Part 17 (1/2)
Sometimes, as at Ecouen, far-off architecture would be painted not upon blue but upon a pale purple hill. At Laigle figures and animals are painted upon green, but they do not hold their own. On the other hand, at Alencon, some distant figures appearing in very pale grey against a delicate greenish landscape (stained upon the grey), are charming in effect.
White backgrounds painted as delicately as the blue are not rare. At Groslay, for example, steely-white architecture is separated from white sky beyond by grey-blue hills, a church with blue steeple breaking the sky. But white does not lend itself so readily to combination with colour as blue; and, as a rule, such backgrounds are grisaille in character, relieved, of course, with stain.
The great sea-scape at Gouda (page 223), representing the taking of Dalmatia in Egypt (a very Dutch Dalmatia), is nearly all in grisaille, against quarries of clear white, with only a little stain in the flags and costumes, and one single touch of poor ruby (about two inches square), which looks as if it might be modern. The port in perspective, the s.h.i.+ps, the whole scene, in fact, is realistically rendered, and comes as near to success as is possible in gla.s.s.
Delightful peeps of landscape are sometimes seen through the columns and arches of an architectural background. Whether the architecture be in purple of divers shades, or in white with only shadows in purple, or whether the nearer architecture be in white and the more distant in purple, in any case a distance beyond is commonly painted upon the grey-blue sky seen through it. Possibly, as at Conches, further vistas of architecture may be stained greenish upon it--any colour almost, for a change. But whatever it may be, and wherever it may be, in the best work it is colour; and it is always more effective than where the shadow is represented by paint, even though the brown be not laid on with a heavy hand, infinitely more effective than when blue or other coloured enamels are relied upon, as in some instances at Montmorency. Enamel may, for all one can tell, have been used in some of the landscapes here commended--it is impossible to say without minute examination of the gla.s.s, which is rarely feasible--but it never a.s.serts its presence; and in any case it has not been used in sufficient quant.i.ty to damage the effect.
It will be gathered from the descriptions of early sixteenth century glazed and painted distances, that they were as carefully schemed with a view to glazing (though in a very different way) as a Gothic picture.
Sometimes, as at Conches, they are rather elaborately leaded; and where that is the case there is not so much danger of incongruity between the delicacy of the painting and the strength of the leads--which a.s.sert themselves less than where they occur singly. It stands to reason also that the more mosaic the gla.s.s the less fragile it is. Painting alone upon the blue is best employed for small peeps of distance. It adapts itself to smaller windows; and it must be done (as for a while it was done) so well, that it seems as if the designer must himself have painted it. Were the artist always the gla.s.s painter, and the gla.s.s painter always an artist, who knows what case pictorial gla.s.s might not make out for itself?
It is a coa.r.s.er kind of distance than the French that we find at King's College, Cambridge. There the landscape backgrounds are in white and stain, grey-blue being reserved for the sky beyond, broken more or less by white clouds, or, occasionally, by the white trunks of trees, the foliage of which is sometimes glazed in green gla.s.s, sometimes painted upon the blue and stained. Here and there a distant tree is painted entirely upon the blue. This treatment is not ill adapted to subjects on the large scale of the work at King's College, but one does not feel that the painters made anything like the most of their opportunity. The inexperience of the designers is shown in their fear of using leads, a most unnecessary fear, seeing that, at the distance the work is from the eye, the bars themselves have only about the value of ordinary lead lines.
[Ill.u.s.tration: 176. THE RELIEF OF LEYDEN, GOUDA.]
Stronger and more workmanlike, but not quite satisfactory, is the much later landscape (1557) of Dirk Crabeth at Gouda. There the sky is blue, leaded in quarries, on which are trees, painted and stained, and some rather florid clouds. In the later work generally the lead lines are no longer either frankly acknowledged or skilfully disguised. The outline of a green hill against the sky will be feebly softened with trivial little twigs and sc.r.a.ps of painted leaf.a.ge. The decline of landscape is amply ill.u.s.trated at Troyes. At Antwerp again there is a window bearing date 1626, in which the landscape background of a quite incomprehensible subject extends to a distant horizon, above which the sky is glazed in white quarries, with clouds painted upon it. This is an attempt to repeat the famous feat of gla.s.s painting which had been done some twenty years before at Gouda. The Relief of Leyden, of which a diagram is here given, is in its way a most remarkable gla.s.s picture. In the foreground is a crowd of soldiers and citizens, upon the quay, about lifesize. They form a band of rich colour at the base of the composition; but the design is confused by the introduction of s.h.i.+elds of arms and their supporters immediately in front of the scene. Beyond are the walls and towers of the city of Delft, and the adjacent towns and villages, and the river dwindling into the far distance where Leyden lies--in the gla.s.s a really marvellous bird's-eye view over characteristically flat country. The horizon extends almost to the springing line of the window arch, and above that rises a sky of plain blue quarries, broken only towards the top by a few bolster-like and rather dirty white clouds.
Absolute realism is of course not reached, but it is approached near enough to startle us into admiration. It is astonis.h.i.+ng what has here been done. But the painter has not done what he meant to do. That was not possible, even with the aid of enamel.
CHAPTER XXI.
ITALIAN GLa.s.s.
In the course of the preceding chapters the reader has been rather unceremoniously carried from country to country, in a way which may have seemed to him erratic. But there was a reason in the zig-zag course taken. The progress of the gla.s.s painter's art was not by any means a straight line. Nor did it develop itself on parallel lines in the various countries in which it throve. It advanced in one place whilst it was almost at a standstill in another.
That is easily understood. It was inevitable that gla.s.s painting, though it arose in France, should languish there during the troublous times when English troops overran it under Edward III. and throughout the Hundred Years' War, that it should revive in all its glory under Francis the First, and that during the disturbances of the Fronde it should again decline. The extremity of France was England's opportunity; and our greatest wealth of stained gla.s.s windows dates from the reign of the later Plantagenets. The Wars of the Roses do not appear greatly to have affected art; but after the Reformation we were more busy smas.h.i.+ng gla.s.s than painting it.
In Germany the course of art ran smoother. Gla.s.s throve under the Holy Roman Empire, and it was not until the Reformation that it suffered any very severe check. Mediaeval Swiss gla.s.s may be cla.s.sed with German.
In the Netherlands gla.s.s painting blossomed out suddenly under the Imperial favour of Charles V. It continued to bear fruit under the Dutch Republic, until it ran to seed at the end of the seventeenth century.
So it happens that, in following the development of gla.s.s painting, it has been necessary to seek the best and most characteristic ill.u.s.trations first in one country and then in another, to travel from France to England, from England to Germany and back to France, thence to Flanders, to France again, and finally once more to the Netherlands, to say nothing of shorter excursions from one place to another, as occasion might demand. In each separate locality there was naturally some sort of progress, but we cannot take any one country as all-sufficient type of the rest; and to have traversed each in turn would have been tedious.
There were everywhere differences of practice and design; in each country, for that matter, there were local schools with marked characteristics of their own. Some of the characteristic national differences have been pointed out in pa.s.sing. To describe them at length would be to write a comparative history of gla.s.s, of which there is here no thought. What concerns us is the broadly marked progress of gla.s.s painting, not the minor local differences in style.
Something more, however, remains to be said of Italian gla.s.s than was possible in any general survey. The mere facts, that the Renaissance arose in Italy so long before it reached this side the Alps, and that gla.s.s painting was never really quite at home in Italy (any more than the Gothic architecture which mothered it), sufficiently account for the difficulty, nay, the impossibility, of cla.s.sing it according to the Gothic periods. Indeed, one is reminded in Italian gla.s.s less often of other windows of the period, English, French, or German, than of contemporary Italian painting.
The comparative fitness of the works of the ”Primitive” painters for models of gla.s.s design has already been pointed out. It is so evident that the Italian sense of colour could find more adequate expression than ever in gla.s.s, that one is inclined to wonder, until it is remembered that Italian churches were at the same time picture galleries, that it did not more commonly find vent in that medium. Even as it is, Italian painters did found a school of gla.s.s painting, comparatively uninfluenced by the traditional Gothic types of design, whilst observing the best traditions of glazier-like technique. Hence it is that we find in Italy windows such as are nowhere else to be seen, windows which at their best are of the very best.
There are resemblances in Italian gla.s.s to German work; and some of it is said to have been executed by Germans. It is none the less Italian.
Though it were executed in Germany, glazier and painter must have worked under the direct influence of the Italian master, and in complete accord with him, putting at his service all their experience in their craft, and all their skill. So well did they work together, that it seems more likely that the executant not only worked under the eye of the master, but was at his elbow whilst he designed. That alone would account satisfactorily for the absolutely harmonious co-operation of designer and gla.s.s-worker. One thing is clear, that the artist, whatever his experience in gla.s.s, great or little, had absolute sympathy with his new material, felt what it could do, saw the opportunities it offered him, and seized them.
An Englishman, or a Frenchman, who found himself for the first time in Italy, would be puzzled to give a date to the windows at Pisa or Milan, or in either of the churches of S. Francis at a.s.sisi. Even an expert in the gla.s.s of other countries has to speak guardedly as to Italian work, or he may have to retract his words. Italian Gothic is so Italian and so little Gothic, it is of no use attempting to compare it with Northern work. To those, moreover, who have been in the habit of a.s.sociating the Renaissance with the sixteenth century, the forms of Quattro-Cento ornament will persist at first in suggesting the later date--just as the first time one goes to Germany the survival of the old form of lettering in inscriptions throws a suspicion of lingering Gothic influence over even full-blown Renaissance design. It takes some time to get over the perplexity arising from the unaccustomed a.s.sociation of an absolutely mosaic treatment of gla.s.s (which with us would mean emphatically Gothic work) with distinctly Renaissance detail, such as one finds at the churches already mentioned, at the Certosa of Pavia, or at Florence.
At a.s.sisi the gla.s.s means, for the most part, to be Gothic. One is reminded there sometimes of German work, both by the colour of the gla.s.s and by the design of some of the medallion and other windows. The ornament generally inclines to the naturalistic rather than to the Quattro-Cento arabesque, or to the geometric kind shown on page 96; and though it includes a fair amount of interlacing handwork of distinctly Italian type, and is sometimes as deep in colour as quite Early gla.s.s, it is approximately Decorated in character. That is so equally with the brilliant remains in the tracery lights of Or San Michele at Florence.
But it is characteristic of Italian gla.s.s of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that, both by the depth of its colour and the very quality of the material, it should continually recall the thirteenth century. Sometimes, as at Milan, for example, you find even sixteenth century gla.s.s in which there is practically no white at all except what is used for the flesh tint.
In the cathedral at Pisa are some windows with little subjects, framed in ornament, all in richest and most brilliant colour, which are at first sight extremely perplexing. The leading is elaborately minute, and there is no modelling in the figures, which yet have nothing of archaic or very early character. It turns out that the paint upon the gla.s.s has perished, and there is hardly a vestige of it left to show that this was not intended for mere mosaic. The effect, nevertheless, is such as to prove how much can be done in pot-metal gla.s.s, and how little it depends upon the painting on it.
[Ill.u.s.tration: 177. a.s.sISI.]