Cathédrale de Chartres; Civilization, Medieval; Mont-Saint-Michel (Abbey : France)
You can read the rest for yourselves. Grisaille is a separate branch
of colour-decoration which belongs with the whole system of lighting
and fenetrage, and will have to remain a closed book because the
feeling and experience which explained it once are lost, and we
cannot recover either. Such things must have been always felt rather
than reasoned, like the irregularities in plan of the builders; the
best work of the best times shows the same subtlety of sense as the
dog shows in retrieving, or the bee in flying, but which tourists
have lost. All we can do is to note that the grisailles were
intended to have values. They were among the refinements of light
and colour with which the apse of Chartres is so crowded that one
must be content to feel what one can, and let the rest go.
Understand, we cannot! nothing proves that the greatest artists who
ever lived have, in a logical sense, understood! or that omnipotence
has ever understood! or that the utmost power of expression has ever
been capable of expressing more than the reaction of one energy on
another, but not of two on two; and when one sits here, in the
central axis of this complicated apse, one sees, in mere light
alone, the reaction of hundreds of energies, although time has left
only a wreck of what the artist put here. One of the best window
spaces is wholly filled up by the fourteenth-century doorway to the
chapel of Saint Piat, and only by looking at the two windows which
correspond on the north does a curious inquirer get a notion of the
probable loss. The same chapel more or less blocks the light of
three other principal windows. The sun, the dust, the acids of
dripping water, and the other works of time, have in seven hundred
years corroded or worn away or altered the glass, especially on the
south side. Windows have been darkened by time and mutilated by
wilful injury. Scores of the panels are wholly restored, modern
reproductions or imitations. Even after all this loss, the glass is
probably the best-preserved, or perhaps the only preserved part of
the decoration in colour, for we never shall know the colour-
decoration of the vaults, the walls, the columns, or the floors.
Only one point is fairly sure;--that on festivals, if not at other
times, every foot of space was covered in some way or another,
throughout the apse, with colour; either paint or tapestry or
embroidery or Byzantine brocades and Oriental stuffs or rugs, lining
the walls, covering the altars, and hiding the floor. Occasionally
you happen upon illuminated manuscripts showing the interiors of
chapels with their colour-decoration; but everything has perished
here except the glass.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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