as a design it is hardly happy.

[Sidenote: St. Ouen at Rouen.]

The fine church of St. Ouen at Rouen is very rich in fourteenth century gla.s.s of the first half of the century. The oldest, perhaps, is in the clerestory windows, which afford another example of the practice found, I think, earlier in France than in England, of placing figures directly on a background of quarries (Plate XXIV.). From the small amount of stain used I do not think they are likely to be later than 1330, though the queer little pedestal with its ogival arch does not look a very early feature.

Rather later than these are the immense windows in the choir aisles, of which Plate XXV. is an example. In comparing them to those in York Minster, they seem to me to come, in point of development, between the aisle windows of the nave and the west windows, but are far better than the latter; yet, although there is hardly a detail in them which cannot be found in an earlier form at Merton College or York, they have, nevertheless, a character all their own, a hint of growing divergence between the two schools. The subject of this particular window is the Life of St. Gervais, but it is such an unimportant detail in the design as to be hardly worth mentioning, the real interest of the windows being their planning and ornament. They are planned on precisely the same system as the windows in Merton College chapel, in the choir chapels at Evreux, and the aisles of York nave, but the canopies are more highly developed, the quarries are "true"

quarries, and stain is much more freely used. Plates XXVI.-x.x.x. show, in detail, the use that has been made of it in the grisaille borders and bosses of this window. Even the canopies that are all yellow are, I fancy, coloured with stain; but the artist has been alive to the danger of too much yellow in the window, and has made every other canopy white, merely touched with stain, a form which in time was to supersede the other altogether. If you compare the little figure from one of these canopies in Plate x.x.x. with the little border figures from Peter de Dene's window at York, you will see how the work is beginning to lose the mosaic character it had inherited from the previous centuries. The grisaille patterns, as well as the borders, show descent from, or at least common origin with, those of York and Merton--you can find that central stem with a wavy line on it in both; but there is a subtle difference in the Rouen work--a little more grace, and more care that the foliage shall not only decorate the whole s.p.a.ce of white, but form a symmetrical pattern on each individual quarry, a tendency which, however, may also be found in English work towards the end of the century.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE x.x.xV CANOPY, FROM ALL SAINTS', NORTH STREET, YORK Fifteenth Century]

Of later fourteenth century work there is not very much in France. The country was devastated by war, and there can have been little money or heart left for painted windows. Whichever side of the channel the style of the early fourteenth century originated, it is quite certain that the next great movement came from England.

FOOTNOTE:

[15] Lasteyrie would have it that the existing windows represent this glazing,--an extraordinary mistake for him to make,--but it is just possible that they contain figures from the older windows.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE x.x.xVI NICHOLAS BLACKBURN AND HIS WIFE, FROM EAST WINDOW OF ALL SAINTS', NORTH STREET, YORK Fifteenth Century]

XII

LATE FOURTEENTH CENTURY GLa.s.s IN ENGLAND

(TRANSITIONAL--GLOUCESTER AND THE WORK OF THE WINCHESTER SCHOOL)

An interesting thing about the design of stained gla.s.s in the fourteenth century is that it never stands still, but changes more rapidly than at any other period in its history. At Gloucester, not more than from ten to twenty years after the latest of the windows I have been describing, the great east window of the Cathedral was filled with gla.s.s, which already faintly foreshadows the change into the style of the succeeding period.

The Severn valley is rich in gla.s.s of the fourteenth century, the work of a school which may have had its headquarters at Gloucester, where, in later times, at all events, there were important gla.s.s-works, which may still be seen in seventeenth century views of the city.

The fourteenth century gla.s.s at Shrewsbury, Tewkesbury, and Wells is all of this school, and differs in many little ways from the work at York, among which are the frequency of the ogival arch and gable in the canopies, and, at Wells, the presence of foliated brackets which support the figures. Whether the work in Bristol Cathedral also belongs to it I am not quite prepared to say.

[Sidenote: The east window of Gloucester Cathedral.]

I have no s.p.a.ce, however, to describe these windows, and must return to the east window of Gloucester Cathedral which is later in style than any of them. Winston, who has given it the same careful study that he had devoted to the Peter de Dene window at York, points out that the coats of arms in it are all those of n.o.bles who took part in the Campaign of Crecy in 1346 and deduces that the date of the window is not later than 1350, whereas Westlake thinks it cannot be earlier than 1360. In either case it is remarkable. To begin with, the tracery of this immense window, the second largest in England, is pure Perpendicular, and the earliest important example of it. The gla.s.s, on the other hand, in its architectural detail, style of drawing, and material used, belongs almost wholly to the Second or Decorated Period, and it is mainly in its planning and general colour scheme that we find a hint of approaching change. The perpendicular mullions and horizontal transoms divide the great window, which is slightly bowed outwards to give its strength, into a series of horizontal rows of narrow lights one above the other, fourteen lights in a row, each light being about two feet wide and from six to nine feet high. The lower tiers (and originally this was true of the tracery as well) are filled with quarries, and the upper one of these, the first that extends all across the window,--for the entrance to the Lady Chapel makes a gap below it,--is decorated with the splendid row of coats of arms already mentioned. Above this each light, row upon row, contains a figure under a canopy, the side shafts of which extend into the light above and support the canopy there, while the central pinnacle also extends upwards past the transom and expands into a flat-topped pedestal which carries the figure above. Figure and canopy are white, their whiteness only emphasised by touches of yellow stain, and relieved against a coloured background. The background of the two central columns of lights is ruby, that of the column on each side blue, and the next ruby again and so on alternately. Thus the general effect is of a white pattern on a background that is striped vertically with alternate red and blue. It is this simple but effective colour scheme that gives the window its resemblance in effect to Perpendicular gla.s.s; but there are other features--the complete absence of borders, the pedestals that carry the figures (which are first found at Wells), and the decoration of the quarries--which all indicate the coming change. The quarries, where the original ones remain, still have the "trellis" pattern, but instead of the continuous flowing pattern of foliage running through them each quarry has a sort of star pattern in the middle of it, stained yellow, a design much more common in the fifteenth than in the fourteenth century. This placing of quarries at the foot of the windows and in the tracery has its origin, of course, in the old fourteenth century arrangement of a horizontal stripe or stripes of figure and canopy work on a ground of grisaille.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE x.x.xVII PRIEST, FROM "ACTS OF MERCY" WINDOW, ALL SAINTS', NORTH STREET, YORK Fifteenth Century]

The subject of the window is the enthronement of the virgin surrounded by apostles, saints, and angels; the same subject as that of the west window of York Minster which it was probably meant to, and certainly does, surpa.s.s. The figures themselves, however, still suffer from the conventionality and affectation of the period, and it was not for twenty years more that there was to be a change in that quarter as well.

[Sidenote: William of Wykeham and Thomas the Glazier.]

It was in 1380, or soon after, that new life came into the art through the piety and enterprise of William of Wykeham, whose influence may be compared to that of Abbot Suger in the twelfth century, and the genius of his master glazier, Thomas. Of the latter we only know his name from the portrait of himself which he put in the windows of Winchester College Chapel (now, alas! only modern copies of the originals), with the inscription "Thomas operator ist. vitri," but his hand is easily recognizable not only at Winchester, and in the three original lights from thence now in South Kensington Museum, but in the glorious set of windows in the antechapel of New College at Oxford.

[Sidenote: New College antechapel.]

There had been no such work as this last done since the best days of the thirteenth century. Here, once again, one finds the art used as a means of emotional expression not only in the deep and solemn harmonies of colour that strike one with a thrill on entering the building, but in the treatment of the subjects themselves, in which the artist breaks completely away from the conventionalism of the preceding period.

The antechapel of New College, a graceful piece of Early Perpendicular, is really, like that at Merton, a cross transept at the west end of the Chapel, forming a =T= of which the antechapel is the head, having windows on all its four sides--two on the east, on either side of the entrance to the Chapel proper, two on the north, one on the south, and three on the west. The gla.s.s of the great central west window was taken out to make room for Jervais' smudgy rendering in muddy browns and yellows of Sir Joshua Reynolds' famous Virtues. I am not concerned with this but with the other windows, which contain, though some of the lights are evidently out of their order, the original glazing which William of Wykeham placed here when he built the Chapel, between 1380 and 1386.

[Sidenote: The canopies.]

The design of the windows is a very simple one. The horizontal transom divides each window into two equal tiers of four, or, in the eastern windows, six, lights with tracery above. Each light is filled with a figure standing on a pedestal and under a canopy, both canopy and pedestal being white, enriched with touches of yellow stain, relieved against a background which is, or was, blue and red in alternate lights, the colour of the background inside the canopy being counterchanged with the colour outside. From this arrangement and from the presence of the pedestal I think the artist had seen both Wells and the east windows of Gloucester Cathedral, but the architecture of his canopies is of a fantastic kind peculiar to this school and unlike anything in gla.s.s of the styles which preceded and followed it, but based to some extent on the stone canopies of the late fourteenth century, such as those on the screen of the west front of Exeter Cathedral. The most noticeable feature in them is the number of queer rounded turrets with pepper-box tops, modelled in relief. Indeed for their solidity, as well as for their violent and untrue perspective, these canopies have more in common with those introduced at Fairford a hundred years later, when the continental influence was coming in, than with the typical canopy of English Perpendicular.

From the large amount of s.p.a.ce that is occupied by the canopy work, the general effect of these windows is rather a white one (though white in all old work is a relative term, the white in this case consisting really of a delicate play of greenish, yellowish, and pure white continually contrasted), and the most beautiful to my mind are those in which, as in the windows on the north side which face one on entering, the figures themselves are almost entirely covered with a coloured mantle which makes a broad splash of distinctive colour in the middle of each light.

[Sidenote: The eastern windows.]

Although all the windows conform to the same general design, those on the east side, on each side of the entrance to the Chapel proper, seem to me to be by a different hand, and were probably done first. They contain or contained originally no colours but red and blue, and the drawing of the figures has much of the conventionalism of the earlier fourteenth century work. The upper tier consists of the twelve apostles, and the lower is believed to have contained the figure of the crucified Christ with His mother and St. John on either side, repeated four times. The figures of Christ have all been destroyed and replaced by figures from elsewhere, perhaps from the destroyed west window; but three figures of the Virgin and three of St. John remain, though it was only in 1900 that they were replaced in what I have little doubt were their original positions. It may, of course, be that these windows are by the same artist as the others, but done before he had quite found himself or emanc.i.p.ated himself from the conventionalities of his predecessors, for he has infused a certain amount of life into the old forms; and the "Mater Dolorosa," in spite of her conventional S-like pose, is a tender and pathetic figure.

[Sidenote: The colouring.]

There is, however, no trace of this conventionality in the other windows, quaint though the drawing may be, and in the colour of them the artist has fairly "let himself go." I know of no better piece of "colour music" in the world than is afforded by the double tier of prophets and patriarchs which occupy the two northern windows which face one on entering--deep rich purple of many shades, warm green, slaty-blue, brown, and a splendid blood-red ruby with a great deal of variety in it; the changes are rung on these in the mantles, hats, and shoes of the figures, while the reds and blues of the backgrounds form a connecting link between them all. A pretty detail is the powdering of the backgrounds to the figures in all the windows with the initials of the personage represented, in white Lombardic letters surmounted by little gold crowns. The drawing is, I admit, quaint,--Thomas was not a great draughtsman even for his time; far from it,--but it is always big, masculine, and expressive, with a strong feeling for decorative line. To copy the scrolls which twist and flutter round the prophets in the upper tier is in itself a lesson in design.

[Sidenote: Eve.]

Perhaps nowhere is his originality of conception so well shown as in the figure of Eve, in the northern west window. Instead of representing her, as nearly every other artist has done to the best of his ability, as a graceful nude, he has given us a peasant woman of his own time, spinning with a distaff and spindle. I do not know that he has even tried to make her pretty, and in the simple drawing of the folds of her colourless dress he has managed to suggest that it is of coa.r.s.e thick stuff. She is neither nymph nor princess but the sharer of man's daily drudgery. In looking at her one is unavoidably reminded of the lines which Wat Tyler's followers had sung only a year or two before:--

When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?

The little upright tracery lights are filled with angels, but in the summit of the northern east window is a small figure of William of Wykeham kneeling before his Saviour, who shows His wounds. This and the mutilated inscription at the base of each light, "Orate pro Willelmo de Wykeham, Episcopo Wynton, fundatore istius collegii," is all there is to tell of the donor. There was a new spirit abroad; no longer were the portrait and arms of the patron allowed to usurp half, or, as at Tewkesbury, the whole of a church window, nor in England, at all events till the end of the fifteenth century, was the practice again revived to quite the same extent.

These windows mark the second of the great periodic impulses in stained gla.s.s, which I spoke of at the beginning of the book. Only the second, I consider, for though there had been many changes in style since the twelfth century, each had meant, on the whole, a loss of beauty rather than a gain, whereas now we find a sudden infusion of new life into the art, which did not in England lose its force for fifty or sixty years to come, and produced a new style, the style of the Third Period. To me these windows are one of the great art treasures of the world, yet as I lately sat there all through a long spring afternoon, party after party of visitors, many of them people educated enough, one would think, to know better, came in to gaze awe-struck at Sir Joshua's muddy brown Virtues, and left without a glance at the glorious colour harmonies which surrounded them.

[Sidenote: Winchester College.]

Of other work of Thomas the Glazier and his school--the Winchester school, as Mr. Westlake calls it--little but fragments remain, unless one counts a window in the south aisle of the Lady Chapel of York Minster, the third from the east, which somewhat resembles their work and represents just about the same stage in development. William of Wykeham's next great work was the founding of Winchester College in 1387, and in what remains of its gla.s.s the hand of Thomas can be clearly seen. But, alas! in the early nineteenth century they took out the old gla.s.s and subst.i.tuted modern copies; it was their method of restoration in those days. The old gla.s.s seems to have been the perquisite of the glazier, and three of the lights, after various peregrinations,--spending eight years in a window of St. Mary's, Shrewsbury,--have found their way to South Kensington Museum where they may still be seen. In style they are very like the north, west, and south windows at New College, and quite obviously by the same hand, though perhaps the canopies, at least in one case, show a very slight progress towards the regular Perpendicular type. The material seems to me much the same as at New College, but for some reason the coloured gla.s.s is much more pitted by the weather and consequently obscured, though the white, perhaps from a different shop, is in splendid preservation.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE x.x.xVIII KNEELING DONORS, FROM "ACTS OF MERCY" WINDOW, ALL SAINTS', NORTH STREET, YORK Fifteenth Century]

[Sidenote: Winchester Cathedral.]

The great west window of Winchester Cathedral contains fragments and a few whole figures of very similar work, and there are others in the side windows of the nave. William of Wykeham's will, made in 1403, leaves money for the glazing of the Cathedral windows "beginning from the west at the first window of the new work done by him," which sounds as if the west end had been already glazed. Indeed the fragments there are more like the eastern windows (the earliest, if I am right) in New College antechapel, while in the fragments that remain in the side windows of the nave the later hand can be traced, though the tendency in the canopies of these is to a.s.similate gradually to the regular Perpendicular type which by this time had been developed elsewhere.

Winston thinks the west window of the Cathedral may have been glazed in the time of William of Wykeham's predecessor, Bishop Edington, in which case it is not unlikely that it and the east windows of the antechapel at New College were the work of Thomas's master, whose style was further developed and improved by Thomas himself.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE x.x.xIX FIGURE, FROM "VISITING THE PRISONERS," IN "ACTS OF MERCY" WINDOW, ALL SAINTS', NORTH STREET, YORK Fifteenth Century]

XIII