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
This window, glazed originally at the beginning of the fourteenth
century, was enlarged and rebuilt with Perpendicular tracery in
1390-91 through the munificence of one of the canons, Henry Blakeborn;
and in 1392 Robert Lyen, glazier, citizen of Exeter, and master
glazier to the Cathedral, was commissioned to adapt the old glass to
its new setting, adding what was necessary of his own work to fill
the space. Robert Lyen's work is easily to be distinguished from the
earlier work (which, besides that of 1302, includes four figures of
about 1340-50, which he may have brought from other windows to fill up
with). It consists of six figures, of which only three are under
canopies of Lyen's time, and of a row, across the bottom, of short
double-arched canopies enclosing coats of arms of past bishops of
Exeter. The drawing is about equal to that of the Winchester School,
but the canopies, with their multitude of crocketted pinnacles in
strong outline, are far nearer to the regular Perpendicular type, such
as we find at York, than anything that was being done by the
Winchester School at that date.
Was the work of Robert Lyen an example of a style which had become
general throughout the west, and of which the influence extended as
far as Coventry? For in 1405 John Thornton of Coventry was
commissioned to fill with stained glass the huge east windows of the
new choir of York Minster, and this is the earliest existing window,
of which the date is known, in which the Perpendicular style in glass
has taken definite form.
[Illustration: PLATE XLIII
HEAD, FROM ST. MICHAEL'S, SPURRIERGATE, YORK
Fifteenth Century]
[Sidenote: The east window of York Minster.]
This great window is the glory of English stained glass. It is 78
feet high from top to bottom, and below the great mass of
Perpendicular tracery, which fills the mighty pointed arch of it,
there are the three tiers of lower lights divided by horizontal
transoms, with nine lights in every tier. Each of these lights
measures 3 feet 6 inches across, and is divided again by the thick
iron frame-bars into roughly square panels, each of which contains a
subject from the Bible. The canopy work which, in the hands of a
fourteenth century artist, would have filled half the window space
with its towering spires, is here reduced to a small many-pinnacled
canopy just filling the head of each light (where it would have been
an awkward shape for a subject), a narrow shafting forming a border
down the side, and a very shallow flat arch dividing each subject from
the one above. There has been no question here of eking out a poverty
of ideas; on the contrary, the artist's aim seems rather to have been
to get as much space as possible for the expression of them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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