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 windows in the clerestory of the nave of York Minster are little,
I think, if at all, later than those in the Chapter-House, but it is a
little difficult to compare them as they are designed to be seen at
such a very different distance from the eye, the white parts of the
clerestory windows consisting only of interlacing bands of lead-work
without any painted pattern at all. A small inset in Plate XVIII.
shows the general arrangement of all these windows; the great wheel of
the tracery, it will be seen, is filled with colour, while the lower
lights are white with two bands of coloured panels running
horizontally through them all. Of these panels the lower row consists
of coats of arms of the great families of the North, contained in
medallions of which Plate XVI. is an example. The upper row consists
for the most part of subjects contained in somewhat similar
medallions, but many of the panels are filled with earlier glass of
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which were doubtless preserved
from the older nave. Thus, if you let your eye run along the northern
side it will be arrested at the extreme west end of the line by a
piece of blue that is different from all the others. It is the twelfth
century blue that we have seen at St. Denis and in the west windows at
Chartres, and the panel is the portion of a Jesse Tree of the same
pattern as that which is found at both those places, and which I
mentioned when speaking of them. Portions of the foliage of the tree
are in the tracery above. I think I recognize this blue too in a panel
on the south side representing a man with a horse and cart, and
remains of early thirteenth century glass are plentiful.
[Illustration: PLATE XXXI
THE ANNUNCIATION, FROM ST. OUEN, ROUEN
Fourteenth Century]
[Sidenote: The aisles of the nave.]
Next after the clerestory, the oldest windows in the nave are the
first five from the east in each aisle. In these the style of the
Second Period is fully developed and is in no sense transitional.
They are rather more advanced in style than the Merton College windows
and are by a far finer artist, being, in fact, the finest work of the
period that I know. They seem to me all to have been executed within a
few years of each other, probably in continuous succession, and to
show the gradual development which might be expected during the
progress of the work.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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