STAINED GLASS

in the arts, the coloured glass used for making decorative windows and other objects through which light passes. Stained glass itself is no different from other coloured glass, being glass to which metallic oxides have been added in order to create colour. The adjective stained has traditionally been reserved to describe the glass used to create pictorial windows. Stained glass, which is purely a Western phenomenon, reached the status of a fine art in the 12th and 13th centuries, when it was combined with Gothic architecture to create brilliant and moving effects. The effect of a stained-glass window is created not by the coloured glass itself but by light passing through the glass and by the setting in which that light is perceived. Contrast is a vital aspect of the effect, which is why the windows that light the vast, dark, Gothic interiors of medieval cathedrals seem so intensely jewellike and brilliant. Light is constantly changingwith the time of day, the seasons, and the weatherso the effect of stained glass varies almost from moment to moment. Certain effects of light will bring out certain tones, and intensity will vary from the soft and mute to the brilliant. Stained glass is similar to painting in certain respects but is probably more akin to the art of mosaic, where tiny, individually coloured components are assembled by the artist to create a unified overall design, and to the art of enameling, particularly the cloisonn technique, where raised metal strips separate the various coloured enamels and form an intrinsic part of the design. Stained glass existed in Early Christian times but did not evolve as an important decorative art until much later. The earliest existing pictorial windows are those at the Cathedral of Augsburg in Germany. Other important 12th-century glass was made for the Abbey of St. Denis, near Paris. In the second quarter of the 13th century the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris was glazed with brilliant walls of stained glass, in a cycle of 1,134 scenes in 15 windows. The finest remaining 13th-century glass in England is at Canterbury Cathedral. Medieval stained glass was cut from thin coloured sheets, and then the design or picture was assembled by fitting the pieces of glass into lead strips that became an integral part of the design. Black vitreous enamel was used to paint details of the design onto the glass pieces. The separately assembled lead panels were then inserted into iron framing members that formed the windows. Some windows reached enormous sizethat at Chartres Cathedral depicting the life of Christ covers more than 250 square feet (23.2 square m). As window sizes increased, the stained glass assumed ever increasing importance from both an aesthetic and a catechistic point of view. Themes were usually taken from the Scriptures, and common subjects included the lives of the saints, prophets, Christ, and the Virgin, as well as the Last Judgment and the Apocalypse. After the 13th century, stained glass began to decline as an art form, though important examples were made until the 16th century. Its decline began when stained-glass artists began to seek the realistic effects sought by Renaissance painters, effects for which the technique was less suited and that diverted artists from exploiting its intense light-refracting quality. In the 19th century a revival of interest in medieval stained glass was part of the Gothic revival, and its techniques led to the production of many brilliant windows in England by the leader of the Arts and Crafts movement, William Morris, to designs by the artist Edward Burne-Jones and in the United States by Louis Comfort Tiffany. The Art Nouveau movement saw an increasing use of stained glass for decorative purposes, and Frank Lloyd Wright used it in much of his architectural work. In the 20th century brilliant stained glass was designed by such painters as Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, and Fernand Lger. in the arts, the coloured glass used for making decorative windows and other objects through which light passes. Strictly speaking, all coloured glass is stained, or coloured by the addition of various metallic oxides while it is in a molten state; nevertheless, the term stained glass has come to refer primarily to the glass employed in making ornamental or pictorial windows. The singular colour harmonies of the stained-glass window are due less to any special glass-colouring technique itself, however, than to the exploitation of certain properties of transmitted light and the light-adaptive behaviour of human vision. Rarely equalled and never surpassed, the great stained-glass windows of the 12th and early 13th centuries actually predate significant technical advances in the glassmaker's craft by more than half a century. And much as these advances undoubtedly contributed to the delicacy and refinement of the stained glass of the later Middle Ages, not only were they unable to arrest the decline of the art, they may rather have hastened it to the extent that they tempted the stained-glass artist to vie with the fresco and easel painter in the naturalistic rendition of his subjects. Neither painting on stained glass nor its assembly with grooved strips of leading is an indispensable feature of the art. Indeed, the leaded window may well have been preceded by windows employing wooden or other forms of assembly such as the cement tracery that has long been traditional in Islamic architecture; and the single most important technical innovation in 20th-century stained glass, slab glass and concrete, is a variation on the earlier masonry technique. Additional reading Illustrated monographs include: Comite International d'Histoire de l'Art, Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi (1956 ), a series intended when complete to document all medieval stained glass extant; J. Baker and A. Lammer, English Stained Glass (1960), probably the best collection of high-quality detail photographs of medieval stained glass ever published; H.E. Read, English Stained Glass (1926); A.C. Sewter, The Stained Glass of William Morris and His Circle (1972); M. Aubert et al., Le Vitrail franaise (1958), the standard work on French stained glass, although marred by many poor reproductions. This fault is remedied in part by the following works: M. Aubert, Stained Glass of the XIIth and XIIIth Centuries from French Cathedrals (1947); and E. von Witzleben, French Stained Glass (1966). H. Wentzel, Meisterwerke der Glasmalerei, 2nd ed. (1954), is the standard work on German medieval stained glass; E. von Witzleben, Farbwunder deutscher Glasmalerei aus dem Mittelalter (1965) is a copiously illustrated monograph on German medieval stained glass. S. Beeh-Lustenberger, Glasmalerei um 8001900 im Hessischen Landesmuseum in Darmstadt (1967), an excellent guide to one of the largest museum collections of medieval stained glass; P. Wember, Johan Thorn Prikker: Glasfenster, Wandbilder, Ornamente 18911932 (1966); G. Marchini, Italian Stained Glass Windows (1957); M. Stettler, Swiss Stained Glass of the Fourteenth Century from the Church of Koenigsfelden (1949); and F. Zschokke, Medieval Stained Glass in Switzerland (Eng. trans. 1947). See also James Sturm, Stained Glass from Medieval Times to the Present: Treasures to Be Seen in New York (1982); and Erne R. Frueh and Florence Frueh, Chicago Stained Glass (1983).Books on aesthetic analysis include J.R. Johnson, The Radiance of Chartres: Studies in the Early Stained Glass of the Cathedral (1965), valuable not only for its somewhat too sweeping criticism of Viollet-le-Duc but for its original analysis of the effect of the twilight atmosphere of the cathedral upon our perception of its stained-glass windows; and R. Sowers, Stained Glass: An Architectural Art (1965), a thoroughly illustrated analysis of the relation between stained glass and architecture, with numerous photographs of contemporary stained glass. David Evans, A Bibliography of Stained Glass (1982), is also recommended.Stained-glass techniques are discussed in Theophilus (Rugerus), Diversarum Artium Schedula (1847; Eng. trans. 1963), the earliest account of stained-glass window-making techniques, now believed to have been written in the early 12th century; C. Winston, Hints on Glass Painting (1847), and his Memoirs (1865), two books containing some of the most thorough and perceptive analyses of medieval glass-painting techniques ever written; E. Viollet-le-Duc, Vitrail, in Dictionnaire Raisonne de l'architecture franaise, vol. 9 (1868; Eng. trans., Mediaeval Stained Glass, 1946), still valuable for its many acute observations; and C.W. Whall, Stained Glass Work (1905), a thorough craft manual by one of the leading turn-of-the-century stained-glass artists in England. Recent manuals include E.L. Armitage, Stained Glass (1959); P. Reyntiens, The Technique of Stained Glass (1967); and R. and G. Mecalf, Techniques of Stained Glass (1971). Pictorial works can also be of interest: M.J. Gradl (ed.), Authentic Art Nouveau Stained Glass Designs in Full Color (1983); Connie Eaton, Oval Stained Glass Pattern Book (1983); Anita Isenberg and Seymour Isenberg, How to Work in Stained Glass, 2nd ed. (1983).