Part 25 (1/2)

When it is in two stages, enclosing two subjects, the lower one has naturally this horizontal entablature (Chapel of the Holy Sacrament, S.

Gudule).

A less usual treatment is where the figures do not occupy the foreground, but are seen through the arch. The subject occupies, in fact, very much the position of a painted altar-piece in a carved stone altar.

Foreground figures prove often to be donors and their patron saints. The head of the window above the great architectural canopy, as it is convenient to call it, is usually of plain white gla.s.s, glazed in rectangular or diamond quarries (page 71).

A coloured ground above a Renaissance canopy indicates Gothic tradition, and an Early period therefore (S. Jacques, Liege).

More to the latter half of the century belong the pictorial compositions in which architecture, more or less proper to the subject, fills great part of the window, the foremost arches adapting themselves, sometimes, to the stonework. In this case the architecture is in white gla.s.s, more or less obscured by painted shadow; and pot-metal colour occurs only in the figures, where it is perhaps quite rich, in occasional columns of coloured marble, and in a peep of pale blue distance seen through some window or other opening (page 213).

[Ill.u.s.tration: 239. FRANcOIS IER CANOPY, LYONS.]

The grey-blue distance has often figures as well as landscape and architecture painted upon it; to represent verdure it is stained green.

Blue is more usual than white as a ground; but that also occurs, similarly painted. The not very usual landscape in white, with a blue sky above, in the windows of King's College Chapel, Cambridge, belongs to the early part of the century.

_Tracery._--In small windows the subject, or its canopy, is often carried up into the tracery lights (page 368), or the architecture ends abruptly and horizontally at the springing of the arch, and the heads of the lights are treated as part of the tracery.

Tracery lights often contain figure subjects. Very commonly they are occupied by figures of angels robed in white and stain, or in rich colour, or with colour only in their wings, playing upon musical instruments, bearing emblems, scrolls, and so on, all on a coloured ground (page 280). There occur also, but less frequently, cherubic heads, portrait medallions, badges, twisted labels, or other devices, upon a ground of ruby, pale blue, purple, or purple-brown. A purple or purplish background is of the period.

Coloured grounds are used without borders. White grounds are usually diapered with clouds.

There is no very distinctive treatment of rose windows. They are filled as pictorially as they well can be. They contain, perhaps, a central subject and in the outer lights angels, cherubs, and the like, much as in other tracery lights.

_Ornament._--The detail of their ornament is a ready means of distinguis.h.i.+ng Renaissance windows. In place of Gothic leaf.a.ge we have scrollwork of the marked arabesque or grotesque character derived from Italy. It needs no description.

Screens and draperies have often patterns in white and stain on ruby and other coloured grounds, produced by abrading the red and painting and staining the white thus exposed. The process may be detected by the absence of intervening lead between the white or yellow and the deep ground.

Other damask patterns are stained on the coloured gla.s.s without abrasion, yellow on blue giving green, on purple olive, and so on.

Ornamental windows scarcely go beyond quarry work, with a border of white and stain. Except in quarry windows, borders are seldom used.

Grisaille windows scarcely occur. The little subjects in white and stain painted upon a single piece of gla.s.s, usually circular and framed in quarries or in a cartouche set in plain glazing (page 352), belong to a cla.s.s by themselves.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 240. CHURCH OF S. PETER, COLOGNE.]

_Technique._--In many respects the technique of the Renaissance gla.s.s painter is only a carrying further of the later Gothic means. He uses more and more white gla.s.s, employing it also as a background; he uses more shades of coloured gla.s.s, especially pale blues, greens, and purples; he chooses his gla.s.s more carefully for specific purposes; he uses more coated gla.s.s, and abrades it; he makes greater use of stain, staining upon all manner of colours--ruby, blue, purple, green--and even painting in stain, and picking out high lights upon it in white. He paints delicate work more delicately. Flesh-painting he carries to a very high point of perfection, more especially in the portraits of Donors. In strengthening his shadows he eventually gets them muddy. At first he used to hatch them to get additional strength; eventually he was not careful always so much as to stipple them. He uses often a warmer brown pigment for flesh painting, and by-and-by resorts to a quite reddish tint by way of local colour; he uses large pieces of gla.s.s when he can, and glazes his backgrounds and other large surfaces in rectangular panes. Above canopies he comes to use pure white gla.s.s, as if to suggest that the canopy is solid, and beyond only atmosphere.

The one quite new departure in sixteenth century technique was the use of enamel colour (see Chapter VIII.). That began to come into use towards the middle of the century. When you detect the least touch of enamel colour in a window, other than the pinkish flesh tint, you may suspect that it belongs to the second half of the century; when it seriously affects the design and colour of the window, you may be sure it does. But it is not until quite the end of the century that mosaic anywhere practically gives way to enamel painting.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 241. S. JEAN, TROYES, 1678.]

The sixteenth century, therefore, includes, broadly speaking, all that is best in Renaissance gla.s.s and much that is already on the decline.

There is a tide in the affairs of art; and after the full flood of the Renaissance, sweeping all before it, glazing and gla.s.s painting sank to the very lowest ebb, out of sight in fact of craftsmans.h.i.+p. Only here and there, by way of rare exception, was good or interesting work any longer done,--as for example at Troyes, where good traditions, piously preserved in a family of exceptionally skilful gla.s.s painters, were followed long after they were elsewhere extinct.

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

You may recognise seventeenth century work not so much by any new departure in design (except that it aims more and more at the effect of an oil picture, and that the portrait of the Donor and his family const.i.tutes the picture) as by its departure from the old methods, the methods above described; by the introduction of pure white gla.s.s, glazed in geometric pattern, in the upper half of the window or, it may be, as a background; by the use of enamel paint instead of coloured gla.s.s; by the abuse of heavy shading (in the vain attempt to get chiaroscuro), and by a loss, consequently, of the old translucency and brilliancy; by the aggressiveness of the lead lines (now that it is sought to do as much as possible without them); by the adoption of thin-coloured gla.s.s, toned by paint, instead of deep pot-metal; by the occurrence of whole panes of gla.s.s coated with solid paint; by the decay of the enamel; and by the general dilapidation of the window.