Stained Glass of the Middle Ages in England and France Part 15

[Sidenote: St. Ouen at Rouen.]

The fifteenth century windows at Rouen follow, for the most part, the general design of the fourteenth century windows in the same churches.

Thus the window in the chapel of SS. Peter and Paul in St. Ouen, which Mr. Westlake thinks to be the work of Guillaume Barbe, 1459-85, has much the same arrangement and proportions as the S. Gervais window in the south choir aisle shown in Plate XXV.; that is to say, a small figure panel, under a big canopy, is set half-way up each tall light of which the top and bottom is filled with quarries. There is the same coloured background to the canopy, ending at the top in the same arched shape, but in the treatment of the canopy itself one finds a difference not only from fourteenth century work but from English work of the fifteenth century. The French canopy, as I have said, had never, like the English, been reduced to an almost flat pattern of intricate line work, and in these Rouen windows one finds the artist already trying to imitate stone-work modelled in relief with results that are heavy and unsatisfactory. It is not that, in English work, individual shafts are not given a light and dark side, but the canopy is not, as in French work, modelled as a solid whole, and the strong line work seems to keep it right.

[Sidenote: The revival.]

It was not, however, till the second half of the century that any new life came into French stained-gla.s.s work, and when it came it brought with it a skill in picture-making that was borrowed from contemporary painting. To this period belong, I think, the fragments from Rouen shown in Plates XLV. to XLIX. The heads of St. Catherine and the old man, if compared with those from York, show the strong difference in facial type between French and English work at this time. The stain on the hair of St. Catherine is very coa.r.s.e and inartistic as compared with English work, but then no other nation ever equalled the English in their delicate and refined use of stain.

[Sidenote: St. Maclou.]

The two heads of Angels (Plates XLVIII., XLIX.), which are from the north transept of St. Ouen, are, I think, by the same hand as an interesting "a.s.sumption of the Virgin," which now occupies two lights of a window in the north aisle of St. Maclou in the same city. A significant point about this gla.s.s is that the picture, which is enclosed by a wide, flat-arched canopy, delicately modelled, stretches right across both lights, completely ignoring the intervening mullion, one of the first hints that stained gla.s.s was forgetting its architectural mission.[18] The composition is much more ambitious and pictorial, and the drawing more advanced than in any of the gla.s.s we have hitherto considered. In front is a crowd of kneeling saints in robes of blue, red, and green, above whom the Virgin kneels before the Almighty, while the top of the picture is filled with rows of golden-haired angels with red wings on a blue ground, of a similar type to those ill.u.s.trated. I should put the date of the window at about 1470-80.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE XLVIII ANGEL'S HEAD, FROM GREAT ROSE WINDOW IN NORTH TRANSEPT OF ST. OUEN'S, ROUEN Fifteenth Century]

[Sidenote: The Lady Chapel at Evreux.]

Of about the same date are the side windows of the Lady Chapel of the Cathedral at Evreux, of which the building was finished, I believe, in 1475. I am surprised that Mr. Westlake, in his notice of the chapel, only mentions the east window with its Jesse tree, which to me is much less beautiful than the others, and which I should be inclined to attribute, at the earliest, to the very end of the century, if not to the following one. The four side windows tell the story of Christ's Ministry, Pa.s.sion, and Resurrection, and show His second coming. Their arrangement is somewhat English, each window having two tiers of lights, each of which has a subject enclosed in a white canopy, but the technique is different from the English. By far the best is the first window of the series, which contains eight scenes from the Ministry of Christ, from the Marriage in Cana to the Entry into Jerusalem. The canopy work with its little figures in niches is modelled as Van Eyck might have done it; the method would not tell well at a distance, but owing to the narrowness of the chapel one cannot get far away from these windows. The figure panels are very rich in colour, Christ being always dressed in a deep purple, and the other figures in rich greens, blues, and reds. The other windows of the series are not quite so good, being thinner and poorer in effect, and seem to me to have been executed by another hand, possibly from the designs of the author of the first window, who may have died in the interval. There is a good deal of similar work in the church of St. Taurin in the same town.

From the pictorial point of view these windows are much more accomplished than anything that had so far been done in England. In comparing English and French fifteenth century work, however, it must always be remembered that the best English work was done during the first half of the century, and is far better than the French work of that time, whereas the best French work was done in the second half of the century when the English Perpendicular style had for the most part become stereotyped and dull, and seemed to resist the introduction of new ideas. These Evreux windows represent the style which, under the influence of contemporary picture-painting, was growing up on the Continent, but which did not obtain a foothold in England till the advent, almost at the end of the century, of the school which produced the Fairford windows.

FOOTNOTE:

[18] It is true that the gla.s.s is not now in its original position, but I think it must always have filled two lights.

XVI

MALVERN AND FAIRFORD

So great was the quant.i.ty of stained gla.s.s produced in England in the fifteenth century, and so much still remains, that it is impossible, in this book, even to mention all the more important examples. We have seen the growth and perfection of the Perpendicular style at York. At Great Malvern Priory you may study its gradual decadence.

[Sidenote: Great Malvern: the "Creation."]

The best of the windows there are undoubtedly the earliest, namely, those in St. Anne's Chapel which include the famous "Creation," of which the date is perhaps 1440-50. It cannot, I think, compare with John Thornton's "Creation" in the east window of York Minster,--the colour scheme is so much more conventional and less expressive,--but it is nevertheless very beautiful. The resemblance of some of the scenes to those in Thornton's window is perhaps no more than one would expect to find in two representations of the same subject in the same period, but at the same time the Malvern "Creation" is very much akin to York work, though rather to the later phase represented by the St. Cuthbert and the All Saints' windows, than to the work of Thornton. I may be wrong, but I sometimes suspect that the inhabitants of the Severn and Avon valleys had more intercourse with the North of England--to which access would be easy by the Avon and Trent, navigable most of the way--than with the Thames Valley and South of England, from which they were cut off by the wild and inhospitable Cotswolds.

[Sidenote: The north transept window.]

In comparing the later windows in Malvern Priory with the "Creation"

and its neighbours in St. Anne's Chapel, one can trace a decided and increasing decadence. The forms are the same but stereotyped and dull, the artists seem timid in their use of colour, and all the life seems to go out of the style. The great north transept window, given in 1501-2 by Henry VII. (it once contained his portrait and still has that of his son Prince Arthur and the architect, Sir Reginald Bray), is, compared with the earlier work, a very poor affair. The yellow stain in particular is very coa.r.s.e and overdone, yet such was the hold which this style had got on our countrymen that in spite of the late date of the window there is not a hint in it of the new ideas which were then coming in, although it is probable that before it was finished, the famous windows of Fairford, not forty miles away across the Cotswolds, had at least been begun.

[Sidenote: Fairford.]

The old church of Fairford with its square central tower, standing on a green slope above a rushing trout stream, which, a few miles below, unites with the baby Thames and makes it a navigable river, occupies a unique position, not merely as the only village church in England--one may, perhaps, say in the world--which still retains the whole of its original set of stained-gla.s.s windows almost intact, but from the quality of the windows themselves. Some, it is true, have suffered damage, but there is not a subject unrecognizable, nor a window missing.

[Sidenote: The new style.]

The church was begun by John Tame, merchant of London, and finished by his son, Sir Edward; but since John Tame's will, dated 1496, while bequeathing various sums for ornaments to the church, makes no mention of the gla.s.s, it is argued that the gla.s.s had been already ordered.

The Fairford windows are usually cla.s.sed as Perpendicular on the strength of their a.s.sociation with Perpendicular architecture and the presence of Perpendicular detail in the canopies and elsewhere, but it is a wholly different style to the Perpendicular of York, of Malvern, of Warwick; the style which, with little change, had held the field in England since the beginning of the century. Fairford, in fact, marks a revolution in English stained gla.s.s. It is an early, if not the first work of a new school which, throwing away the old native tradition, based its style on that which had grown up on the Continent and, still more, upon Flemish painting. The Fairford windows represent a phase of their art which did not last very long, for their style soon began to a.s.similate itself to that of the Renaissance. In the windows of King's College Chapel at Cambridge you may see the change happening, and in the latest windows there you may also, alas! see the rapid setting in of decadence. It was, indeed, a style which contained in itself the seeds of decay, which germinated all too rapidly; but these, its first-fruits, at Fairford are magnificent, and disarm criticism.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE XLIX ANGEL'S HEAD, FROM GREAT ROSE WINDOW IN NORTH TRANSEPT OF ST.

OUEN'S, ROUEN Fifteenth Century]

They mark, as I say, a complete departure from the older standards of English fifteenth century gla.s.s. It is the same story, once more repeated, of old conventions of drawing becoming out of date, and failing to satisfy a newer generation. Of the more advanced schools of painting, the Flemish was the one that Englishmen were most in touch with, and it was thence that the new school of English gla.s.s-workers took their inspiration, with the result that a Flemish feeling is traceable in all their work. One immediate result of the more pictorial standard now expected of the artist was that he came to depend in quite a different way on the painting of his gla.s.s as distinct from the glazing. At Fairford, elaborate landscape backgrounds are put in with the brown enamel alone, helped by yellow stain, sometimes on white, sometimes on grey-blue gla.s.s, to which latter the stain gives a green for gra.s.s and trees. Not as yet, however, does the painting take precedence of the glazing, the balance being for a time held equal between the two. Indeed the craft of glazing, as well as that of painting, was now at its height; the artist had all the resources of both at his command and used them to the full, but as yet the limits of the medium were not overstepped.

Another result of the pictorial standard now arrived at, was that the artist began to feel cramped by the narrow lights he had to fill, and to let his subjects spread through more than one of them, ignoring the intervening mullion. At Fairford many of the subjects occupy two lights, and the "Crucifixion" at the east end and the "Doom" at the west spread right across the whole width of the window. As yet this is not so done that one loses the sense of the design decorating the stone-work; but both these developments are indications of a tendency which was to increase as time went on, and eventually to ruin the art.

The new point of view naturally affected the canopy, which is shaded like solid stone-work, giving it a heavy and clumsy effect. In many of the subject windows, however, the canopy is omitted altogether, the sky of the picture, which is sometimes white, with clouds and circling swifts painted on it, continuing right up to the stone-work.

[Sidenote: The problem of the authorship of the windows.]

I agree with Mr. Westlake in finding the work of more than one hand in the windows. Two there are certainly, and possibly four. The east window is certainly by a different, and, I think, an older hand than the west, and the windows of the north aisle, though they may be by the same hand as the west windows, are certainly by a different one to the Apostles opposite them, which are the poorest windows in the church. I think the differences are greater than could be accounted for by any development that might take place in the same man's style during the execution of the windows. The west windows are the work of a different temperament to the east windows. The forms are fuller, stronger, and more rounded, and show a much stronger sense for the decorative placing of a line.

There is no record to tell us who these men were, and there has been much discussion as to whether they were Englishmen or Flemings. Indeed the wildest theories have been advanced as to the origin of the windows. They have been attributed to Durer, without the slightest internal or external evidence except the presence of an A which does not resemble his signature. Another story which, though not heard of, I believe, till the eighteenth century, has obtained wide credence, is that they were captured at sea, bound for Rome, by Edward Tame, and the church built to contain them; but the most casual examination of the windows ought to convince any one that they were made for the church and not the church for them.[19]

As to the question of the English or Flemish authorship of the windows, it is true that Flemish details crop up here and there both in architecture and the costumes; but this is not surprising, for the style, new then to England, was largely based on Flemish art, and on the other hand the English characteristics are in excess of the Flemish.

[Sidenote: Barnard Flower.]

In Henry VII.'s Chapel at Westminster, high up in the central clerestory window of the apse, is a single figure under a canopy which bears a most striking resemblance to the series of the Prophets at Fairford (Plate L.). In the figure, in the scroll he holds, in the canopy, in the treatment of the drapery, and even in the queer drawing of the hands, the resemblance is so close that I for one cannot doubt their common authorship. Now it is on record that the windows of Henry VII.'s Chapel were glazed by "one Barnard Flower," the king's glazier, who also is the glazier named in the first contract for the windows in King's College Chapel at Cambridge, but who died in 1525-26 before they were finished. A comparison of those windows at Cambridge which are believed to be his work, especially that over the north door, with the Fairford windows, reveals many points of resemblance, and, allowing for the twenty years which probably separate the execution of the two works, I think we should not be far wrong in a.s.signing to Flower the whole of the north aisle at Fairford, and perhaps the Latin Fathers in the south aisle. Whether the west windows are his work too I do not feel sure, and to the names of the other artists who took part in the work we have no clue.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE L THE PROPHETS JOEL, ZEPHANIAH, AMOS, AND HOSEA, FROM THE NORTH AISLE OF THE NAVE, FAIRFORD Late Fifteenth Century]

[Sidenote: The general scheme.]

[Sidenote: The "Doom."]

Yet though one may thus trace various hands in the work, the windows form a connected whole, the planning of which must have been the work of one mind. The arrangement is the traditional one whereby the whole church forms an exposition of the foundations of the Christian faith.

The windows of the nave contain single figures, the Prophets on the north side (Plate L.) facing the Apostles on the south. Each Apostle holds a verse of the creed, and the Prophet opposite him a corresponding verse from his writings. The four Evangelists face the four Latin Fathers. Farther east, within the now vanished screen, the windows unfold the Gospel story, those on the north leading up to the Pa.s.sion in the east window, those on the south showing the Descent into h.e.l.l, the Resurrection, and the events that followed. Then, as the spectator turns to the west, there faces him, in the great west window, the tremendous "Doom" or Last Judgment. Do not look at the upper half where Christ sits enthroned as Judge, surrounded by saints and angels; it has suffered the fate of the Winchester College gla.s.s.

Blown in by a storm in 1703, it was "restored" in the middle of the nineteenth century, which means that the old gla.s.s was removed and a bad copy subst.i.tuted. Where the blue ring of Heaven pa.s.ses through the tracery lights the original gla.s.s remains, and the difference between it and the new is an object lesson in good and bad stained-gla.s.s work.

But below the transom the window is still unspoilt. In the midst stands Michael with sword and scales, and below him the dead are rising naked from their graves. Michael himself, it must be confessed, is a somewhat lackadaisical figure; it was not possible for an artist of that time and school to give a figure the arresting quality of the Methuselah in Plate III.; neither does one's eye linger long over the Saved, who troop up the golden stairs on Michael's right, but is irresistibly attracted to the other side of the picture, where in a great glow of ruby gla.s.s are seen the Flames of h.e.l.l, to which devils--grey and blue at the outer edge of the fire, but darker and more purple as they are farther in--are carrying the wretched souls of the Lost. Just outside the flames an angel and a devil are fighting in mid-air for the possession of a soul, and a comparison of these figures with the similar ones in the Descent into Limbo or "Harrying of h.e.l.l," which is by the same hand as the east window, shows at once the difference between the work of the two men.

[Sidenote: The west windows of the aisles.]

On either side the west windows of the aisles contain, as types of the Last Judgment, on the north, the Judgment of Solomon, which protected the innocent; on the south, that of David on the Amalekite, which condemned the guilty. It seems to me not unlikely that the position of these windows was originally reversed, Solomon's judgment being on the side of the Saved in the "Doom" and David's on that of the Lost. They have both suffered greatly in the storm of 1703 and contain many blank s.p.a.ces, but from what remains they seem to me, together with the "Doom," the most accomplished work in the church.

[Sidenote: The clerestory.]

Very splendid, too, are the Persecutors of the Church, who, clad in all the bravery of wickedness, fill the north side of the clerestory, fronting the somewhat insipid row of Martyrs on the other side. Here is Herod transfixing an Innocent; Nero, if it is he, with the head of St. Paul; the King of the Huns, and Diocletian, perhaps, with bows and arrows; and, in a dark blue robe, Judas, with the halter round his neck and the bag in his hand, between Annas and Caiaphas. In the tracery lights above the Martyrs are rather commonplace white and gold angels, but over the Persecutors are fascinating little figures of devils, grey, blue, and green, on a background of ruby flames. I am afraid there is no question which series the artist enjoyed doing most!

Fairford marks the end of mediaeval stained gla.s.s in England.

Conservative artists might still, as at Malvern and at St. Neots in Cornwall, try to carry on the older tradition, but their works are isolated survivals. The Fairford windows themselves represent, as I have said, a very short-lived phase in English gla.s.s, of which they are the most complete example, others being the fragments in Henry VII.'s Chapel at Westminster and the remains of Bishop Fox's glazing in Winchester Cathedral, now collected into the east clerestory window there. Flower's own work at King's College, Cambridge, twenty years later than Fairford, shows signs of change, and that of his successors in the same building, as at Basingstoke, at Balliol College and elsewhere must be cla.s.sed as wholly of the Renaissance. With Fairford, then, these notes on Stained Gla.s.s of the Middle Ages may fitly end.

FOOTNOTE: