Part 27 (1/2)
(as he most wilfully miscalled himself) of this perhaps ”empty day.” It was left to the modern artist to discover that.
The subject most frequently affected by the designer of the West window of a Gothic church was ”The Last Judgment,” in which appeared our Lord in Majesty, St. Michael weighing human souls, angels welcoming the righteous into heaven, and fiends carrying off the doomed to h.e.l.l. These ”Doom” windows, as they are also called, are not, to the modern mind, impressive--not, that is to say, as the pictures of reward and punishment hereafter they were meant to be. The scene strikes us invariably as grotesque rather than terrible, actual as it may have been to the simple artist, who meant to be a sober chronicler, and to the yet simpler wors.h.i.+ppers to whom he addressed himself.
[Ill.u.s.tration: 248. THE TEMPTATION, FAIRFORD.]
Apart from that, ”Last Judgment” windows are among the most interesting in the church. The portion of the window, in particular, which is devoted to perdition is most attractive. h.e.l.l flames offered to the artist a splendid opportunity for colour, upon which he seized with delight. And the fiends he imagined! Doubtless those crude conceptions of his were very real to him, convincing and terror-striking. The grim humour which we see in them may be of our own imagining; but that the draughtsman enjoyed his creations no artist will doubt.
[Ill.u.s.tration: 249. PART OF LAST JUDGMENT, FAIRFORD.]
That is easy to understand. His subject allowed him freedom of imagination, gave him scope for fancy, humour, colour; and all his faculties found outlet. No wonder his would-be fiends live beautiful in our recollection! In the midst of ruby flames dance devils, purple, black, and brown, gnas.h.i.+ng carnivorous teeth or yellow fangs, their beady, white eyes gleaming with cruelty. Devils there are apparently red-hot; others green and grey, with a beautiful but unholy kind of iridescence about them. As for the blue devils, they are beautiful enough to scare away from the beholder blue devils less tangible, which may have had possession of him. There is a great white devil in a window at Stra.s.sburg, who has escaped, it seems, from the Doom window near by, but not from the flames about him, a background of magnificent ruby. The drawing of a part of the Last Judgment from Fairford (page 373) gives only the grotesqueness of the scene, the quaintly conceived tortures of the d.a.m.ned; but that division of the gla.s.s is in reality a glory of gorgeous colour, to which one is irresistibly attracted. For that, as ever, the designer has reserved his richest and most glowing colour.
Some slight touch of human perversity perhaps inspires him also. At Fairford, at all events, he has put some of his best work, and especially some of his finest colour, into the figures of the Persecutors of the Church. Unfortunately, they are high up in the clerestory, and so do not get their share of attention; certainly they do not get the praise they deserve. Why, one is inclined to ask, this honour to the enemies of the Church on the part of the churchman? Was he at heart a heathen giving secret vent in art to feelings he dared not openly express? Not a bit of it! He was just a trifle tired of Angels, and Saints, and subjects according to convention; he was delighted at the chance of doing something not quite tame and same, and revelled in the opportunity when it occurred. In the tracery openings above the persecutors, where in the ordinary way would be angels, are lodged much more appropriate little fiends. They haunt the memory long after you have seen them, not as anything very terrific, but as bits of beautiful colour. The Devil overleaf, hovering in wait for the soul of the impenitent thief upon the cross, is not by any means a favourable specimen of the Fairford fiends.
Occasionally there is a grimness about the mediaeval Devil which we feel to this day. In a window at S. Etienne, Beauvais, there is a quite unforgettable picture of a woman struggling in the clutches of the evil one. She is draped in green, the Devil is of greenish-white, the architecture is represented in a gloom of purple and dark blue; only a peep of pale sky is seen through the window. On the one hand, this is a delightful composition of decorative colour. On the other it is intensely dramatic. It sets one wondering who this may be, and what will be the outcome of it. The struggle is fearful, the fiend is quite frantic in action. One is so taken with the scene that one does not notice that his head is wanting, and has been replaced by one which does not even fit his shoulders. That the effect, for all that, is impressive, speaks volumes for the story-teller.
[Ill.u.s.tration: 250. FAIRFORD.]
Alas, alas, the Devil is dead! His modern counterfeit is a fraud. You may see this at the church of S. Vincent, at Rouen, in one of the subjects representing the life of that saint, where he puts the devils to flight. The nearest of them is an evil-looking thing, ruby coloured, uncannily spotted, like some bright poisonous-looking fungus. The restorer has supplemented these retreating devils by a farther one painted on the grey-blue sky. The imp is grotesque enough, and very cleverly put in, but it plainly belongs no longer to the early sixteenth century. It suggests a theatrical ”property,” not the hobgoblin of old belief. That is just what the devilry in old gla.s.s never does.
It must be owned that mediaeval Angels charm us less. They are by comparison tame. Their colour is delicate and silvery, belike, but not seductive; their wings sit awkwardly upon them; they fulfil more or less trivial functions, bearing scrolls or emblems, s.h.i.+elds of arms even.
They are not in the least ethereal. They are too much on the model of man or woman. What possible business, for example, have they with legs and feet? Yet it is by the rarest chance that the body is, as it were, lost in a swirl of drapery, which, by disguising the lower limbs, makes the image by so much, if not the more angelic, at least the less obviously of the earth.
The gla.s.s hunter cannot but be amused every now and again by odd anachronisms in mediaeval and even later ill.u.s.trations in gla.s.s. But wonder at them ceases when we remember how simple-minded was the craftsman of those days before archaeology. If he wished to picture scenes of the long past--and he did--there was nothing for it but to show them as they occurred to his imagination--as happening, that is to say, in his own day; and that is practically what he did. He had perhaps a vague notion that a Roman soldier should wear a kilt; but in the main he was content that the onlookers at the Crucifixion should be costumed according to the period of William the Conqueror, or Maximilian, in which he himself happened to live. The practice had, at least, one advantage over our modern displays of probably very inaccurate learnedness, in that it brought the scene close home to the unlearned observer, and, as it were, linked the event with his own life. In short, there is more vitality in that rude story-telling than in the more elaborate histories, much less inaccurate in detail doubtless, to which to-day and henceforth artists are pledged.
There is no occasion to dwell upon the oddities of gla.s.s painting; they are those of mediaeval art all through. If we take a certain incongruity for granted, the guilelessness of it only charms us. That same guilelessness enables the artist to make absolutely ornamental use of themes which to-day we might think it profane to make subservient to decorative effect. We never question his sincerity, though in the scene of the Creation, as at Erfurth, he made a pattern of the birds, pair and pair, each on its own tree. He can safely show the staff of S.
Christopher, as at Freiburg, blossoming so freely as conveniently to fill the head of the window and balance the Child upon his shoulder.
According as it occurs to him, or as it suits his purpose, kings and bishops take part in the Crucifixion; S. Michael tramples upon a dragon big enough to swallow him at a mouthful; Abraham goes out, gorgeously arrayed in red and purple, to slaughter Isaac on a richly decorated altar, and a white ram, prancing among the green, calls his attention to itself as the more appropriate sacrifice; Adam and Eve are driven forth from Eden by a scarlet angel, draped in white, with wings as well as sword of flaming red. In this last case the peculiar colour has a significance. Elsewhere it implies the poverty of the glazier's palette, or indicates the sacrifice of natural to artistic effect. So it was that, till quite the end of the thirteenth century, we meet with positively blue beards, ruby cows, and trees of all the colours of the rainbow; and even at a much later date than that, primary-coloured cattle look over the manger at the Nativity, and Christ is shown entering Jerusalem on a bright blue donkey.
To the last the gla.s.s painter indulged in very interesting compound subjects--the Nativity, for example, with in the distance the Magi on their way; the Last Supper, and in the foreground, relieved against the tablecloth, Christ was.h.i.+ng Peter's feet, the apostles grouped round so as to form part of each or either subject. Sometimes a series of events form a single picture, as where you have the Temptation, the Expulsion, Eve with her distaff, Adam with his spade, the childhood of Cain and Abel, and the first fratricide, all grouped in one comprehensive landscape.
Consecutive pictures, by the way, generally follow in horizontal not vertical series, beginning on your left as you face the window. There is no invariable rule; but in most cases the order of the subjects is from left to right, row after row, terminating at the top of the window.
From the beginning difficult doctrinal subjects are attempted, as well as histories and legends. In the sixteenth century the design is often an allegory, full of meaning, though the meaning of it all may not be very obvious. The Virtues, for example, no longer content to stand under canopies, systematically spearing each its contrasting Vice, harness themselves, as at S. Patrice, Rouen, to a processional car, in which are the Virgin, Christ upon the Cross, and sundry vases, preceded by the Patriarchs and other holy personages. Another interesting ”morality,” at S. Vincent, Rouen, is pictured in a medley of little figures each with descriptive label--”Richesse,” for example, a lady in gorgeous golden array; ”Pitie,” a matron of sober aspect; ”Les Riches Ingra.s.s,” a group of gay young men; ”Le Riche” and ”Le Poure,” alike pursued by death.
Another decorative device of the sixteenth century is the Virgin, lifesize, surrounded by her emblems and little white scrolls describing them--”Fons ortorum,” ”Sivit as Dei,” and so on, in oddly spelt Latin.
This occurs at Conches.
In Later Gothic, and of course in Renaissance gla.s.s, the situation is, if not realised, at all events dramatically treated. One scarcely knows to which period to attribute the window at S. Patrice, Rouen, with scenes from the life of S. Louis, an admirably sober and serious piece of work. Conspicuous in it is the recurring mantle of the King, deep indigo coloured, embroidered with golden _fleurs-de-lys_, on an inky-blue ground. The whole effect is rich but strikingly low in tone.
An exceptionally fine scene is that in which the King, in a golden boat with white sails, ermine diapered, a crown upon his head, kneels in prayer before a little crucifix, whilst his one companion lifts up his hands in terror: the man is clad in green; for the rest the colour is sombre, only the pale blue armour of the Saint, his dark blue cloak, for once undiapered--as if the artist felt that here the golden lilies would be out of place--and the leaden sea around: that extends to the very top of the picture, distant s.h.i.+ps painted upon it to indicate that it is water. An inscription explains how:--
”En revenant du pays de Syrie En mer fut tourmente ... gde furie Mais en priant Jesu Christ il en fut delivre.”
It must be allowed that the storm does not rage very terrifically; but the effect is not merely beautiful as colour but really descriptive, and something more.
It is only occasionally that this much of dramatic effect is produced; but touches of well-studied realism are common, as where, in the same church, at the martyrdom of a saint, the executioners who feed the fire shrink from the yellow flames and guard their eyes.
Decorative treatment goes almost without saying in the early sixteenth century. At S. Patrice, again, is a singularly fine instance of that. In the centre of the window, against a background of forest, with the distant hunt in full cry, S. Eustache stands entranced, his richly clad figure a focus of bright colour; facing him, in the one light, the legendary stag, enclosing between its antlers the vision of the crucifix, balanced, in the other, by the white horse of the convert: the note of white is repeated in the lithe hounds running through the three lights, and, with the silvery trunks of the trees, holds the composition together. This subject of the Conversion of S. Hubert was rather a favourite one in gla.s.s, and was usually well treated. The stag is invaluable. At Erfurth he stands against the green, a ma.s.s of yellow, with purple antlers, which form a vesica-shaped frame for the fabled vision.