Part 12 (2/2)
The subdivision of art into periods is in reality the veriest makes.h.i.+ft.
To be on quite safe ground we should have, as a matter of fact, to reduce our periods to not more than half their supposed duration, and to cla.s.s all the rest of the time as belonging to intervals of transition.
The truth is, it is always a period of transition. The stream moves perpetually on; there are only moments in its course when it seems to move more slowly, and we have time to fix its characteristics. It follows that, if we divide our periods according to time, we have to include within them work of very various character; and if we divide them according to style, our dates get hopelessly confused.
Some sort of cla.s.sification is necessary in order to emphasise changes which actually took place only by degrees, and are perceptible only to the expert. But no sooner do we begin to cla.s.sify, than we find so many exceptions, that we are inclined almost to wonder if they do not form the rule. All that has been said, therefore, and may yet be said, about the periods of design, must be taken with more than a grain of suspicion. For example, what shall be said about the great East window at Gloucester Cathedral, which Winston instances as a typical example of Decorated gla.s.s? Doubtless the technique is that of soon after the middle of the fourteenth century, and the detail of the canopies, when you come to examine them, is more nearly Decorated than anything else; but the first impression of the gla.s.s is quite that of Perpendicular work. This may come partly of the circ.u.mstances that the masonry of the window follows already distinctly Perpendicular lines; but it comes much more from the colour of the gla.s.s and its distribution. It is not merely that blue and ruby backgrounds are carried straight up through the long lengths of each alternate light, or that the blue is lighter and greyer than in Decorated gla.s.s, but that the figures, and especially the canopies, are for the first time, practically speaking, altogether in white, only very slightly relieved with yellow stain. The student who accepted this as typical Decorated work, would be quite at sea when he came to Perpendicular gla.s.s, in which this paler colour, this preponderance of white, and especially this framing of the figures in white canopy work, is a most distinctive, if not the most distinctive, feature. After all, the window is Perpendicular; and, though the gla.s.s in it may have many characteristics of Decorated work, it cannot well be said that the gla.s.s is Decorated, true though it be that gla.s.s did, as a rule, follow rather in the wake of architectural progress.
Many windows are almost equally difficult to cla.s.sify. In the Decorated gla.s.s at Wells there are both earlier and later features. The heads glazed in pinkish gla.s.s, with eyes and beards leaded up in white, strike an Early note, whilst the broadly treated bases or pedestals of certain canopies in the Lady Chapel, one of which is here shown (the canopies themselves are strictly Decorated), prelude the coming style.
[Ill.u.s.tration: 136. PEDESTAL, WELLS.]
These bases remind one of those in the ante-chapel at New College, Oxford, dating from the last quarter of the fourteenth century, which, though it is not difficult to trace in them the lingering influence of Decorated tradition, must undoubtedly be put down as early examples of the later style. In these fine windows (upon which the tourist turns his back whilst he admires the poor attempt of Sir Joshua Reynolds in the West window) there is not yet the accomplishment of full-fledged Perpendicular work. The figures, though full of fine feeling, are not well drawn, and the painting is not delicate; but the design of the gla.s.s, its setting out, the balance and arrangement of colour, the tone of the windows, and the breadth of effect, are admirable; and it is precisely in these respects that it proclaims itself of the later school of Gothic. Indeed, we may a.s.sume that it was in order to include such work as this that the line was drawn at the year 1380. To cla.s.s it with Decorated gla.s.s would have been too absurd. Compare the New College canopy on page 180 with the Decorated canopy on page 155 and the more orthodox Perpendicular canopies below and on pages 185, 340, and there is no possible hesitation as to which it most resembles. The only thing in which it shows any leaning towards Decorated work is in the very occasional introduction of pot-metal colour; and the main thing in which it differs from later Perpendicular design is that its shafts are round instead of square, and that it is more solidly built up, larger, more n.o.bly conceived.
[Ill.u.s.tration: 137. CANOPY, NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD.]
A parallel French instance is at the S. Chapelle at Riom, in which canopies, having at first sight all the appearance of typically Late Gothic work, prove to have details which one would rather describe as Decorated. The German canopy work at Shrewsbury (pages 183, 186) is not very far removed from Decorated. The later Perpendicular canopies run to finikin pinnacles.
[Ill.u.s.tration: 138. TYPICAL PERPENDICULAR CANOPY.]
The New College canopies have none of the bra.s.sy yellow colour characteristic of Decorated work, but are absolutely silvery in effect.
The gradual dilution, as one may say, of the deep, rich, Early colour is noticeable throughout the fourteenth century. Towards its close the gla.s.s painter halts no longer between two opinions, between light and colour. He has quite made up his mind in favour of white gla.s.s. He has come pretty generally to conceive his window as a field of white, into which to introduce a certain amount of rich colour, not often a very large amount. As a rule, perhaps not more than one-fourth of the area of a fifteenth century window was colour; for, in addition to the white of the canopy, there was commonly a fair amount of white in the draperies, and the flesh was now always represented by white. The typical Perpendicular window, then, is filled with shrinework in white, enclosing figures, or figure subjects, into which white enters largely (the flesh and some of the drapery, often a good deal, is sure to be white), upon a background of colour. Not much of this coloured background, most often in blue or ruby, and sometimes deep in colour, was ordinarily shown, so fully was the s.p.a.ce occupied by figure work.
Sometimes there would be represented, behind the figure, a screen of white, so that only the head and shoulders would stand revealed against dark colour. Sometimes this screen would be in colour, contrasting with the background, richly diapered in imitation of damask (page 342).
Sometimes the background would be white, leaded perhaps in quarries; but in any case the prevalent scheme of design was to frame up pictures, more or less in colour, in architectural canopy work of white and stain.
Yellow stain, it should be said, was freely used in connection with all this white; and its invariable a.s.sociation therewith is one of the marked characteristics of Later Gothic gla.s.s; but as a rule the yellow was not only delicate in tint but delicately introduced, so that it did not much disturb the effect of white. There were significant pa.s.sages of yellow in it, but the effect of the ma.s.s was cool and silvery.
In canopies yellow stain was used as gold might be in stonework, which the canopies imitated; crockets and pinnacles would be tipped with yellow, as with gilding (see opposite), and the reveal of the arch, shown in false perspective above the figure, would be similarly stained, so as to soften the transition from the dark colour of the background to the white of the canopy ma.s.s.
One comes upon windows, probably of about the beginning of the end of the fourteenth century, in which the colour scheme is practically limited to red, white, and blue, the yellow being, comparatively speaking, lost in the white. Again, one finds windows in which the colours are much lighter than in earlier gla.s.s. But as a rule the lighter colours now introduced (the glazier's palette was by this time quite extensive) were used to support, and not to the exclusion of, the richer and deeper colour, which is the glory of gla.s.s, seldom to be dispensed with even in grisaille. You may do without colour altogether, but pale colours always have a poor effect.
[Ill.u.s.tration: 139. FIGURE AND CANOPY, S. MARY'S, SHREWSBURY.]
The typical Perpendicular canopies ill.u.s.trated and already referred to are quite favourable specimens of the kind of thing in vogue throughout the fifteenth century. In France much the same forms were adopted (page 342). Some exceptionally delicate figure-and-canopy windows (or parts of them) are to be found in the cathedral at Toulouse--the figure in colour, or in white and colour, against a background of white, richly diapered with damask pattern, which quite sufficiently distinguishes it from the architecture only just touched with yellow. An instance of later German work is given below. The German designer indulged temperamentally in the interpenetration of shafting and other vagaries of the kind, which we find in German stone carving. Sometimes in German work, and occasionally also in French, Late Gothic canopies were all in yellow, framing the picture, as it were, in gold. As a rule, however, they were, as with us, silvery in tone, and framed the coloured gla.s.s in a way most absolutely satisfactory, so far as effect is concerned.
[Ill.u.s.tration: 140. GERMAN LATE GOTHIC CANOPY.]
In itself, however, this canopy work is rarely of any great interest; occasionally, as already in the preceding century, the designer has enniched in the shafts little figures of saints or angels (there is just the indication of such introduction of little statuettes in the very simple and restrained example of canopy work from Cologne, on page 191), redeeming it from dulness; but as a rule it is trite and commonplace to a degree. The white, as frame, is perfect. It is none the more so that it simulates misplaced stonework. What a strange thing it is in the history of ornament that the natural bias of the designer seems to be so irresistibly towards imitation! The man's first thought seems to be to make the thing he is doing look like something it is not. Why, having designed openings in the wall of his building, he should proceed forthwith to fill them up with something in poor imitation of masonry, is a mystery. Economy had then, perhaps, as now, more to do with it than art, for it is a very cheap expedient.
[Ill.u.s.tration: 141. ALL SOULS' COLLEGE, OXFORD.]
Not only in the matter of colour, but in that of proportion, the later Gothic canopies were a great improvement upon what had gone before. They were distributed still very much upon the horizontal principle so noticeable in Decorated work; but by this time the architect had come to the tardy conclusion that the long lights of his window wanted holding together, and he tied them together, if they were of any length, by means of transoms, in which case the gla.s.s-worker had to deal with lights of manageable length. The light from All Souls' College, here given, is an example of a very usual Perpendicular arrangement. About one half its entire length is occupied by a figure enshrined, as it were, in an architectural niche. The base of the canopy is about equal in height to the width of the light. The shafts are broad enough to emphasise the independence of the light. The pinnacles of the canopy extend into the window head. A point or two of background colour, as though one could see through, are ingeniously introduced into the canopy and its base. It would be difficult to better such an arrangement of white and colour, except that one feels the urgent want of a margin of white, to separate the coloured background from the masonry round the window head.
[Ill.u.s.tration: 142. TWO WINDOWS, S. MARY'S, SHREWSBURY.]
The idea is, no doubt, that the shrinework should appear to stand in the opening, and the figure be sheltered under that. The illusion aimed at, it is scarcely necessary to say, is not produced, and in any case would not have been worth producing. On the contrary, the desirable thing to be done was, to acknowledge the window opening, which, except for this pretence, the colour of the design effectually does.
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