Windows, A Book About Stained & Painted Glass Part 29

CHAPTER x.x.xIII.

A WORD ON RESTORATION.

If old windows have suffered at the hands of time, they have also gained, apart from sentiment, a tone and quality which the gla.s.s had not when it was new.

Their arch-enemy is the restorer, at whose hands they have suffered cruel and irreparable wrong. He is the thief who has robbed so much old gla.s.s of its glory, and a most impenitent one: there are times when any one who cares for gla.s.s could find it in his heart to wish he were crucified. So greedy is he of work, if not of gain, that restoration cannot safely be left even to the most learned of men; to him, perhaps, can it least of all be entrusted.

The twelfth century windows at S. Denis should be among the most interesting extant. They are ruined by restoration. The beauty which they may have had, which they must have had, is wiped out; and, for purposes of study, they are of use only to those who have opportunity and leisure to ferret out what is genuine amidst the sham. The S.

Chapelle is cited as a triumph of restoration, an object lesson, in which we may see a thirteenth century chapel with its gla.s.s as it appeared when first it was built. If that is so, then time has indeed been kinder even than one had thought. No less an authority than Mr.

Ruskin (in a letter to Mr. E. S. Dallas, published in the _Athenaeum_) praises the new work there, and says he cannot distinguish it from the old. There is at least a window and a half (part of the East window, and the one to the left of that) in which, at all events, the old is easily distinguishable from the new. But if the new is not more obvious throughout, that is not because the new is so good, but because the old has been so restored that it is unrecognisable--as good as new, in fact, and no better. The old gla.s.s is so smartened up, so watered down with modern, that it gives one rather a poor idea of unspoiled thirteenth century work. A more adequate impression of what it must have been, may be gained from the few panels of it, comparatively unhurt by restoration, now in South Kensington Museum.

The story of destruction repeats itself wherever the restorer has had his way. Sometimes he has actually inserted new material if only the old was cracked, obscured, corroded; and has effaced the very qualities which come of age and accident. Sometimes he has indulged in a brand-new background. There, at least, it seemed to his ignorance, he might safely subst.i.tute nice, new, even-tinted, well-made gla.s.s for streaky, speckled, rough, mechanically imperfect material. Invariably he has thinned the effect of colour by diluting the old gla.s.s with new. Many quite poor new-looking windows, spick and span from the restorer (those, for example, at the East end of Milan Cathedral), turn out to contain a certain amount of old work, good perhaps, lost in garish modern manufacture. At Notre Dame, at Paris, the considerable remains of Early and Early Decorated gla.s.s go for very little. One has to pick them out from among modern work designed to deceive. Certain windows at Mantes have suffered such thorough restoration that one begins to wonder if they are not altogether new; and you have precisely the same doubt at Limoges and at scores of other places. At Lyons an Early Rose has been made peculiarly hideous by restoration. Much of the harsh purple in Early French mosaic is surely due to the admixture of crude new gla.s.s.

It is needless to multiply examples; they will occur to every one. All this old work swamped in modern imitation goes inevitably for nought. If the new is good it puzzles and perplexes one; if bad, one can see nothing else. What is crude kills what is subdued. It is as if one listened for a tender word at parting, and it was drowned in the screech of the steam-engine.

Early gla.s.s was so mechanically imperfect, and age has so roughened and pitted it, that its colour has, almost of necessity, a quality which new work has not; and one is disposed, perhaps too hastily, to ascribe all garish gla.s.s in old windows to the restorer. Many a time, however, the new work convicts itself. At Stra.s.sburg it is quite easily detected. You may check your judgment in this respect by surveying the windows from the rear. It is a very good plan to preface the study of old work by examining it from the churchyard, the street, the close, or in the case of a big church from its outer galleries. The surface exposed to the weather, with the light upon it, explains often at a glance what would else be unaccountable. A vile habit of the restorer is to smudge over his gla.s.s with dirty paint, perhaps burnt in, perhaps merely in varnish colour; this he terms "antiquating."

The worse the new work added to the old, the more thoroughly it spoils it; the better the forgery, the more serious the doubt it throws upon what may be genuine. The modern ideal of restoration is thoroughly vicious. All that can be done is mending; and it should be an axiom with the repairer, that, where gla.s.s (however broken) can possibly be made safe by lead joints, no new piece of gla.s.s should ever be inserted in its place. Better any disfigurement by leads than the least adulteration of old work.

It is absurd to set good old work in the midst of inferior reproduction of it, as the common practice is, more especially in the case of Early work. Every bungler has thought himself equal to the task of restoring thirteenth century gla.s.s. It was rudely drawn and roughly painted. What could be easier than to repeat details of ornament, or even to make up bogus old subjects, and so complete the window? To paint figures anything like those in the picture windows of the sixteenth century was obviously not so easy, and the difficulty has acted as a deterrent.

Where it has not, the discrepancy between old and new is usually unmistakable. Men like M. Cap.r.o.nnier, however, have sometimes put excellent workmanship into their restoration of Renaissance work, to be detected only by a certain air of modernity, which happily has crept into it, in spite of the restorer. But was it not he who flattened the grey-blue background to the transept windows at S. Gudule? The fine window at S. Gervais, Paris, with the Judgment of Solomon, has lost much of its charm in restoration. To compare it with the two lights in the window to the right of it, is to see how much of the quality of old gla.s.s has been restored away. That quality may be due in part to age and decay. What then? Beauty is beauty; and if it comes of decay (which we cannot hinder), let us at least enjoy the beauty of decay.

It has been proved at Stra.s.sburg that thirteenth or even twelfth century work may be quite harmoniously worked into fourteenth century windows.

And even in the sixteenth century there were artists who managed to adapt quite Early mosaic gla.s.s to Renaissance windows, in which abundant stain, and even enamel, was used. The effect may be perplexing, but it does not deceive. Why will not a man frankly tell us what is new in his work? Then we could appreciate what he had done. But it is only once in a while that he takes you into his confidence. This happens, by way of exception, in a window at S. Mary's Redcliffe, Bristol, in the case of some figure work on quarry backgrounds, in which the new work is all of clear unpainted white or coloured gla.s.s, but so judiciously chosen that you do not at first perceive the patching. The effect is absolutely harmonious; and when you begin to study the gla.s.s, you do so without any fear that imposition is being practised upon you. Where the painting has in parts been made good, there is always that fear, as, for example, at S. Mary's Hall, Coventry: the windows have been restored with great taste; but one cannot always be quite sure as to what is modern.

The merest jumble of old gla.s.s, more especially if it be all of one period or quality, is far better than what is called restoration. Who does not call to mind window after window in which the gla.s.s is so mixed as to be quite meaningless, and is yet, for all that, beautiful? The Western Rose at Reims is an unintelligible jumble mainly of blue and green. It may not be design, but it is magnificent. Again, the Western lights at Auxerre, in great part patchwork, are simply glorious when the afternoon sun shines through.

At the East end of Winchester Cathedral is a seven-light window, reckoned by Winston to be one of the finest of a fine period. At the West end is an enormous window, which seems to be a mere medley of odds and ends. On examination you can trace in perhaps twelve out of forty-four lights of this last the outline of canopy-work, and in two or three that of the figure under it; but for the rest, certainly in the two lower tiers (which are best seen), it is mere patchwork, including some quite crude blue, and a certain amount of common clear white sheet.

The effect, when you examine it closely, is anything but pleasing. But as you stand near the choir screen on a not very bright morning, and look from one window to the other, the effect is just the opposite of what might have been expected. For the really fine East window has been restored; and, whether to preserve it or to bring old work and new into uniformity, it has been screened with sheets of perforated zinc! On the other hand, the really considerable amount of crude white and colour with which the West window has been botched is, so to speak, swallowed up in silvery radiance. Probably it helps even to give it quality; anyway, the effect is delightful. Indeed, it recalls the impression of the Five Sisters at York, or suggests some monster cobweb in which the light is caught. Beauty, forbid that any busybody should restore it! At Poitiers (S. Radegonde) is a grisaille window of the fourteenth century, all patched, defaced, undecipherable--mended only with thick bulbous bits of green-white gla.s.s--which is quite all one could desire in the way of decoration.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 256. A RESTORATION AT ANGERS.]

In very many churches there remain fragments of old gla.s.s in stray tracery openings, not enough to produce effect. The question has been what to do with them. A common practice is to use up such sc.r.a.ps in the form of bordering to common white quarry gla.s.s. That is quite a futile thing to do. The effect of setting old gla.s.s amidst plain white is to put out its colour; and this, not only in the case of deep-coloured gla.s.s, but equally of Early grisaille; which when framed in clear gla.s.s, looks merely dirty. The most beautiful and sparkling of thirteenth century gla.s.s so framed would be degraded. At Angers are some windows consisting of a mosaic of sc.r.a.ps worked up into pattern (before the days of restoration as we know it); and the mere introduction amidst it of a strapwork of thin white sheet (above) is enough to take from it all charm of colour, all quality of old gla.s.s. Ma.s.sed all together in one window, without such adulteration, the most miscellaneous collection of chips makes usually colour. In the hands of a colourist it would be certain to do so. What if it be confused? Mystery is, at all events, one element of charm, and even of beauty.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 257. S. JEAN-AUX-BOIS.]

It is not beyond the bounds of possibility to marry old work with new; but the union is rarely happy. It wants, in the first place, good modern gla.s.s. Further than that, it wants an artist, and one who has more care for old work than for his own. There is some satisfactory eking out old gla.s.s with new at Evreux, where a number of small subjects, many of them old, are framed in grisaille, in great part new, in a very ingenious way. At Munster is a window in which little tracery lights (you can tell that by their shapes) are used as points of interest in a modern composition--with a result, only less happy than where, at S. Mary's Redcliffe, a window is made up almost entirely of old gla.s.s, very much of one period, the more fragmentary remains forming a sort of broken mosaic background to circular medallions, heads, and other important pieces, arranged more or less pattern-wise upon it. Old gla.s.s must needs be mended sometimes, patched perhaps; new may have to be added to it; it has even to be adapted on occasion to a new window, with or without the admixture of new; but none of this is restoration of the gla.s.s in the modern sense. That implies restoring it to what once it was--which is, on the face of it, absurd.

The effect of windows made up (as at S. Jean-aux-Bois, page 409) of segments of two or three old windows satisfies the artistic sense perfectly. What the restorer does is to take each pattern he finds in it for what he calls "authority," and to make two or three windows, all of which have much more the appearance of modern forgeries (which in great part they are) than of old work. The "antiquation" of the new gla.s.s in them deceives none but the most ignorant; but it does throw doubt upon the genuineness of the old work found in such very bad company.

If there remain enough old gla.s.s to make a window, let it be judiciously repaired; if there be not enough for that, let it be piously preserved, best of all, in a museum, where those who care for such sc.r.a.ps may see it: scattered about in stray windows in out-of-the-way churches they are practically unseen. Better than what is called restoration, the brutality of the mason who plasters up gaps in the clerestory windows of great churches with mortar, or the plumber's patch of zinc, which temporarily at least keeps out the weather and the crude white light, leaving us in full enjoyment of the colour and effect of old gla.s.s. How grateful we are when it is only cobbled, and not restored. Restoration is a word to make the artist shudder.

In a window at Auch, representing the Risen Christ, with, on the one side, the doubting Thomas, and on the other the Magdalene, the customary inscription, "Noli me tangere," is followed (in letters of precisely the same character) by the signature of the artist, Arnaut de Moles. It is the reverend Abbe responsible for the authorised description of the church, who suggests that it may have been with intention he signed his name just there. He has come off, as it happens, very much better at the hands of the restorer than most men. Had it been possible for him to foresee what nineteenth century "restoration" meant, well might he have written over his signature "Leave me alone"!

THE END.