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 two heads of Angels (Plates XLVIII., XLIX.), which are from the
north transept of St. Ouen, are, I think, by the same hand as an
interesting "Assumption of the Virgin," which now occupies two lights
of a window in the north aisle of St. Maclou in the same city. A
significant point about this glass is that the picture, which is
enclosed by a wide, flat-arched canopy, delicately modelled, stretches
right across both lights, completely ignoring the intervening mullion,
one of the first hints that stained glass was forgetting its
architectural mission.[18] The composition is much more ambitious and
pictorial, and the drawing more advanced than in any of the glass we
have hitherto considered. In front is a crowd of kneeling saints in
robes of blue, red, and green, above whom the Virgin kneels before the
Almighty, while the top of the picture is filled with rows of
golden-haired angels with red wings on a blue ground, of a
similar type to those illustrated. I should put the date of the window
at about 1470-80.
[Illustration: PLATE XLVIII
ANGEL'S HEAD, FROM GREAT ROSE WINDOW IN NORTH TRANSEPT OF ST. OUEN'S,
ROUEN
Fifteenth Century]
[Sidenote: The Lady Chapel at Evreux.]
Of about the same date are the side windows of the Lady Chapel of the
Cathedral at Evreux, of which the building was finished, I believe, in
1475. I am surprised that Mr. Westlake, in his notice of the chapel,
only mentions the east window with its Jesse tree, which to me is much
less beautiful than the others, and which I should be inclined to
attribute, at the earliest, to the very end of the century, if not to
the following one. The four side windows tell the story of Christ's
Ministry, Passion, and Resurrection, and show His second coming. Their
arrangement is somewhat English, each window having two tiers of
lights, each of which has a subject enclosed in a white canopy, but
the technique is different from the English. By far the best is the
first window of the series, which contains eight scenes from the
Ministry of Christ, from the Marriage in Cana to the Entry into
Jerusalem. The canopy work with its little figures in niches is
modelled as Van Eyck might have done it; the method would not tell
well at a distance, but owing to the narrowness of the chapel one
cannot get far away from these windows. The figure panels are very
rich in colour, Christ being always dressed in a deep purple, and the
other figures in rich greens, blues, and reds. The other windows of
the series are not quite so good, being thinner and poorer in effect,
and seem to me to have been executed by another hand, possibly from
the designs of the author of the first window, who may have died in
the interval. There is a good deal of similar work in the church of
St. Taurin in the same town.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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