Stained glass of the middle ages in England and FranceArnold, Hugh
History
Stained glass of the middle ages in England and France
Arnold, Hugh
Art, Medieval; Glass painting and staining -- England; Glass painting and staining -- France
The fifteenth century windows at Rouen follow, for the most part, the
general design of the fourteenth century windows in the same churches.
Thus the window in the chapel of SS. Peter and Paul in St. Ouen, which
Mr. Westlake thinks to be the work of Guillaume Barbe, 1459-85, has
much the same arrangement and proportions as the S. Gervais window in
the south choir aisle shown in Plate XXV.; that is to say, a small
figure panel, under a big canopy, is set half-way up each tall light
of which the top and bottom is filled with quarries. There is the same
coloured background to the canopy, ending at the top in the same
arched shape, but in the treatment of the canopy itself one finds a
difference not only from fourteenth century work but from English work
of the fifteenth century. The French canopy, as I have said, had
never, like the English, been reduced to an almost flat pattern of
intricate line work, and in these Rouen windows one finds the artist
already trying to imitate stone-work modelled in relief with results
that are heavy and unsatisfactory. It is not that, in English work,
individual shafts are not given a light and dark side, but the canopy
is not, as in French work, modelled as a solid whole, and the strong
line work seems to keep it right.
[Sidenote: The revival.]
It was not, however, till the second half of the century that any new
life came into French stained-glass work, and when it came it brought
with it a skill in picture-making that was borrowed from contemporary
painting. To this period belong, I think, the fragments from Rouen
shown in Plates XLV. to XLIX. The heads of St. Catherine and the old
man, if compared with those from York, show the strong difference in
facial type between French and English work at this time. The stain
on the hair of St. Catherine is very coarse and inartistic as compared
with English work, but then no other nation ever equalled the English
in their delicate and refined use of stain.
[Sidenote: St. Maclou.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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