Lights of Heaven
October 2007
Few areas of medieval art possess the magic of stained glass windows. The experience of the shimmering majesty of a cathedral flooded with jeweled light is unforgettable and usually reduces chattering tourists to stunned, reverent silence and awe. Yet many of those masterpieces, once thought as eternal as Paradise, have entered collections in Europe and America. Paradoxically, today stained glass is one of the most affordable and underappreciated areas of medieval art.The origins of stained glass are cloaked in mystery. There is reason to believe that the Romans used colored glass in windows and walls, and some scholars see a connection between stained glass and medieval cloisonné enameling. Whatever the case, the art of making beautiful pictorial stained glass windows erupted quite suddenly in Europe in the 10th century.
To impart color to glass, medieval craftsmen melted it and then added various metallic salts and oxides. Silver tinted glass yellow and gold, copper in various mixtures created brick reds and greens, cobalt made blue, and gold, the most precious of all additives, produced a deep and brilliant cranberry red. By the beginning of the 11th century, colored narrative windows seemed to be a requirement in the construction of churches, and the basic rules of its manufacture were described in a how-to manuscript by the monk Theophilus around 1100: "If you want to assemble simple windows, first mark out the dimensions of their length and breadth on a wooden board, then draw scroll work or anything else that pleases you, and select colors that are to be put in. Cut the glass and fit the pieces together with the grozing iron. Enclose them with lead canes … and solder on both sides. Surround it with a wooden frame strengthened with nails and set it up in the place where you wish." He makes it sound easy!
Details such as facial features and shading were added in grisaille stain and black enamel. According to Mary Shepherd, president of the International Center of Medieval Art in New York, there soon developed various unofficial national styles of stained glass. "French stained glass tended toward extensive use of blue and red, with other colors used as accents, while German stained glass opted for what I call the ‘Crayola box’ effect, with lots of colors. German glass tends to be more expressionistic, with more detailing of faces and hair."
Though most designers of medieval stained glass are unknown, the iconography of a considerable amount of Netherlandish and German glass is derived from the engravings of such printmakers as the Master E.S., the Housebook Master and Martin Schongauer. Such important painters as Albrecht Dürer, Hans von Kulmbach, Hans Baldung, Lucas Van Leyden, Bernard Van Orley, Jan Gossaert and Hans Holbein the Younger directly supplied designs and cartoons for stained glass, occasionally painting glass themselves. The Flemish master Dirck Vellert even became more renowned for his glass designs than for his panel paintings.
With the rise of the merchant classes in the 15th century, stained glass moved into residences for the first time, in the form of finely painted roundels (most no more than 6 to 8 inches in diameter) highlighted in various shades of yellow and orange against a clear background. Unrestricted by leading, the designs were rendered with painterly and atmospheric effects, heightened by occasional careful scratching away of the grisaille glaze to provide bright accents. Because of their secular settings, these roundels lent themselves to a greater variety of subject matter than church windows, encompassing genre scenes, folktales and allegories in addition to religious subjects. Roundels were especially popular in the Netherlands and in England, while multicolored leaded heraldic windows featuring allegorical personifications of figures brandishing family coats of arms became favored in Germany, where their popularity endured until well into the 17th century.But the glory of Northern European stained glass came to an end with the Reformation. Protestant iconoclasm was responsible for the destruction of much northern European religious art, including stained glass, though the ravages were somewhat selective. "Stained glass windows had an unusually high survival rate based on local whims," Shepherd explains. "Some religious subjects, like the mystical incarnations of the Virgin Mary, were taboo in Great Britain, but other straightforward biblical subjects were fine. The Dutch were ruthless in the oppression and destruction of religious stained glass in their churches, and to this date almost no medieval stained glass from Holland survives." Even worse destruction and dispersal occurred during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic invasions. Just as many French royal Baroque and Renaissance tapestries were burned to retrieve the gold threading, many windows across France and Germany were dismembered for the leading, which was reused for cannons and bullets.
It was only with the rise of the Romantic movement in art and literature and the fascination with the "Gothick" early in the 19th century that medieval and Renaissance stained glass was appreciated anew, particularly in Great Britain. Eccentric collectors such as Sir Hans Soane sought out sections and fragments of windows as much for their lustrous colors as for their ancient charm. "Pieces of old stained glass were often found littering churchyards," notes London dealer Sam Fogg, "and many 19th-century collectors fitted them together with new pieces of glass to make new windows, sometimes completing a figure or, more interestingly, making a composite window where heads, foliage and other details are arranged artistically between colored or clear modern glass."
As stained glass became a fashionable accessory in many a Victorian manor house or chapel, older panels were often extensively augmented with newer glass. "It’s almost impossible to tell from a photograph if a piece of glass is old or new," says Timothy Husband, curator of medieval art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "You have to see it with your fingers; the surface of the glass will tell you how old it is. Older glass often has a very irregular surface, while newer glass tends to be smoother and thinner."
Two of the most important collections of medieval stained glass owned by Americans were formed by J. Pierpont Morgan and Henry Walters. Though much of Morgan’s medieval art collection was donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he kept his stained glass in London, and it was donated after his death to the Victoria and Albert Museum by his son in an effort to offset estate taxes. Walters’ collection, now in the gallery that bears his name in Baltimore, was found after his death, still crated and unopened.
The most assiduous and devoted American collector of medieval stained glass was Raymond Pitcairn, heir to the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company fortune. A devout Swedenborgian, he oversaw the construction of the Swedenborgian Cathedral in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania, about 15 miles north of downtown Philadelphia, from 1915 to 1919. To aid the workers, Pitcairn bought some medieval glass panels as models, but soon became enamored of them as works of art and eventually purchased more than 250 panels for his own Romanesque-style home, "Glencairn," built in the 1920s.
Though many American museums have some excellent examples of stained glass, the finest and most varied collection is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in the Cloisters, atop Fort Tryon Park in upper Manhattan. Stained glass is a particular interest of the Cloisters’ curator; in 1995, Husband presented "The Luminous Image," a landmark exhibition of early 16th-century Netherlandish roundels, and he has been instrumental in upgrading the Metropolitan’s collection in all areas of glass. He is always on the lookout for more silver-stained roundels, and recently added two of particular beauty: a fine Flemish roundel of "The Assumption of Mary of Egypt" and a North Netherlandish roundel depicting "Sorgheloos in Poverty."The story of Sorgheloos ("Carefree") is a kind of secular version of the Prodigal Son, but unlike the Prodigal, poor Sorgheloos experiences no redemption; he fritters away his inheritance and ends up abandoned and alone in poverty. Husband was especially determined to have this particular piece, which depicts the unhappy conclusion of the tale, and after losing it in a bidding war to a dealer at a London auction, he approached the dealer and instantly reserved it. "Some curators will just walk away from an object if they lose it at auction to a dealer, but I had to have this Sorgheloos roundel. It was too important to the collection to lose." One of Husband’s ongoing projects at the Cloisters is the restoration and re-installation of its windows, which, though protected by clear back-plates, still have to be monitored for corrosive effects brought about by pollutants.
The newest museum collection of stained glass is at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Though medieval art has long been represented there by an excellent collection of illuminated manuscripts, it never occurred to the curators to add stained glass to the collection of European decorative arts until the museum’s 2000 exhibition "Painting on Light: Drawings and Stained Glass in the Age of Dürer and Holbein." Organized by Barbara Butts and Lee Hendrix, it was something of a German bookend to the Met’s "Luminous Image" show. The combination of the German design drawings for stained glass (of which the Getty has an unusually fine collection) and the windows derived from them made such an impression that the Getty began to think seriously about adding stained glass to its holdings. "We already had drawings and illuminated manuscripts from the period, and the stained glass made a good fit," explains Hendrix. "So we unofficially began to look around." An opportunity arose in 1993, when Sam Fogg sold the museum his entire stained glass exhibition of more than 30 pieces dating from the 12th to the 16th centuries, which will be installed in the Getty’s new decorative arts galleries, slated to open early next year.
You don’t have to be a museum curator with deep institutional pockets to buy medieval stained glass, Fogg is quick to point out. Fragments such as heads or small figures start at around $5,000, while complete panels, which Fogg calls "very rare and desirable," range from $30,000 to $500,000 or even $1 million. He recently sold a late 13th-century head extracted from a window of Rouen Cathedral for $10,000 and an intact panel depicting three French kings, circa 1500, for $150,000. Fogg says, "It’s a cheap area compared with any other kind of medieval art."
Blumka Gallery, New York
212.734.3222 blumkagallery.com
Daniel Katz, London
011.44.20.7493.0688 katz.co.uk
International Center of Medieval Art, New York
212.928.1146 medievalart.org
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
310.440.7300 getty.edu
Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cloisters, New York
212.535.7710 metmuseum.org
Sam Fogg, London
011.44.20.7534.2100 samfogg.com
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore
410.547.9000 thewalters.org