Windows, A Book About Stained & Painted Glass Part 5

CHAPTER VII.

GLa.s.s PAINTING (RENAISSANCE).

The quality _par excellence_ of Renaissance gla.s.s was its painting; its dependence upon paint was its defect. Until about the middle of the sixteenth century the painter goes on perfecting himself in his special direction, neglecting, to some extent, considerations of construction on the one hand, and of colour upon the other, which cannot with impunity be ignored in gla.s.s, but achieving pictorially such conspicuous success that there may be question, among all but ardent admirers of gla.s.s that is essentially gla.s.s-like, as to whether the loss, alike in depth and in translucency of colour, as well as of constructional fitness, may not be fully compensated for by the gain in fulness of pictorial expression.

According as we value most the qualities of gla.s.s in gla.s.s, or the qualities of a picture in no matter what material, will our verdict be.

But there comes a point when the painter so far oversteps the limit of consistency, so clearly attempts to do in gla.s.s what cannot be done in it, so plainly sacrifices to qualities which he cannot get the qualities which stained gla.s.s offers him, that he ceases to be any longer working in gla.s.s, and is only attempting upon gla.s.s what had very much better have been done in some other and more congenial medium.

The event goes to prove the seductiveness of the pictorial idea, and ill.u.s.trates once more the danger of calling to your a.s.sistance a rival craft, which, by-and-by, may oust you from your own workshop. The consideration of the possibilities in the way of pictorial gla.s.s is reserved for a chapter by itself. It concerns us for the moment only in so far as the pictorial intention affected, as it very seriously did, the technique of gla.s.s painting.

In pursuit of the pictorial the painter strayed from his allegiance to gla.s.s. He learnt to depend upon his manipulation instead of upon his material; and that facility of his in painting led him astray. He not only began to use paint where before he would, as a matter of course, have glazed-in coloured gla.s.s, but to lay it on so heavily as seriously to detract from that translucency which is the glory of gla.s.s.

It is rash to say, at a glance, whether gla.s.s has been too heavily painted or not. I once made a careful note, in writing, that certain windows in the church of S. Alpin, at Chalons, were over-painted. After a lapse of two or three years I made another equally careful note to the effect that they were thin, and wanted stronger painting. It was not until, determined to solve the mystery of these contradictory memoranda, I went a third time to Chalons, that I discovered, that with the light shining full upon them the windows were thin, that by a dull light they were heavy, and that by a certain just sufficiently subdued light they were all that could be desired. There is indiscretion, at least, in painting in such a key that only one particular light does justice to your work; but the artist in gla.s.s is always very much at the mercy of chance in this respect. He cannot choose the light in which his work shall be seen, and the painter of Chalons may have been more unfortunate than in any way to blame. There comes, however, a degree of heaviness in painted gla.s.s about which there can be no discussion. When the paint is laid on so thick that under ordinary conditions of light the gla.s.s is obscure, or when it is so heavy that the light necessary to illuminate it is more than is good for the rest of the window, the bounds of moderation have surely been pa.s.sed. And in the latter half of the sixteenth century it was less and less the custom to take heed of considerations other than pictorial; so that by degrees the translucency of gla.s.s was sacrificed habitually to strength of effect depending not so much upon colour, which is the strength of gla.s.s, as upon the relief obtained by shadow--just the one quality not to be obtained in gla.s.s painting. For the quality of shadow depends upon its transparency; and shadow painted upon gla.s.s, through which the light is to come, must needs be obscure, must lack, in proportion as it is dark, the mysterious quality of light in darkness, which is the charm of shadow. The misuse of shading which eventually prevailed may best be explained by reference to its beginnings, already in the first half of the century, when most consummate work was yet being done. For example, in the masterpieces of Bernard van Orley, at S. Gudule, Brussels--one of which is ill.u.s.trated overleaf; it is a mere diagram, giving no idea of the splendour of the gla.s.s, but it is enough to serve our purpose.

The execution of the window is, in its kind, equal to the breadth and dignity of the design. The painter has done, if not quite all that he proposed to do, all that was possible in paint upon gla.s.s. Any fault to find in him, then, must be with what he meant to do, not what he did. To speak justly, there is no fault to find with any one, but only with the condition of things. We have here, a.s.sociated with the gla.s.s painter, a more famous artist, the greatest of his time in Flanders, pupil of Michael Angelo, court painter, and otherwise distinguished. It was not to be expected that he should be learned in all the wisdom of the gla.s.s painter, nor yet, human nature being what it is, that he should submit himself, lowly and reverently, to the man better acquainted with the capacities of gla.s.s. All that the gla.s.s painter could do was to translate the design of the master into gla.s.s as best he might, not perhaps as best he could have done had there been no great master to consult in the matter.

This was not the first time, by any means, that the designer and painter of a window were two men. There is no saying how soon that much subdivision of labour entered the gla.s.s worker's shop; but so long as they were both practical men, versed each in his art, and, to some extent, each in the technique of the other, it did not so much matter.

When the painter from outside was called in to design, it mattered everything. What could he be expected to care for technique other than his own? What did he know about it? He was only an amateur so far as gla.s.s was concerned; and his influence made against workmanlikeness. He may have done marvels; he did marvels; but his very mastery made things worse. He bore himself so superbly that it was not seen what dangerous ground he trod on. Lesser men must needs all stumble along in his footsteps, until they fell; and in their fall they dragged their art with them.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 41. MOSAIC GLa.s.s, AREZZO.]

The fault inherent in such work as the Brussels windows is neither Van Orley's nor the gla.s.s painter's; it is in the mistaken aim of the designer striving less for colour in his windows than for relief. He succeeds in getting quite extraordinary relief, but at the expense of colour, which in gla.s.s is the most important thing. The figures in the window ill.u.s.trated are so strongly painted that even the white portions of their drapery stand out in dark relief against the pale grey sky.

That is not done, you may be sure, without considerable sacrifice of the light-giving quality of the gla.s.s. It is at a similar cost that the white-and-gold architecture stands out in almost the solidity of actual stone against the plain white diamond panes above, giving very much the false impression that it is placed in the window, and that you see through its arches and behind it into s.p.a.ce. Another very striking thing in the composition is the telling ma.s.s of shadow on the soffit of the central arch. It produces its effect, and a very strong one. The festoons of yellow arabesque hanging in front of it tell out against it like beaten gold, and the rather poorish grey-blue background to the figures beneath it has by comparison an almost atmospheric quality. It is all very skilfully planned as light and dark; but there is absolutely no reason why that shadow should have been produced by heavy paint.

Under certain conditions of light there are, it is true, gleams of light amidst this shadow. You can make out that the roof is coffered, and can perceive just a glow of warm colour; but most days and most of the day it is dead, dull, lifeless, colourless. The points to note are: (1) that this painted shadow must of necessity be dull; and (2) that on work of this scale at all events (the figures here are very much over lifesize), this abandonment of the mosaic method was not in the slightest degree called for. On the contrary, the simpler, easier, and more workmanlike thing to do would have been to glaze-in the shadow with deep rich pot-metal gla.s.s. That was done in earlier gla.s.s, and in gla.s.s of about the same period as this.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 42. RENAISSANCE WINDOW, S. GUDULE, BRUSSELS.]

For example, at Liege, where there are beautiful windows of about the same period, very similar in design, the gla.s.s is altogether lighter and more brilliant, partly owing to the use of paint with a much lighter hand, but yet more to greater reliance upon pot-metal. In the Church of S. Jacques, as at S. Gudule, there are arched canopies with festoons in bright relief against a background of shadowed soffit; but there the shadow is obtained by glazing-in pot-metal, which has all the necessary depth, and is yet luminous and full of colour.

So also the deeply shadowed architectural background to the representation of the Daughter of Herodias dancing before Herod, in the Church of S. Vincent, at Rouen (overleaf), is leaded up in deep purple gla.s.s, through which you get peeps of distant atmospheric blue beyond.

And this was quite a common practice among French gla.s.s painters of the early half of the sixteenth century--as at Auch, at Ecouen, at Beauvais, at Conches, where the architecture in shadow is leaded in shades of purple or purplish gla.s.s, which leave little for the painter to do upon the pot-metal. At Freiburg, in Germany, there is a window designed on lines very similar indeed to Van Orley's work, in which the shadowed parts are glazed in shades of deep blue and purple. In Italy it was the custom, already in the fifteenth century, to lead-in deep shadows in pot-metal; and they did not readily depart from it. Surely that is the way to get strong effects, and not by paint. You may take it as a test of workmanlike treatment, that the darks have been glazed-in, where it was possible, and not merely painted upon the gla.s.s.

There is some misconception about what is called Renaissance gla.s.s.

Gla.s.s painting was not native to Italy, and was never thoroughly acclimatised there, any more than Gothic architecture, to which it was--the handmaid I was going to say, but better say the standard-bearer. Much gla.s.s was accordingly executed in Italy in defiance, not only of all tradition, but of all consistency and self-restraint. But even in Italy you will find sixteenth century gla.s.s as workmanlike as can be. The details from Arezzo and Bologna, above, overleaf, and on page 266, are p.r.o.nouncedly Renaissance in type, but the method employed by the gla.s.s painter is as thoroughly mosaic as though he had worked in the thirteenth century. Not less glazier-like in treatment are the French Renaissance details from Rouen, on pages 75 and 347, from which it may be seen that a workmanlike treatment of gla.s.s was not confined to Gothic glaziers. It was less a question of style, in the historic sense, than of the men's acquaintance with the traditions of good work, and their readiness to accept the situation.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 43. MOSAIC GLa.s.s, AREZZO.]

Possibly the Netherlandish love of light and shade--and especially of shade--may account for the character of the Brussels gla.s.s. Against that it should be said that, elsewhere in Flanders, splendid gla.s.s was being done about the same time, less open to the charge of being too heavily painted--at Liege, for example. But everywhere, and perhaps more than anywhere in the Netherlands, which became presently a great centre of gla.s.s painting, the tendency, towards the latter part of the century, was in the direction of undue reliance upon paint; of which came inevitably one of two things--either the shaded parts were heavy, dirty, and opaque, or they were weak and washy in effect. If, by means of painting, an artist can get (as he can) something worth getting not otherwise to be got, though we may differ as to the relative value of what he gains and what he sacrifices, it would be hard to deny him his preference, and his right to follow it; but if by painting on gla.s.s he attempts to get what could better be expressed by working in it, then clearly he has strayed (as Van Orley did) from the straight path, as gla.s.s-workers read the map.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 44. SALOME, S. VINCENT, ROUEN.]

It is rather a curious thing that the avoidance of leading, the dependence upon glazing and paint, should manifest itself especially in windows designed on such a scale that it would have been quite easy to get all that was got in paint, and more, by the introduction of coloured gla.s.s; in windows, for example, on the scale of those at King's College, Cambridge, with figures much over lifesize, where the artist, you can see, has been afraid of leading, and has shirked it. Evidently he did not realise for how little the leads would count in the gla.s.s. He does not in that case fall into the error of painting with too heavy a hand, but he trusts too much to paint--a trust so little founded that the paint has oftentimes perished, much to the disfigurement of his picture.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 45. RENAISSANCE MOSAIC GLa.s.s.]

The French gla.s.s painters of about the same period, though working upon a smaller scale, did not depart in the same way from the use of glazing; and where they did resort to painting, it was often with a view to a refinement of detail not otherwise to be obtained, as in the case of the delicate landscape backgrounds painted upon pale blue, which have a beauty all their own.

There is here no intention whatever of disparaging such work as that at S. Gudule. Any one capable of appreciating what is strongest and most delicate in gla.s.s must have had such keen delight in them that there is something almost like ingrat.i.tude in saying anything of them but what is in their praise. But the truth remains. Here is a branching off from old use; here the painter begins to wander from the path, and to lead after him generations of gla.s.s painters to come. It takes, perhaps, genius to lead men hopelessly astray!

CHAPTER VIII.

ENAMEL PAINTING.

The excessive use of opaque paint was not so much a new departure as the exaggeration of a tendency which had grown with the growth of gla.s.s painting itself. The really new thing in gla.s.s painting about this time was the introduction of enamel.

When gla.s.s painters were resorting, not only to opaque painting, but to abrasion, annealing, or whatever would relieve them from the difficulty of getting in mosaic gla.s.s the pictorial effect which was more and more their ruling thought, when glazing had become to them a difficulty (to the early gla.s.s-workers it was a resource), it was inevitable that they should think about painting on gla.s.s in colour. Accordingly towards the middle of the sixteenth century they began to use enamel. This was the decisive turning-point of the art.

In theory the process of painting in enamel is simple enough. You have only to grind coloured gla.s.s to impalpable dust, mix it with "fat oil,"

or gum-and-water, and paint with it upon white or tinted gla.s.s; in the furnace the medium will be fired away, and the particles of coloured gla.s.s will melt and adhere, more or less firmly, to the heated sheet of gla.s.s to which they have been applied. This theory gla.s.s painters began to put into practice. In the beginning they used enamel only tentatively, first of all in the flesh tints. It had been the custom since the fourteenth century to paint flesh always upon white or whitish gla.s.s in the ordinary brown pigment; and something of the simple dignity and monumental character of old gla.s.s is due, no doubt, to that and similar removedness from nature. Gradually the fashion was introduced of painting the flesh in red instead of brown. In one sense this was no such very new thing to do. The ordinary brown pigment spoken of all along is itself enamel, although it has been thought better not to speak of it by that name for fear of confusion. Inasmuch, however, as this was the use of a pigment to get not merely flesh painting but flesh tint--that is to say, colour--it was a step in quite a new direction.

Pictorially it offered considerable advantages to the painter. He could not only get, without lead, contrast of colour between a head and the white ground upon which it was painted, or the white drapery about it, but he could very readily give the effect of white hair or beard in contrast to ruddy flesh, and so on. There is a fragment at the _Musee des Arts Decoratifs_ at Paris, attributed to Jean Cousin, 1531, in which a turbaned head appears to have been cut out of a piece of purplish-blue gla.s.s, the flesh abraded, and then painted in red, the lips still redder, whilst the beard is painted on the blue, which shades off into the cheeks in the most realistic manner. Very clever things were done in this way, always in the realistic direction; but down to the middle of the century, and even later, there were always some painters who remained faithful to the traditional cool brown colour. A rather happy mean between warm and cold flesh is found at Auch (1513), where warmish enamel upon grey-blue or greenish gla.s.s gives modelling and variety of colour in the flesh, which is yet never hot. Well-chosen pieces of gla.s.s are made use of, in which the darker half comes in happily for the bearded part of a man's face. So, also, the head of the Virgin at the foot of the cross is painted upon grey, which tells as such in her coif, shaded with a cooler brown, but only deepens and saddens her face, and intensifies the contrast with the Magdalen. Occasionally one of these heads comes out too blue, but at the worst it is better than the hot, foxy flesh painting which became the rule.

Painting in colour upon gla.s.s could naturally not stop at flesh red. It was used for pale blue skies, at first only to get a more delicate gradation from pale pot-metal colour to white, but eventually for the sky throughout the picture. In connection with yellow stain it gave a green for distant landscape.

Enamel was used in ornament to give the colour of fruits and flowers in garlands and the like, and generally for elaboration of detail, which, if not trivial, was of small account in serious decoration. For a while there were gla.s.s painters who remained proof against its seduction. It was not till the latter half of the sixteenth century that gla.s.s painters generally began seriously to subst.i.tute enamel for pot-metal, and to rely upon paint, translucent as well as opaque. Even then they could not do without pot-metal, avoid it as they might. The really strong men, such as the Crabeth Brothers, at Gouda, by no means abandoned the old method, but they relied so much upon paint as to greatly obscure the glory of their gla.s.s. The Gouda windows, which bring us to the seventeenth century, contain among them the most daring things in gla.s.s extant. They prove that a subject can be rendered more pictorially than one would have conceived to be possible in gla.s.s, but they show also what cannot be done in it; in fact, they may be said to indicate, as nearly as can be, the limits of the practicable. What artists of this calibre could not do we may safely p.r.o.nounce to be beyond the scope of gla.s.s painting, even with the aid of enamel.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 46. THE BAPTISM, GOUDA.]

No skill of painting could make otherwise than dull the ma.s.ses of heavily painted white gla.s.s employed to represent the deep shade of the receding architecture in the upper part of the window on page 242; so, the ma.s.s of masonry which serves in the lower half of the window on this page as a background to the Donor and his patron saint and some shields of arms, represented as it is by a thick sc.u.m of brown paint, could not but lack l.u.s.tre. Think of the extent of all that uninteresting paint; what a sacrifice it means of colour and translucency!

Enamel painting did not lead to much. The colours obtained by that means had neither the purity nor the richness and volume of pot-metal. They had to be strengthened with brown, which still further dulled them; and, the taste for light and shade predominating as it did in the seventeenth century, the gla.s.s painter was eventually lured to the destruction of all gla.s.s-like quality in his gla.s.s.

There are some windows in the cathedral at Brussels, in the chapel opposite that of the Holy Sacrament, where are Van Orley's windows, which bear witness to the terrible decline that had taken place during something like a century--not that they are badly executed in their way.

The texture of silk, for example, is given by the gla.s.s painter perfectly; but, in the struggle for picturesque effects of light and shade, all consistency of treatment is abandoned. The painter is here let loose; and he can no more withstand the attractions of paint than a boy can resist the temptation of fresh fallen snow. The one must throw s...o...b..a.l.l.s at somebody, the other must lay about him with pigment. Here he lays about him with it recklessly. He is reckless, that is, of the obscurity of the gla.s.s he covers with it. At moments, when the sun shines fiercely upon it, you dimly see what he was aiming at; nine-tenths of the time all is blackness. Slabs of white gla.s.s are coated literally by the yard with dense brown pigment through which the light rarely shines.

It had become the practice now to glaze a window mainly in rectangular panes of considerable size. Where pot-metal colour was used at all, it had of necessity to be surrounded with a leaden line; but within the area of the coloured ma.s.s the leading was usually in these upright and horizontal lines, and not at all according to the folds of the drapery or what not. If the glazier went out of his way to take a lead line round a face, instead of across it, that was as much as he would do; if it was merely the face of a cherub, however delicately painted, he would, perhaps, as at S. Jacques, Antwerp, cut brutally across it; and even where structural lead lines compelled him to use separate pieces of material, he by no means always took advantage of the opportunity of getting colour in his gla.s.s, but, as at Antwerp, contentedly accepted his rectangular panes of white, as something to paint on--to the exclusion of no matter how much light. It simplified matters, no doubt, for the painter thus to throw away opportunities, and just depend upon his brush; but it resulted at the best only in an imitation of oil painting, lacking the qualities of oil paint.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 47. S. MARTIN eS VIGNES, TROYES.]

The French gla.s.s painters were less reckless. At Troyes, indeed, there is plenty of seventeenth century gla.s.s in which a workman can still find considerable interest. That of Linard Gontier, in particular, has deservedly a great reputation. He was a painter who could get with a wash of colour, and seemingly with ease, effects which most gla.s.s painters could only get at by stippling, hatching, and picking out; and he managed his enamel very cleverly, floating it on with great dexterity. But it is rarely that he gets what artists would call colour out of it. Even in the hands of a man of his prodigious skill the method proclaims its inherent weakness. The work is thinner, duller, altogether poorer, than the earlier gla.s.s of much less consummate workmen, who worked upon sounder and severer principles. The strength and the weakness of the painter are exemplified in the group of Donors above.

The painting is admirable, not only in the heads, but in the texture of the men's cloaks; those cloaks, however, are painted in black paint.

When the light is quite favourable they look like velvet; they never look like gla.s.s.

There is here the excuse, for what it may be worth, of texture and perhaps other pictorial qualities. Even that is often wanting in seventeenth century work, as when, at S. Jacques, Antwerp, the background to a design in white and stain is glazed in panes of white gla.s.s solidly coated with brown paint. This is obscuration out of pure wilfulness.

It was not only when the artist sought to get strong effects in enamel painting that the method fell short of success. The delicacy that might be got by means of it was neutralised by the necessity of some sort of glazing, and matters were not mended by glazing the windows in panes. It is impossible to take much satisfaction in the most delicately painted gla.s.s picture when it is so scored over with coa.r.s.e black lines of lead or iron that it is as if you were looking at it through a grill. That is very much the effect seen in Sir Joshua Reynolds' famous window in the ante-chapel at New College, Oxford (two lights of which are shown opposite), where the Virtues are seen imprisoned, you may say, within iron bars. They look very much better there than in the gla.s.s, which, for all the graceful draughtsmanship of the artist and the delicate workmanship of the painter, is ineffective to the last degree. It has no more brilliancy or sparkle than a huge engraving seen against the light; square feet of white gla.s.s are muddied over with paint.

It was not Sir Joshua's fault, of course, that the traditions of the glazier's craft were in his day well-nigh extinct; but Sir Horace Walpole was quite right when he described these vaunted Virtues as "washy." To say that they are infinitely more pleasing in the artist's designs is the strongest condemnation of the gla.s.s.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 48. VIRTUES, BY SIR J. REYNOLDS, NEW COLL., OXFORD.]

There was one use made of enamel which promised to be of real help to the glazier--that of painting the necessary shadows on pot-metal in shades of the same colour as the gla.s.s. Since enamel of some kind had to be used, why not employ a colour more akin to the gla.s.s itself than mere brown? It would seem as if by so doing one might get depth of colour with less danger of heaviness than by the use of brown; but the gla.s.s painted in that way (by the Van Lingen, for example, a family of Flemings established in England, whose work may be seen at Wadham and Balliol Colleges, Oxford) was by no means free from heaviness. Enamel then, it will be seen, was never really of any great use in gla.s.s painting, and it led to the degradation of the art to something very much like the painting of transparencies, as they are called, on linen blinds.

Let us note categorically the objections to it. A glazier objects to it, that it is an evasion of the difficulty of working in gla.s.s, and not a frank solution of it. That may be sentimental more or less. A colourist objects to it, because it is impossible to get in it the depth and richness of strong pot-metal, or the brilliancy of the more delicate shades of self-coloured material. That, it may be urged, remains to be proved, but the enamel painter practically undertook to prove the contrary, and failed. Admirers of consistency object to it, that it succeeds so ill in reconciling the delicacy of painting aimed at with the brutality of the glazing employed. That, again, is a question of artistic appreciation, not so easily proved to those who do not feel the discord. Lovers of good work, of work that will stand, object to it that it is not lasting. This is a point that can be easily proved.