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
From the large amount of space that is occupied by the canopy work,
the general effect of these windows is rather a white one (though
white in all old work is a relative term, the white in this case
consisting really of a delicate play of greenish, yellowish, and pure
white continually contrasted), and the most beautiful to my mind are
those in which, as in the windows on the north side which face one on
entering, the figures themselves are almost entirely covered with a
coloured mantle which makes a broad splash of distinctive colour in
the middle of each light.
[Sidenote: The eastern windows.]
Although all the windows conform to the same general design, those on
the east side, on each side of the entrance to the Chapel proper, seem
to me to be by a different hand, and were probably done first. They
contain or contained originally no colours but red and blue, and the
drawing of the figures has much of the conventionalism of the earlier
fourteenth century work. The upper tier consists of the twelve
apostles, and the lower is believed to have contained the figure of
the crucified Christ with His mother and St. John on either side,
repeated four times. The figures of Christ have all been destroyed and
replaced by figures from elsewhere, perhaps from the destroyed west
window; but three figures of the Virgin and three of St. John remain,
though it was only in 1900 that they were replaced in what I have
little doubt were their original positions. It may, of course, be
that these windows are by the same artist as the others, but done
before he had quite found himself or emancipated himself from the
conventionalities of his predecessors, for he has infused a certain
amount of life into the old forms; and the "Mater Dolorosa," in spite
of her conventional S-like pose, is a tender and pathetic figure.
[Sidenote: The colouring.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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