Windows, A Book About Stained & Painted Glass Part 28

The course of the gla.s.s hunter seems never yet to have been clearly mapped out for him. Nor can he depend upon those who pretend to direct his steps. The enthusiastic description of the monograph proves in the event to have very likely no warrant of art; the paragraph in the guide-book is so cold as to excite no spark of curiosity about what may be worth every effort to see. Between the two a beginner stands uncertain which way to turn, and as often as not goes astray.

The question which perplexes him on the very outskirts of the subject is: Which are the windows to see? That depends. Some there are which every one who cares at all about gla.s.s should certainly see, some which the student who really wants to know should study, some which the artist should see, if merely for the satisfaction of his colour sense. To enumerate only a single cla.s.s of these would be to write a catalogue; but catalogues are hard reading; the more interesting and more helpful course will be, to tell shortly of some of the windows best worth seeing, and why they should be seen. And if choice be made of instances typical enough to ill.u.s.trate the history of gla.s.s, the list may serve as an itinerary to such as may think it worth while to study it, as it should be studied, not in books, but in churches.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 251. GRISAILLE PATTERNS, SALISBURY.]

Churches favourable to the study of Early gla.s.s in England are not very many. A series of thirteenth century windows is rare; and good examples, such as the fragments from the S. Chapelle, at South Kensington, are few and far between. The one fine series of medallion windows is at Canterbury Cathedral, in the round-headed lights of the choir. In the clerestory also is some figure work, on a larger scale, but less admirable of its kind. For good thirteenth century grisaille in any considerable quant.i.ty one must go to Salisbury, where, fortunately, the aisle windows are near enough to the eye to show the very characteristic patterns of the gla.s.s. To sit there in the nave and wait until service is over, is no hardship even to the most ardent gla.s.s hunter.

The silvery light from the windows facing him at the East end of the aisles is solace and delight enough. Yet more enchanting is the pale beauty of the Five slim Sisters, in the North transept of York Minster; that, however, is gained, to some extent, by the confusion of the pattern, which is not quite typically Early, but begins to show symptoms of a transition stage in design.

To appreciate at its full value the stronger colour of the Early mosaic gla.s.s one must cross the Channel. We have nothing in this country to compare in quant.i.ty, and therefore for effect, with the gorgeous gla.s.s illuminating the great French churches. Reims, for example, Bourges, Le Mans, are perfect treasure houses of jewelled light. But richer than all is Chartres. The windows there are less conveniently placed for study than at Le Mans, but they are grander, and more in number. At Reims the art is coa.r.s.er, though the magnificence of certain red windows there lives in the memory. Emphatically Chartres is the place to know and appreciate thirteenth century gla.s.s. No other great church of the period retains so much of its original glazing; and since it is one of the largest, and the gla.s.s is very much of one period, it follows that no church contains so much Early gla.s.s. The impression it produces is the more p.r.o.nounced that there is little else. Except for a modern window or two, one Late Gothic window, and some four or five lights of grisaille, which belong to the second period, the gla.s.s throughout this vast building is typically Early. It is well worth a pilgrimage to Chartres only to see it. You may wander about the church for hours at a time, unravelling the patterns of the windows, and puzzling out the subjects of the medallion pictures. To sit there in more restful mood upon some summer afternoon, when the light is softened by a gentle fall of rain, is to be thrilled by the beauty of it all. It is as though, in a dream, you found yourself in some huge cavern, lit only by the light of jewels, myriads of them gleaming darkly through the gloom. It is difficult to imagine anything more mysterious, solemn, or impressive. Yes, Chartres is the place in which to be penetrated by the spirit of Early mediaeval gla.s.s. There is a story told of a child sitting for the first time in his life in some French church, awed by the great Rose window facing him, when all at once the organ burst into music; and it seemed to him, he said, as if the window spoke. Words could not better express than that the powerful impression of Early mosaic gla.s.s, the solemnity of its beauty, the way it belongs to the grandeur of the great church, the something deep in us vibrating in answer to it.

Exceptionally interesting Early gla.s.s is to be found in the cathedral of Poitiers; but it is hurt by the white light from other windows. In the case of Early coloured windows it is more than ever true that their intensity can only be appreciated when all the light in the building comes through them. That intensity, as was said, is deepened where, as at Stra.s.sburg, the colour of the walls absorbs instead of reflecting light. There the red sandstone of which the church is built gives back so little light that, as you enter the door, you step from sunshine into twilight, in which the gla.s.s shines doubly glorious. Some of these (certain of the Kings, for example, on the north side of the nave, each with its huge nimbus eddying, as it were, ring by ring of colour, out to the margin of the niche) are of the thirteenth if not of the twelfth century; but they are typical of no period. The borders framing them are perhaps a century later than the figures. Indeed, the period of this gla.s.s is most perplexing to the student of style, until he realises that, after the great fire at the very end of the thirteenth century, remains of earlier gla.s.s, spared from the wreck, were incorporated with the newer work. And, not only this, but, what was rare in mediaeval days, the fourteenth century designer, in his endeavour to harmonise, as he most successfully did, the old work with the new, gave to his own work a character which was not of his period,--much to the mystification of the student, who too readily imagines that he cannot go far wrong in attributing to the gla.s.s in a church a date posterior to its construction.

The cathedral at Stra.s.sburg is rich also in distinctly Decorated gla.s.s, to all of which the tourist pays no heed. He goes there to see the clock. If he should have a quarter of an hour to spare before noon--at which hour the c.o.c.k crows and the church is shut--he allows himself to be driven by the verger, with the rest of the crowd, into the transept, and penned up there until the silly performance begins. To hear folk talk of the thing afterwards at the _table d'hote_ you might fancy that Erwin Von Steinbach had built his masterpiece just to house this rickety piece of mock old mechanism.

Some of the most interesting gla.s.s of the Middle Gothic period is to be found in Germany, for tradition died hard there; and, whilst thirteenth century gla.s.s was more often Romanesque than Gothic in character, that of the fourteenth often followed closely the traditions of earlier Gothic workmanship. The Germans excelled especially in foliage design, which they treated in a manner of their own. It was neither very deep in colour nor grisaille, but midway between the two. The gla.s.s at Regensburg is an exceedingly good instance of this treatment; but instances of it are to be found also in the Museum at Munich, very conveniently placed for the purposes of study. The windows at Freiburg in the Black Forest should also be seen. But some of the very richest figure work of the period is to be found in the choir windows of S.

Sebald's Church, at Nuremberg. Except for the simplicity of their lines these are not striking in design; but the colour is perhaps deeper in tone than in the very richest of thirteenth century gla.s.s. The first impression is that the composition is entirely devoid of white gla.s.s; but there proves to be a very small amount of h.o.r.n.y-tinted material which may be supposed to answer to that description. As the light fades towards evening these windows become dull and heavy; but on a bright day the intensity of their richness is unsurpa.s.sed. They have a quality which one a.s.sociates rather with velvet than with gla.s.s.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 252. 14TH CENTURY GERMAN GLa.s.s.]

Excellent Decorated gla.s.s, and a great quant.i.ty of it, is to be found at Evreux, and again at Troyes. The clerestory of the choir at Tours is most completely furnished with rich Early Decorated gla.s.s of transitional character--interesting on that account, and, at the same time, most beautiful to see. There is other Decorated work there with which it is convenient to compare it, together with earlier and later work more or less worth seeing. Again most interesting work, but not much of it, and that rather fragmentary, is to be found at the church of S. Radegonde, at Poitiers; but there was in France at about that time rather a lull in gla.s.s painting. In England, on the contrary, there is an abundance of it. There is good work in the choir of Wells Cathedral.

Part of it is in a rather fragmentary condition, but it is all very much of a period; and there is enough of it to give a fair idea of what English Decorated gla.s.s is like. York Minster is rich in it. It is quite an object lesson in style to go straight from the contemplation of the Five Sisters, which belong to the latter part of the Early period of gla.s.s painting, into the neighbouring vestibule of the Chapter House, where the windows are of the early years of the Second Period, and thence to the Chapter House itself, where they are typically Decorated.

The study of Decorated gla.s.s can be continued in the nave again, which is filled with it. Entering, then, the choir, you find mainly Perpendicular gla.s.s, much of it typical of English work of the Late Gothic period.

Other very beautiful Late Gothic work is to be found in some of the smaller churches of York, such as All Saints'. There is a window there made up of fragments of old gla.s.s, among which are some very delicately painted and really beautiful heads. This work is all characteristically English. English also is the gla.s.s in the Priory Church at Great Malvern. There is a vast quant.i.ty of it, too, which adds to its effect; but unfortunately, a great part of it now fills windows for which it was obviously not designed. This is the more unfortunate because, where it has not been disturbed, it shows unmistakable evidence of having been very carefully designed for its place. The tracery of the great East window is, for example, an admirable instance of the just balance between white and colour so characteristic of later Gothic gla.s.s. Again, the Creation window, amongst others, is a lesson in delicate gla.s.s painting.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 253. FAIRFORD.]

Distinctly English in the delicacy of their painting are, again, the windows in the church of S. Mary, Ross. The far-famed windows of Fairford are, of course, not English. They were captured, the story goes, at sea, and brought to Gloucestershire, where a Perpendicular church was built to accommodate them. English antiquaries make claim that they are English, but internal evidence shows them to be Flemish or German. Considerable notoriety attaches to the Fairford windows owing to a theory which was at one time propounded to the effect that they were designed by Albert Durer. The theory is now as dead as a back number, but the notoriety remains--and not undeservedly; for although this gla.s.s stands by no means alone, and is distinctly second to some contemporary work (such, for example, as that on the north side of the nave of Cologne Cathedral, which Durer might conceivably have designed), it is remarkably fine; and it enjoys the comparatively rare distinction of practically filling the windows of the church. You not only, therefore, see the colour (which, rather than the painting, is its charm) at its best, but you have a complete scheme of decoration--Type answering to Anti-type, the Twelve Apostles corresponding to the Prophets, the Evangelists to the Four Fathers, and again the Saints opposed to the Persecutors of the Church. Most old gla.s.s owes something to the disintegration of its surface, and the consequent refraction of the light transmitted through it. In the Fairford gla.s.s the colours are more than usually mellow. The white, in particular, is stained to every variety of green and grey--the colour, as it proves, of the minute growth of lichen with which it is overgrown. It is said that, when the fury of iconoclasm was abroad, this gla.s.s was buried out of harm's way; which may possibly have hastened the decay of the gla.s.s, and so have given root-hold for the growth which now glorifies it.

It would not be easy to find finer instances of Late Gothic German work than the five great windows on the North side of Cologne Cathedral.

There, too, one has only to turn right-about-face to compare early sixteenth century with nineteenth century German practice, and on precisely the same scale, too. Any one who could hesitate for an instant to choose between them, has everything yet to learn in regard both to gla.s.s and to colour. The garish modern transparencies show, by their obvious shortcomings, the consummate accomplishment of the later Gothic gla.s.s painters.

There is a very remarkable late Gothic Jesse window in the Lorenz Kirche at Nuremberg, and another almost equal to it in the cathedral at Ulm.

The Tree of Jesse is very differently, but certainly not less beautifully, rendered in the fine West window at Alencon.

In most of the great French churches, and in many of the smaller ones, you find good fifteenth century work. At Bourges you have seven four-light windows and one larger one, all fairly typical. The best of them is in the chapel of Jacques Coeur, the Jack that built at Bourges quite one of the most remarkable of mediaeval houses extant. But there is no one church which recurs before all others to the memory when one thinks of Late Gothic gla.s.s in France. One remembers more readily certain superlative instances, such as the flamboyant Rose window at the West end of S. Maclou, at Rouen, a wonder of rich colour, or the Western Rose in the cathedral there. The fact is, that the spirit of the Renaissance begins early in the sixteenth century to creep into French work; and, as gla.s.s painting arrives at its perfection, it betrays very often signs of going over to the new manner. This is peculiarly the case in that part of France which lies just this side of the Alps; so much so, that a markedly mixed style is commonly accepted as "Burgundian."

This is most apparent in the beautiful church of Brou, a marvel of fanciful Gothic, florid, of course, after the manner of the Early sixteenth century, extreme in its ornamentation, but, for all but the purist, extremely beautiful. The church itself is as rich as a jewel by Cellini, and infinitely more interesting; and the gla.s.s is worthy of its unique setting.

There is a very remarkable series of windows to see in the cathedral at Auch, all of a period, all by one man, filling all the eighteen windows of the choir ambulatory. Transition is everywhere apparent in them, though perhaps one would not have placed them quite so early as 1513, the date ascribed to them. A notable thing about the work is its scale, which is much larger than is usual in French gla.s.s of that period.

Nowhere will you find windows more simply and largely designed or more broadly treated. Nowhere will you find big Renaissance canopies richer in colour or more interesting in design. The fifty or more rather fantastically a.s.sociated Prophets, Patriarchs, Sibyls, and Apostles depicted, form, with the architecture about them and the tracery above, quite remarkable compositions of colour. And it is very evident that the colour of each window has been thought out as a whole. There is not one of these windows which is not worth seeing. They form collectively a most important link in the chain of style, without, however, belonging to any marked period. Indeed, they stand rather by themselves as examples of very Early Renaissance work, aiming at broad effects of strong colour (quite opposite from what one rather expects of sixteenth century French work), and reaching it. And though the artist works almost entirely in mosaic--using coloured gla.s.s, that is to say, instead of pigment--and depends less than usual upon painting, he yet lays his colour about the window in a remarkably painter-like way.

There are noteworthy windows at Chalons-sur-Marne, in the churches of SS. Madelaine and Joseph, which can be claimed neither as Gothic nor Renaissance, details of each period occurring side by side in the same window. At the church of S. Alpin at Chalons is a series of picture windows in grisaille, not often met with, and very well worth seeing.

Early sixteenth century gla.s.s is so abundant that it is hopeless to specify churches. Nowhere is the transition period better represented than at Rouen, and, for that matter, the Early Renaissance too. The church of S. Vincent contains no less than thirteen windows, with subjects biblical or allegorical, but always strikingly rich in colour.

The choir is, you may say, an architectural frame to a series of gla.s.s pictures second to few of their period, and so nearly all of a period as to give one an excellent impression of it: the brilliancy of the colour, the silveriness of the white gla.s.s, and the delicacy of the landscape backgrounds is typical. Scarcely less interesting is the abundant gla.s.s in the church of S. Patrice, which carries us well into the middle of the sixteenth century and beyond; so that Rouen is an excellent place in which to study all but Early gla.s.s: there is not much of that to speak of there. Two exceptionally fine Renaissance windows are to be found in the church of S. G.o.dard; and there are others well worth seeing whilst you are in Rouen, if not in every case worth going there to see, in the churches of S. Romain, S. Nicaise, S. Vivien, in addition to S. Ouen, S.

Maclou, and the cathedral.

Yet finer Renaissance work is to be found at Beauvais--finer, that is to say, in design. One is reminded there sometimes of Raffaelle, who furnished designs for the tapestries for which the town was famous; these may very well have inspired the gla.s.s painters; but there is not at Beauvais the quant.i.ty of work which one finds at Rouen. The very perfection of workmanship is to be seen also in the windows at Montmorency and Ecouen (both within a very short distance of Paris); but, on the whole, this most interesting gla.s.s hardly comes up to what one might imagine it to be from the reproductions in M. Magne's most sumptuous monograph.

In a certain sense also the windows at Conches, in Normandy, are a disappointment. In a series of windows designed by Aldegrever one expects to find abundant ornament; and there is practically none. What little there is, is like enough to his work to be possibly by him; but one feels that Heinrich Aldegrever, if he had had his way, would have lavished upon them a wealth of ornamental detail, which would have made them much more certainly his than, as it is, internal evidence proves them to be. It would hardly have occurred to any one, apart from the name in one of the windows, to attribute them to this greatest ornamentist among the Little Masters. It is only the ornamentist who is disappointed, however, not the gla.s.s hunter. It is an experience to have visited a church like Conches, simple, well proportioned, dignified; where, as you enter from the West (and the few modern windows are hidden), you see one expanse of good gla.s.s, of a good period, not much hurt by restoration. The effect is singularly one. You come away not remembering so much the gla.s.s, or any particular window, as the satisfactory impression of it all--an impression which inclines you to put down the date of a pilgrimage to Conches as a red-letter day in your gla.s.s-hunting experiences.

There is magnificent Renaissance gla.s.s in Flanders, and especially at Liege, in which, for the most part, Gothic tradition lingers. Most beautiful is the great window in the South transept of the cathedral.

The radiance of the scene in which the Coronation of the Virgin is laid, reminds one of nothing less than a gorgeous golden sunset, which grows more mellow towards evening when the light is low. In the choir of S.

Jacques there are no less than five tall three-light windows, by no means so impressive as the gla.s.s at the cathedral, but probably only less worthy of study because they have suffered more restoration. The seven long two-light windows at S. Martin, though less well-known, are at least as good as these. In most of them may be seen the decorative use of heraldry as a framework to figure subjects, characteristic of German and Flemish work. Very much of this character is the gla.s.s from Herkenrode, which now occupies the seven easternmost windows of the Lady Chapel in Lichfield Cathedral. They are pictorial, but the pictures are gla.s.s pictures, depending upon colour for their effect; and they are really admirable specimens of the more gla.s.s-like manner of the Early Flemish Renaissance. There is in the three windows at the East end of Hanover Square Church, London, some equally admirable gla.s.s, which must once have belonged to a fine Jesse window; but it has suffered too much in its adaptation to its present position to be of great interest to any but those who know something about gla.s.s.

All this work is in marked contrast to the not much later Flemish gla.s.s at Brussels--the two great transept windows, and those in the Chapel of the Holy Sacrament at S. Gudule, to which reference is made at length in Chapter VII. They are windows which must be seen. They are at once the types, and the best examples, of the gla.s.s painter's new departure in the direction of light and shade. On the other hand, the large East window at S. Margaret's, Westminster (Dutch, it is said, of about the same date), has not the charm of the period, and must not be taken to represent it fairly.

The brilliant achievements of William of Ma.r.s.eilles at Arezzo, and the extraordinarily rich windows in the Duomo at Florence, have been discussed at some length (pages 248, 268). They should be seen by any one pretending to some acquaintance with what has been done in gla.s.s.

Other Florentine windows worthy of mention are, the Western Rose at S.

Maria Novella, and the great round window over the West door at S.

Croce, ascribed to Ghiberti. The transept window in SS. Giovanni e Paolo at Venice does not come up to its reputation. It is in a miserable condition, and as to its authorship (whence its reputation), you have only to compare it with the S. Augustine picture, which hangs close by, to see that it is not by the same hand. One of the mult.i.tudinous Vivarini may very likely have had a hand in it, but certainly not Bartolomeo. His manner, even in his pictures, was more restrained than that. There are a number of fine windows in the nave of Milan Cathedral, two at least in which the composition of red and blue is a joy to see.

Earlier Italian gla.s.s is of less importance; the windows at a.s.sisi, for example, are interesting rather than remarkable. They show a distinctly Italian rendering of Gothic, which is of course not quite Gothic; but to the designer they indicate trials in design, which might possibly with advantage be carried farther.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 254. RAISING OF LAZARUS, AREZZO.]

By far the most comprehensive series of Renaissance windows in this country is in King's College Chapel, Cambridge. In the matter of dignity and depth of colour, the small amount of rather earlier gla.s.s in the outer chapel holds its own; but the thing to see, of course, is the array of windows, twenty-three of them, all of great size, within the choir screen. It flatters national vanity, though it may not show great critical ac.u.men, to ascribe them to English hands. Evidently many hands were employed, some much more expert than others. It seems there is doc.u.mentary evidence to show that the contracts for them (1516-1526) were undertaken by Englishmen. Very possibly they were executed in England, and even, as it is said they were, in London. That they were not painted by the men who drew them, or even by painters in touch with the draughtsmen, is indicated by such accidents as the yellow-haired, white-faced negro, of p.r.o.nounced African type, among the adoring Magi.

It is as clear that the painter had never seen a black man as that the draughtsman had drawn his Gaspar from the life. Certain of the accessory scroll-bearing figures, which keep, as it were, ornamental guard between the pictures, might possibly have been designed by Holbein, who is reported to have had a hand in the scheme; but they are at least as likely to be the handiwork of men unknown to fame. But, no matter who designed the gla.s.s, it is on a grand scale, and largely designed. It is not, however, a model of the fit treatment of gla.s.s, though it belongs to the second quarter of the sixteenth century. For the designers have been more than half afraid to use leading enough to bind the gla.s.s well together, and have been at quite unnecessary pains to do without lead lines. The windows vary, too, in merit; and they bear evidence, if only in the repet.i.tion of sundry stock figures, of haste in production.

Still, they have fine qualities of design and colour, and they are, on the whole, gla.s.s-like as well as delightful pictures. We have nothing to compare with them in their way.

To see how far pictorial gla.s.s painting can be carried, go to Holland.

No degree of familiarity with old gla.s.s quite prepares one for the kind of thing which has made the humdrum market town of Gouda famous. Imagine a big, bare, empty church with some thirty or more huge windows, mostly of six lights, seldom less than five-and-twenty feet in height, all filled with great gla.s.s pictures, some of them filling the whole window, and designed to suggest that you see the scene through the window arch.

They do not, of course, quite give that impression, but it is marvellous how near they go to doing it. No wonder the painters have won the applause due to their daring no less than to what they have done. Any one appreciating the qualities of gla.s.s, and realising what can best be done in it, is disposed at first to resent the popularity of this scene-painting in gla.s.s;--one measures a work naturally by the standard of its fame;--but a workman's very appreciation of technique must, in the end, commend to him this masterly gla.s.s painting. For the Crabeth Brothers, their pupils, and coadjutors, were not only artists of wonderful capacity, daring what only great artists can dare, but they had the fortune to live at a time when the traditions of their art had not yet been cast to the winds. Though working during the latter half of the sixteenth century, they were the direct descendants of the men who had raised gla.s.s painting to the point of perfection, and they inherited from their forbears much that they could not unlearn. Ambitious as they might be, and impatient of restraint, they could not quite emanc.i.p.ate themselves from the prejudices in which they were brought up. More than a spark of the old fire lay smouldering still in the kiln of the gla.s.s painter, and it flared up at Gouda, brilliantly illuminating the declining years of the century, and of the art which may be said to have flickered out after that.

This last expiring effort in gla.s.s painting counts for more, in that it is the doing not only of strong men but of men who knew their trade. It is extremely interesting to trace the work of the individual artists employed; which a little book published at Gouda, and translated into most amusing English, enables one to do. Dirk Crabeth's work is pre-eminent for dignity of design, his figures are well composed, and his colour is rich; although in the rendering of architectural interiors he falls into the mud, that is to say, into the prevailing Netherlandish opacity of paint. His brother Walter has not such a heavy hand; he excels in architectural distance, as Dirk does in landscape; and his work is generally bright and sparkling, not so strong as his brother's, but more delicate. Their pupils, too, do them credit, though they lack taste. Among the other more or less known artists who took part in the gla.s.s, Lambrecht van Ort distinguishes himself in canopy work, as a painter-architect might be expected to do; Adrian de Vrije and N.

Johnson delight also in architecture, Wilhelmus Tibault and Cornelius Clok in landscape. Clok and Tibault compete in colour with the Crabeths, and go beyond them in originality.

Description of this unrivalled collection of later Dutch gla.s.s painting, except on the spot, is as hopeless as it would be dull. The windows must be seen. The men were artists and craftsmen, and their work is truly wonderful. Who shall attempt what these men failed to do? That is the moral of it.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 255. THE VIRGIN, S. MARTIN-eS-VIGNES, TROYES.]

The only other place where later gla.s.s is of sufficient worth to make it worth seeing, the only place where Seventeenth century work arouses much interest, is Troyes. There is a quant.i.ty of it in the churches of S. Nizier, S. Pantaleon, and in the cathedral, attributed, for the most part, to Linard Gontier, who is certainly responsible for some of the best of it. But it is in the church of S. Martin-es-Vignes, in the outskirts of the town, that it is to be appreciated _en ma.s.se_. There you may see some hundred and ten lights in all, executed during the first forty years of the seventeenth century. This is the place to study the decline and fall of gla.s.s painting--a melancholy sort of satisfaction. Here more thoroughly than ever must be realised how hopeless it is to evade in gla.s.s the glazier's part of the business; how powerless enamel is to produce effect; how weak, poor, lacking in limpidity and l.u.s.tre, its colour is--and this even in the hands of an artist born, one may say, after his time. Gonthier was an incomparable gla.s.s painter. He could produce with a wash of pigment effects which lesser men could only get by laborious stippling and scratching; he could float enamel on to gla.s.s with a dexterity which enabled him to get something like colour in it; but he was not a colourist, nor yet, probably, a designer. The difference in the work attributed to him, and the style of his design (which is sometimes that of an earlier and better day) lead one rather to suppose that he adapted or adopted the designs of his predecessors as suited his convenience.

To see what gla.s.s painting came to in the eighteenth century you cannot do better than go to Oxford. You have there the design of no less a man than Sir Joshua Reynolds, painted by one of the best china painters of his day. None but a china painter, by the way, could be found to do it.

It is not unfair, therefore, to compare this masterpiece of its poor period with the rude work of the fourteenth century, done by no one knows whom. And what do we find? Conspicuous before us is the great West window, which might as well have been painted on linen, so little of the translucency of gla.s.s is there left in it. It in no way lessens the credit of the great portrait painter that he knew nothing of the capacities of gla.s.s; that was not his _metier_. And there was no one to advise him wisely in the matter. But the result is disastrous. The beauty of his drawing--and there is charm at least in the figures of the Virtues--counts for little, as compared with the dulness of it all. It has neither the colour of mosaic gla.s.s nor the sparkle of grisaille.

The white is obscured by ma.s.ses of heavy paint, which, when the sun shines very brightly behind it, kindles at best into a foxy-brown; and even this is in danger of peeling off, and showing the poverty of the gla.s.s it was meant to enrich. Any pictorial effect it might have had is ruined by the leads and bars, which a.s.sert themselves in the most uncompromising manner. In short, the qualities of oil painting aimed at are altogether missed, and the facilities which gla.s.s offered are not so much as sought.

It is no hardship to turn your back upon such poor stuff. And there, high up on the other side, are seven great Gothic windows. These are by no means of the best period. The design consists largely of canopy work, never profoundly interesting; the figures are, at the best, rudely drawn; some of them are even grotesquely awkward. Their heads are too large by half, their hands and feet flattened out in the familiar, childish, mediaeval way. In all the sixty-four figures there is not one that can be called beautiful. Yet for all that, there is a dignity in them which the graceful Virtues lack. They are designed, moreover, with a large sense of decoration. The balance of white and colour is just perfect, and the way the patches of deep colour are embedded, as it were, in grisaille, is skilful in the extreme. To compare them with the futile effort of the eighteenth century, opposite, is to apprehend what can be done in gla.s.s, and what cannot. The whole secret of the success of the mere craftsman where the great painter failed, is that he knew what to seek in gla.s.s,--colour, brilliancy, decorative breadth. He not only knew what to do, but how to do it; and he did it in the manliest and most straightforward way. Rude though the work, it fits its place, fulfils its function, adorns the architecture, gives grandeur to it.

What more can you ask?

Domestic gla.s.s, such as that in which the Swiss excelled (window panes, many of them, rather than windows), is best studied in museums, whither most of it has drifted. There is no national collection without good examples. Better or more accessible it would be difficult to find than those in the quiet little museum at Lucerne--so quiet that, if you spend a morning there, studying them, you become yourself, by reason of your long stay, an object of interest. So little attention do these masterpieces in miniature gla.s.s painting attract, that the guardians do not expect any one to give them more than a pa.s.sing glance; but they leave you, happily, quite free to pursue your harmless, if inexplicable, bent.

The list of windows worth seeing is by no means exhausted. In many a town, as at York, Tours, Troyes, Evreux, Bourges, Rouen, Nuremberg, Cologne, and in many a single church, you may find the whole course of gla.s.s painting, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, more or less completely ill.u.s.trated; and, where that is so, of course one period throws light upon another. But the impression is always stronger when the century has left its mark upon the church.

Not until you have a clear idea of the characteristics of style, can you sort out for yourself the various specimens, which occur in anything but historic sequence in the churches where they are to be found. Having arrived at understanding enough to do that, you will need no further guidance, and may go a-hunting for yourself. To the gla.s.s hunter there are almost everywhere windows worth seeing.