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
There had been no such work as this last done since the best days of
the thirteenth century. Here, once again, one finds the art used as a
means of emotional expression not only in the deep and solemn
harmonies of colour that strike one with a thrill on entering the
building, but in the treatment of the subjects themselves, in which
the artist breaks completely away from the conventionalism of the
preceding period.
The antechapel of New College, a graceful piece of Early
Perpendicular, is really, like that at Merton, a cross transept at the
west end of the Chapel, forming a =T= of which the antechapel is the
head, having windows on all its four sides--two on the east, on either
side of the entrance to the Chapel proper, two on the north, one on
the south, and three on the west. The glass of the great central west
window was taken out to make room for Jervais' smudgy rendering in
muddy browns and yellows of Sir Joshua Reynolds' famous Virtues. I am
not concerned with this but with the other windows, which contain,
though some of the lights are evidently out of their order, the
original glazing which William of Wykeham placed here when he built
the Chapel, between 1380 and 1386.
[Sidenote: The canopies.]
The design of the windows is a very simple one. The horizontal transom
divides each window into two equal tiers of four, or, in the eastern
windows, six, lights with tracery above. Each light is filled with a
figure standing on a pedestal and under a canopy, both canopy and
pedestal being white, enriched with touches of yellow stain, relieved
against a background which is, or was, blue and red in alternate
lights, the colour of the background inside the canopy being
counterchanged with the colour outside. From this arrangement and from
the presence of the pedestal I think the artist had seen both Wells
and the east windows of Gloucester Cathedral, but the architecture of
his canopies is of a fantastic kind peculiar to this school and unlike
anything in glass of the styles which preceded and followed it, but
based to some extent on the stone canopies of the late fourteenth
century, such as those on the screen of the west front of Exeter
Cathedral. The most noticeable feature in them is the number of queer
rounded turrets with pepper-box tops, modelled in relief. Indeed for
their solidity, as well as for their violent and untrue perspective,
these canopies have more in common with those introduced at Fairford a
hundred years later, when the continental influence was coming in,
than with the typical canopy of English Perpendicular.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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