Windows, A Book About Stained & Painted Glass Part 19

[Ill.u.s.tration: 190. EVREUX.]

Figures or figure subjects in formal bands across tall quarry lights are always effective; so are figures planted more casually upon the quarries--kneeling donors, flying angels, or whatever they may be. So again, are figure panels alternating with bosses of ornament; but, if the window occupy a position where the figures can be appreciated, a surrounding of quarries seems hardly of interest enough, and if not, the figures seem rather thrown away. One is tempted to make exception in favour of figures in grisaille, which, if very delicately painted (as for example at S. Martin-c.u.m-Gregory, York), show to advantage on a quarry ground, which has the modesty not to compete with them in interest. The quarries keep their place perfectly as a background; and the slight painting upon them is just enough to give the gla.s.s quality, and to indicate that, however subordinate, it is yet part of the picture.

A quarry window, no less than any other, wants a border, if only to prevent the strongly marked straight lines of lead from appearing to run into the stonework. A simple line of colour with another of white next the mullions is enough for that. Even this is occasionally omitted, more especially in tracery lights, but in that case the gla.s.s seems to lack finish. The most satisfactory border to quarry lights into which otherwise no colour is introduced, is a broadish border of white, painted with pattern and in part stained. A coloured border seems to imply other colour breaking the field of quarries. By itself it is too much or not enough. Its proportion is a thing to be determined in each case on the spot; but even in narrow lights, if they contain bosses of colour (as do those in the transepts at Le Mans) a broad border about one fifth the width of the window, with a broad white line next the stone, is very effective.

The monotony of any great surface of quarry work, has led to the introduction of medallions and the like, even where it is not desired to introduce pot-metal colour. In the window from Evreux, ill.u.s.trated opposite, the effect of the delicately painted little angel medallions, in white on a ground of stain, is all that could be wished. Any little surprise of that kind is always welcome; but, should it occur too frequently, it becomes itself monotonous.

There is no end to the variety of forms in which colour may be introduced into quarry work. It is best in the form of patches, and not in the form of lines between the quarries as occurs occasionally, at Poitiers, for example, at Rouen cathedral, and at Chalons (page 167).

[Ill.u.s.tration: 191. QUARRY WINDOW, EVREUX.]

Big rosettes, discs, wreaths, rings of colour, and the like, are more effective than small spots. They need not be heavy, there may be any amount of white in them. In narrow lights, they may sometimes with advantage come in front of the border; that admits of the biggest possible medallion, and it is best to have such features large and few.

Mean little rosettes are too suggestive of the contractor; in the church of S. Ouen, at Rouen, one is uncomfortably reminded of him--it would be so easy to estimate for gla.s.s of that kind at so much the foot! Heraldic shields form often peculiarly effective colour-patches in quarry windows, more especially because of the accidental arrangement of colour they compel. There is a point at which symmetry of colour palls upon the eye.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 192. LINCOLN.]

The even surface of quarry lights all in white and stain is broken sometimes by an occasional band of inscription, which may either take the line of the quarries, or cross them in the form of a label. At Evreux some quarry lights are most pleasingly interrupted by square patches of inscription in yellow, or, which is still more satisfactory, in white. In the same cathedral there is a very interesting instance of inscription, in letters some five or six inches high, leaded in blue upon a quarry ground.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 193. GERMAN QUARRY BORDER.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: 194. EARLY ENGLISH QUARRY.]

The patterns with which quarries are painted naturally followed the ordinary course of grisaille. In the thirteenth century the designs were strongly outlined, and showed clear against a cross-hatched ground; which, however, did not, as a rule, extend to the lead, but a margin of clear gla.s.s was left next to it, in acknowledgment of the quarry shape.

The combination of quarries and strap ornament in the example at Lincoln (page 287) is unusual, but the quarries themselves are, but for the absence of a clear line next the leads, characteristically of the thirteenth century. The quarry border from Nuremberg (above) is rather later in character. In that case also, as it happens, there is no marginal line of clear gla.s.s. The typical treatment is shown below.

Later, as in other grisaille, the cross-hatched ground was omitted; and the foliage took, of course, more natural form. It was presently more delicately traced (page 290), and more often than not tinted in yellow stain. Consistently with the more natural form of leaf.a.ge the design in fourteenth century work was often one continuous growth trailing through the window, and pa.s.sing behind the marginal band of stain which now usually emphasised the top sides of the quarries. Often a futile attempt was made (page 286) to give the appearance of interlacing to these bands, but that was nullified by the stronger lead lines. True, interlacing was only possible where, as in some earlier work, the bands were continued on all four sides of the quarry, so that the lead fell into its place as inters.p.a.ce between two interlacing bands. It was better when there was no pretence of interlacing (below). Additional importance was sometimes given to the marginal band by tracing a pattern upon it, or, as on page 291, painting it in brown, and then picking out geometric tracery upon it. There came a time when marginal lines were omitted altogether. That was the usual, though not invariable, practice in the fifteenth century, by which time the draughtsman had apparently learnt to husband his inventive faculty. The continuous growth of the pattern, as well as the marginal acknowledgment of the lead lines, died out of fashion, and quarries were mostly painted sprig fashion. The character of these sprigs will be best judged from the specimens on page 289, some of the most interesting given in "Shaw's Book of Quarries."

Quarry patterns do not, of course, occur in that profuse variety; it is seldom that more than two patterns are found in a single window, often there is only one. The range of design in quarries of this kind is limited only by the invention of the artist. It includes both floral and conventional ornament, animal and grotesque figures, emblems and heraldic badges, cyphers, monograms, mottoes, and so on. There is scope not only for meaning in design, but for the artist's humour; but, when all is said, the Late Gothic pattern windows, now given over entirely to quarry work, are of no great account as concerns their detail. The later quarry patterns are often pretty enough, sometimes amusing, but they go for very little in the decoration of a church. Plentiful as quarry work is everywhere, and characteristic as it is of Perpendicular gla.s.s, there is not much that shows an attempt to do anything serious with the quarry window. All that was done was to paint more or less delicate and dainty patterns upon the little lozenge panes. However, they were traced with a light hand and a sure one, and with a kind of spontaneity which gives them really what artistic charm they have.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 195. QUARRY PATTERNS (SHAW).]

[Ill.u.s.tration: 196. 14TH CENTURY QUARRY.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: 197. 14TH CENTURY QUARRIES.]

The occasional endeavours to get stronger and bolder effects in quarry work were not very successful. At Evreux and at Rouen there are some late quarries painted more after the fashion of bold mosaic diaper; but the effect, though satisfactory enough, is not such as to convince one that that is the better way.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 198. 14TH CENTURY QUARRY.]

To heraldry, and especially to shields of arms surrounded by mantling (page 293), quarries form an excellent background, but only in the event of there being enough of them left free to show that it is a quarry window upon which the heraldry is imposed, or rather into which it is inlaid. Odds and ends of quarries want to be accounted for, as forming the continuation of the gla.s.s above and below. In the case of a window not a quarry window, it is a mistake to break up the background, as was sometimes done, into quarries, or rather into fragments of quarries. The object of the square or diamond shape is to break up a plain surface. If the ground is naturally broken up by figures, foliage, mantling, or what not, why introduce further quarry lines? They are not in themselves interesting. Their great value is in that they give scale to a window; but that is only on condition that they are seen in their entirety.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 199. ROUND GLa.s.s, ROUNDELS, OR BULL'S-EYES.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: 200. HERALDIC GLa.s.s.]

In Germany the place of quarries was supplied by roundels (page 292) unpainted. What applies to quarries applies in many respects to them; and they have a brilliancy which flat gla.s.s has not. They were usually enclosed in painted borders of white and stain, and have a very delicate and pearly effect; but where (as at S. Peter's, at Cologne) they occur in great quant.i.ty as compared with coloured subjects, these appear to be floating rather uncomfortably in their midst. The Italians, who also used roundels in place of quarries, often let colour into the interstices between them, and also little painted squares or paterae of white and stain. In the sham windows decorating the Sistine Chapel at Rome, separating Botticelli's series of Popes, the pointed s.p.a.ces between the rounds are coloured diagonally in successive rows of red, yellow, and green; but the result is most pleasing where, as at Verona and elsewhere, the little triangular s.p.a.ces are neither of one tint nor yet symmetrically arranged, but distributed in a quasi-accidental and unexpected way. Sometimes it was the little paterae that was in colour and the rest white. In any case, the effect is refined, as it is at Arezzo also, where the monotony of roundels, in sundry clerestory windows, is broken by figure medallions and other features in white and colour. The adaptation of roundels to the circular shape is shown in the portion of a round window from Santa Maria Novella. What more remains to be said about roundels and quarry windows is reserved for the chapter on "Domestic Gla.s.s."

[Ill.u.s.tration: 201. QUARRY FROM CHETWODE CHURCH.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: 202. WINDOW IN THE CERTOSA IN VAL D'EMA, FLORENCE.]

CHAPTER XXIV.

DOMESTIC GLa.s.s.

It is customary to draw a distinction between "Ecclesiastical" and "Domestic" gla.s.s.

In mediaeval days the Church was the patron of art; and, when kings and corporations commissioned stained gla.s.s windows, it was usually to present them to Mother Church. It is in churches, then, that the greater part of the old gla.s.s remains to us, iconoclastic mania notwithstanding; and it is only there that the course of gla.s.s painting can be traced.

Once in a while, as at S. Mary's Hall, Coventry, one comes upon a great window designed to decorate a civic building; but the whiles are few and far between. When such windows do occur they prove not to differ widely from more familiar church work.

What, then, is the difference between the two kinds of gla.s.s? It is not that the one is ecclesiastical the other secular, the one religious the other profane art. "Sacred Art" is a term consecrated by use; but, strictly speaking, it is a meaningless combination of words, signifying, if it signify anything, that the speaker confounds the art of telling with the thing told. Art has no more a religion than it has a country.

No doubt there clings always to the art of the devout believer some fervour of faith, as there may hang about the sceptic's doing a chill of doubt. The historian will enrich his gla.s.s with story, the preacher will convey in it a dogma. Poet or proser, philosopher or fool, may each in turn peep out of the window. Youth will everywhere betray its ardour, manhood its vigour, age its experience. A live man cannot help but put himself into his work. But none of that is art. His art is in the way he expresses himself, not in what he says; and there is no more religion in his gla.s.s painting than in his handwriting, though the graphologist may read in it his character.

The difference between church gla.s.s and domestic arises, speaking from the point of view of art, solely from architectural conditions. In so far as they are both gla.s.s, the same methods of glazing and painting apply to both. It is only in so far as the position and purpose of the two are different, that they call for different treatment in design. The treatment suitable to a great hall does not materially differ from that adapted to a church; the same breadth of design, the same largeness of execution, are required; what suits a cloister would suit a pa.s.sage.

When, however, it comes to the windows of dwelling-rooms, the scheme and execution appropriate even to the smallest chapels of a church, would most likely be out of place. The distinction is very much as that between wall decoration in fresco and cabinet paintings in oil- or water-colour.

In the house there is less need than in the church for severity, and more for liveliness, less occasion for breadth, and more for delicacy.

The scale of the dwelling-room itself justifies, perhaps demands, a smaller treatment. Here, if anywhere, is opportunity for that preciousness of execution which, in work of more monumental character, it seems a pity to expend upon so frail a substance as gla.s.s--frailer than ever when it was the thin white gla.s.s employed for window panes.

For, so far from the glazier of the sixteenth or seventeenth century imagining, as we mostly do, that it was any part of the purpose of domestic gla.s.s to shut out the view--less need in those days!--he employed in most cases a material which was not merely translucent but absolutely transparent.

This use of transparent gla.s.s marks a distinction, and forms something of a new departure. It was employed to some extent in Renaissance church work; but there it was more as a background to the stained gla.s.s window than as a part of it. Here the transparent gla.s.s is the window; and the design, whether in pot-metal or in enamel, shows more or less against the clear.

The relationship of certain seventeenth century windows at Antwerp to the Italian windows on pages 295, 299, 352, is obvious. They may be quite possibly founded upon them. There is the same arrangement of subjects in cartouches, set in geometric glazing of clear gla.s.s. But in the Italian windows one kind of gla.s.s is used throughout (the little pieces of thin pot-metal colour in the cartouches, and so on, scarcely count); and the proportion of the painted work to clear gla.s.s is so schemed that, although you may feel that the plain work wants just a touch of enrichment to bring it all together, you are not asked deliberately to imagine yourself to be looking through, beyond the painting, into s.p.a.ce.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 203. ITALIAN GRISAILLE, FLORENCE.]

The detail in these windows from the Certosa in Val d'Ema, near Florence, is all outlined and painted in brown upon clear white gla.s.s, the flesh warmer in tint than the rest; the high lights are brushed out of a matt tint, and some pale stain is washed in. The artful thing about the design is, the cunning way in which the borders are planned, so as to avoid the absolute parallelism of marginal lines. For the rest the design is rather characteristically Late Renaissance, though the relation of border to cartouche, and of both together to clear gla.s.s, is better than usual. It will be noted that these are not strictly domestic windows; but they are designed to be seen about on a level with the eye, and from a distance of not more than ten feet, which is as far as the width of the cloister allows one to get away from them.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 204. CERTOSA IN VAL D'EMA.]

They fulfil, therefore, altogether very much the conditions which apply generally to domestic gla.s.s, and may be taken, if not as types of domestic work, at least as something on the way from the church to the house. This, though the common type of Italian Renaissance grisaille, was not invariable. At S. Frediano, Lucca, for example, there is a white window, which, except for a little medallion in its centre, might at a glance almost pa.s.s for thirteenth century work: the Cinque-Cento scroll is so rendered, with cross-hatched ground and all, as to suggest the early mediaeval craftsman; it is centuries away from Da Udine in style.

The domestic quarry window differed, in mediaeval work, in no respect from church work. In the sixteenth century it took rather a new form. It consisted no longer of a more or less diaper-like all-over pattern, but of a panel, designed to be glazed in quarries. Here, again, is an approximation to the seventeenth century practice of leading up pictures in rectangular panes, but only an approximation. There is this important difference, that the quarry window starts from the lead lines, and is religiously designed within them.

Thus to accept, the simple square and obviously fit lines of quarry glazing, and to expend his art in painting upon them, simplifies the task of the gla.s.s painter; and he very frequently fell back upon that plan, more readily perhaps when he happened to know more about painting than about glazing. That was Da Udine's case, who is credited with the design of the windows in the Laurentian library at Florence, as of those at the Certosa in Val d'Ema. They bear a date some few years after his death; but they are so like what he certainly would have done that, directly or indirectly, the design is clearly due to him. The one ill.u.s.trated on page 298 is quite one of the best of these windows; in the others the ornament is even less coherent. The characteristic arabesque is painted in brown enamel, with redder enamel for the flesh tints, some yellow stain, and a little blue enamel in the heraldic lozenge, all upon clear white gla.s.s. The effect is delicate and silvery and no appreciable amount of light is excluded (a point usually of some importance in domestic work); but, though the main forms are designed within the lead lines, one feels that these have not been considered enough, that the leads compete with the painting, and that the bars, in particular, which are far thicker than need be, and occur with unnecessary frequency (in fact, at every horizontal quarry joint but one), very seriously mar the effect of delicate painting. That is as much as to say that the design, graceful and fanciful as it is, does not fulfil the conditions of quarry gla.s.s.

It is not enough for complete success in this form of window that the quarry lines shall be the basis of the design; the painting also must be strong enough to hold its own against leads and bars. That is hardly the case with the exceptionally delicate ornament in the Dutch gla.s.s opposite. But here, notwithstanding that the scroll is slighter than the Italian work and more delicately painted, the central patch of enamel colour in the shield and mantling does, to some extent, focus the attention there, and so withdraw the eye from the lead lines. The window is not merely cleverly designed; it is a frank, straightforward, manly piece of work, marred only by the comparative heaviness of the leads.

The truth is that a gla.s.s painter becomes so used to lead lines, and gets to take them so much for granted, that they do not offend him; and he is apt to forget how obtrusive they may appear in the eyes of the unaccustomed. Hence his sometimes seemingly brutal treatment of tenderly painted ornament.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 205. DUTCH QUARRY WINDOW, S. K. MUSEUM.]

Other good examples of Dutch domestic gla.s.s, not quite so good as this, but painted with admirable directness, are to be found at the _Musee des Antiquites_ at Brussels. At the Louvre also the Dutch work is good.

There are two lights there in which cartouches enclosing small oval subjects (fables) spread over the greater part of the quarry glazing, leaving only the lowermost of them comparatively empty. On these are painted b.u.t.terflies, a dragon-fly, even a gad-fly, almost to the life.

These flies upon the window pane, like the little miniature figures in the bottom corner quarries on page 301, are trivial enough in idea; but the idea is cleverly and daintily expressed; and one does not expect much else than triviality in seventeenth century design. Moreover, in the privacy of domestic life it is permitted to be trivial.