STAINED GLASS

Evening Post, Volume CXXI, Issue 107, 7 May 1936, Page 6

STAINED GLASS

THE CODE OF' ARTISTS

Lovers of stained glass will be interested in the Victoria and Albert Museum's ' book by Bernard Kackham, F.S.A., "A Guide; to the Collections of Stained Glass," says the "Daily Telegraph:" ■';. lU'-:'.--^' ,----■■ ' ..'.-■ :

,: It/gives an account of the rare windows,, iii; the museum, and traces the history .of the art, which is of relatively recent growth, "much less ancient, for instance, than the arts of the sculptor, the potter, the .weaver, and'the metalworker. It was non-existent before the Christian era. ..."

The earliest window glass was'•Roman, in the sixth century, when small panes; of coloured glass,were held together ■ in' a framework of wood or stone. The invention of transparent coloured glass, followed by the discovery that a framework for the small coloured panes could be made of lead cast in narrow, grooved strips, which could be bent into all kinds of figures broughtl into being the stained glass window. ; '■"■'

Explainingv.that the medieval artist did not aim-to present things exactly as.he saw them/but symbolically, the author writes:— , ■

"A single tree stood for landscape, one, arch or column for a building; a 'night scene was indicated, if indoors, by a"hanging lamp, outdoors by one star, in the sky.; Such • a code of graphic symbols was the more readily accepted by the glass-painter, because the sources ot his craft were as yet very" limited." ;■ • '

The way in which old windows have' become mixed with newer is instanced in one case of early Netherlandish glass-painting, when glass from a window dated 1644 has been used to restore a 15th century window.

In the chapter on glass-painting in France in. the sixteenth century, the author makes some comments which recall the growth of self-advertis/ment in_ our own century. Writing of the donors of stained windows to churches, he observes; :

"In the early Middle Ages they were sometimes represented in a.window, but always on a small scale as compared with other figures, and generally in an attitude of devotion. , In the fifteenth-century Anjou window at Le Mans the figures of donors . . .are nearly lize-size, equalling in scale the Apostles and Saints in the upper ranks of the window."