Stained Glass of the Middle Ages in England and France Part 3

[Sidenote: The line work.]

The gla.s.s between the line work is left nearly clear, but not quite; for if quite clear the intensity of the light would have bitten into the edge of the black line and made it appear what engravers call a "rotten" line, or even be invisible altogether at a little distance.

Therefore the painter softened the edges of his line work by one of two methods. The first, described by Theophilus, though I cannot say for certain that it has been used in any gla.s.s I have examined, was to slightly smear the painting when wet with a soft brush. The other, which seems to have been more used, was to edge the dark line work, so to speak, with fainter strokes in semi-transparent half-tone. In work that was meant to be placed near the eye the line work is extraordinarily fine and delicate, while in work that has to be seen from a distance, such as the clerestory windows of a cathedral, we find the whole scale of the execution increased. Lines are there used from half an inch to an inch thick, but in every case the work is equally admirable for its precision and vigour.

[Sidenote: The "Matt."]

In the later periods the half-tone shading became developed into the "matt" or thin coat of enamel laid evenly all over the surface of the gla.s.s, from which, when dry, the lights were brushed out and the line work became more and more delicate. Still, as long as technique remained sound, the strength of shading was really obtained by line work, the matt or half-tone serving its true use in softening the light and making the line work visible.

Renaissance gla.s.s painters, in their efforts to produce the effects of oil painting in gla.s.s, tried to get rid of the effect of irradiation altogether by dulling the whole surface of the gla.s.s, with fatal results to the beauty of the material.

To sum up, although the work of this period may suffer in popular esteem from the drawing being conceived in an archaic convention,--a convention different to our own,--and from having suffered from restoration, the fact remains that at no time did the artist understand better the possibilities and limitations of his art and adopt a sounder technique in regard to them.

FOOTNOTE:

[5] It seems to have been the practice of gla.s.s-workers in the Middle Ages to describe the different colours in gla.s.s by the jewel they most nearly resembled. A survival of this at the present day is their universal habit of calling red gla.s.s "ruby."

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE VI SCROLL-WORK, FROM THE EAST WINDOW, CANTERBURY Twelfth or early Thirteenth Century]

IV

TWELFTH CENTURY GLa.s.s

The few examples I have mentioned are the only ones which can with any probability be dated from the eleventh century, but of twelfth century work much more remains.

[Sidenote: Poitiers.]

The window at Poitiers in Plate II. shows little if any change in style from the Le Mans window in Plate I. It is still almost pure Byzantine, and if I were to judge by style alone I should place this window very early indeed. A fragment of an inscription has, however, been found on it--DITHANC ... BLAS,--which has been thought to mean that the window was the gift of one Maurice de Blason, who became Bishop of Poitiers in 1198. If so, and if we are right in identifying the Le Mans window with Bishop Hoel's glazing, a whole century separates the two.

The probable explanation is that the Byzantine style had lingered on in the south-east of France, as it may well have done, whereas north of the Loire a school had by this time arisen, and had been flourishing for many years, which was producing work both in France and England of a very different and far more advanced character.

[Sidenote: The school of Chartres, St. Denis, and Canterbury.]

The twelfth and early thirteenth century windows at Chartres, St.

Denis, Canterbury and Sens show such resemblance to each other that there can be little doubt of their common origin. As, however, their execution covers a period of at least seventy years, one man cannot have been responsible for them all.

Probably they represent the work of a group of men working together--perhaps never more than half a dozen at one time--under a master who was trained by his predecessor, and who in turn would be succeeded in the leadership by the best of his pupils. Several of these masters in succession must have been men of genius, and thus between them they evolved a style which, carried on by a succession of lesser men, governed design in stained gla.s.s for a century to come.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE VII BORDER, FROM THE TRINITY CHAPEL, CANTERBURY Twelfth or early Thirteenth Century]

The rise of this school is the first of the periodic impulses to which I have referred, and the work they produced was, for its dignity and grandeur, unequalled for two hundred years--if it has ever been equalled at all.

The figure of Methuselah or "Matusale" in Plate III., which is one of the few remaining of the original figures once in the choir clerestory at Canterbury (it is now in the S. Transept), is a good example of their work, and a comparison of it with the Poitiers window (which is actually later in date but in the older style) shows the greatness of the change they effected. The change is, in fact, that from ancient to modern art: from Byzantine, the last lingering survival of the great cla.s.sic tradition of Greece, to Gothic, the first expression of the art of the modern world.

Who were these men and where did they come from? Some would have it that there was a great central school at Chartres, but there is little evidence for it. When Abbot Suger built the great abbey of St. Denis, which was dedicated in 1142, he filled it with gla.s.s, "painted," says his secretary, Monk William, "with exquisite art by many masters of _divers nations_" ("de diversis nationibus"). Does this mean that some of them were English or Germans, or only men from other provinces than the Ile de France? No one can say; but they must have been working together to produce the results they did. One statement of the Monk William's leads me to think that the work was done on the spot. He says the work was very costly, because they "used sapphires to colour their gla.s.s." Now this is an obvious misunderstanding, due to the practice, in those days, of describing coloured gla.s.s by the name of the precious stone it resembled, and such a mistake is most likely to have been made in conversation with the artists themselves.

It is, of course, always possible that they had no permanent headquarters but took up their abode in whatever city their chief work was for the time being, there erected their furnaces, which the description of Theophilus shows to have been simple affairs, and remained there till their work was completed--which must have taken some years in every case--and then moved on to the next work.

Much has been made of the fact that a window in Rouen bears the signature of one Clement of Chartres,--"Clemens vitrearius Carnutensis me fecit,"--but that window is a hundred and forty years later than St. Denis. By that time the whole Cathedral at Chartres had been filled with gla.s.s, a task which extended over thirty years; and Clement may well have learned his trade and pa.s.sed from apprentice to master there. No other artist of the school has signed his name anywhere, nor has Clement anywhere else.

One can tell pretty well the order in which the most important of their work which remains was done. First Chartres and St. Denis,--so near together that one cannot say which came first,--then Canterbury, Sens, and then back to Chartres again, where a fire had destroyed all but the west windows. This, however, probably represents only a small portion of their labours, of which the rest has disappeared. For instance, a few fragments set among later work in York Minster have all the characteristics of this school; and we know that Prior Conrad's choir at Canterbury, which was completed in 1130 and destroyed in 1175, was renowned for the splendour of its gla.s.s, which may have been their work too.

A window at Le Mans, rather later than the one ill.u.s.trated, and which Mr. Westlake thinks may be dated about 1120, shows signs of the new movement. It consists of a series of subjects from the stories of SS.

Gervasius and Protasius, and already shows the arrangement of small medallions of simple shape, surrounded by ornament filling the rectangular openings of the iron-work, though from the fact that some of the medallions seem to have been cut down, they are probably not in their original position. In the drawing of the subjects the artist is breaking away from the Byzantine tradition. The new wine is bursting the old bottles. He is a man in love with life, and when he depicts a group of men stoning a saint he likes to make them really throwing, and to show in their faces, as well as he knows how, that they are thorough ruffians.

Next in antiquity to this window, and some twenty or thirty years later (1142-1150), come the earliest of the windows at Chartres and at St. Denis.

[Sidenote: Chartres.]

In the year A.D. 1134 a terrible fire destroyed the town of Chartres and so damaged the west end of the Cathedral that it had to be pulled down and rebuilt--a work which took some fifteen years to accomplish, while the towers were not finished till twenty years later still. The three windows over the west door were filled with gla.s.s some time between 1145 and 1150.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE VIII BORDER AND MOSAIC DIAPER, FROM THE TRINITY CHAPEL, CANTERBURY Thirteenth Century]

[Sidenote: The west windows.]

In early times churches seem to have been peculiarly liable to destruction by fire, owing perhaps to the number of wooden buildings by which they were surrounded. The early history of every great cathedral is one of successive disastrous conflagrations, after each of which the building rises once more, larger and more splendid. Thus, in 1194, another fire completely destroyed the whole of the Cathedral with the exception of the newly built west end, which included the three windows in question. These escaped damage, protected perhaps by the immense depth of their embrasures, and still remain almost unimpaired to this day, the largest and most perfect windows of their time that have come down to us. In them one feels that the new movement has found itself and produced a great man.

Two of them, the central one, which is the largest, being some 30 feet high and 10 wide, and that on the south, are medallion windows, containing scenes from the life of Christ. The bars of the iron-work, which are about 3 feet apart, divide them into a series of regular squares, which are filled with square and circular medallions; in the central window the figures in the medallions are relieved against alternate backgrounds of ruby and blue. The ruby of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is a wonderful colour. It is never of a perfectly even tint, each piece having, as it were, its own character, and the colour seems to have a slightly granulated or "crumbly" texture, which gives it a quality unknown in later gla.s.s. So beautiful was it evidently considered that the artist seldom or never attempted to enrich it with painting.

[Sidenote: The Jesse tree.]

The third window, that on the north, is filled with a "Tree of Jesse."

The subjects of stained-gla.s.s windows in this First Period were chosen with one object--the exposition of the Christian Doctrine, and of this the human descent of Christ was an essential part. Accordingly, at all periods in the history of mediaeval stained gla.s.s we find windows devoted to the representation of "the Tree of Jesse."

The arrangement is always the same as in this window at Chartres. The figure of Jesse lies rec.u.mbent at the foot of the window, and from his loins rises the "Tree"--a ma.s.s of branching scroll work with conventional foliage, spreading over the whole window, carrying on its branches David and other human ancestors of Christ, and culminating in the Virgin and Christ Himself at the top of the window. On either side are ranged the Prophets who foretold His coming, and the whole, surrounded by a rich border, forms, at Chartres, a ma.s.s of jewelled colour some 9 feet wide and 25 feet high.

This window and the one of which a part, identical in design, remains at St. Denis, are the oldest examples I know of a Jesse tree in stained gla.s.s, and whether or not they were the first to be made, their design formed a model for others for long after.

[Sidenote: La Belle Verriere.]

The remainder of the windows in the Cathedral, including the western rose, are of the thirteenth century with one exception--the one in the south choir aisle, which contains the great figure of the Virgin known as "Notre Dame de la Belle Verriere": the only window, as far as I know, to which in former times people knelt by hundreds in adoration, and before which they still occasionally burn a candle.

The Virgin with the Child on her knee sits enthroned in the upper part of the window, and surrounded by angels, on a much smaller scale, incensing and holding candles, while below are medallions ill.u.s.trating the Marriage at Cana and the Temptation. The angels and the medallions are of the thirteenth century, but the figures of the Virgin and Child with their background are almost certainly of the twelfth. Probably the veneration in which they were held caused them to be rescued from the fire,--hurriedly broken out, perhaps, from the surrounding gla.s.s,--and then reset in thirteenth century work after the Cathedral was rebuilt.[6] The Virgin is dressed in a robe of pale greyish-blue, of a colour one seldom sees in later work, relieved against a background of deep ruby, set with jewels of a darker blue. The precision of the colour harmony is wonderful, and no drawing I have seen of the window gives, even in outline, the beautiful poise of the head, bent in gracious benediction.

Although I have said that the workers of this school were breaking away from the Byzantine tradition and looking at life with their own eyes, yet it is never possible for men suddenly to produce work wholly independent of tradition, even when they are foolish enough to try; so we find in this case Greek art, through Byzantine, retains enough influence with these men to give to their work a dignity and restraint which is lacking in that of the thirteenth century. This is very noticeable wherever one gets the two in close juxtaposition, as at Chartres and also at Canterbury. There is an impressive severity of design and a feeling for proportion in the figure of the Virgin in La Belle Verriere which one misses in the surrounding work, which, though very beautiful, is by comparison small and fussy in treatment.

[Sidenote: St. Denis.]

In the meantime, in 1142, while the west front of Chartres Cathedral was still in progress, the great Abbot Suger had finished the construction of his abbey of St. Denis, near Paris. He was a great patron of the arts, as well as a good man and the first statesman of his age, and he seems to have spared no pains in the decoration of the church and especially in the filling of the windows with stained gla.s.s. Of this gla.s.s, alas! only the merest remnant is left, consisting of several medallions and part of a "Tree of Jesse." They have been collected and placed in the chapels of the apse of the church, embedded in garishly coloured ornament--the work of M.

Gerente, acting under the orders of the great and terrible Viollet-le-Duc--which effectually prevents one taking any pleasure in their beauty. They are, however, very interesting to study. Whether or not they were done before or after the three windows at Chartres it is, I think, impossible to say for certain. The history of the two buildings shows that they must have been done within a few years of each other (two of those at St. Denis contain figures of Suger as donor, and he died in 1152), and they are certainly the work of the same school. The Jesse tree in particular is either a copy, or the original, on a smaller scale, of the one at Chartres, being almost identical in design.

Many of the medallions are interesting from their deeply symbolical character. In one, for instance, is Christ, with the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, represented, as in the Jesse tree, by doves, each contained in a circle and connected with His breast by rays. With His left hand He unveils a figure labelled "Synagoga," and with His right He crowns another figure labelled "Ecclesia."

Another very curious medallion represents the _foederis arca_, "ark of the covenant." A figure of the Almighty supports a crucifix which rises from the ark,--a square box on four wheels,--while round about are the four symbols of the Evangelists. The cross is thus shown as the symbol of G.o.d's new covenant with man as the ark was that of the old. A quaint feature is that the artist, while feeling that all four wheels had got to be shown somehow, has been in some difficulty as to how to show the farther pair, and has therefore placed them above the ark, as if resting on it, as an ancient Egyptian artist might have done in his place.