stained glass

stained glass, in the arts, the coloured glass used for making decorative windows and other objects through which light passes. Strictly speaking, all coloured glass is “stained,” or coloured by the addition of various metallic oxides while it is in a molten state. Nevertheless, the term stained glass has come to refer primarily to the glass employed in making ornamental or pictorial windows. The singular colour harmonies of the stained-glass window are less due to any special glass-colouring technique itself than to the exploitation of certain properties of transmitted light and the light-adaptive behaviour of human vision. Rarely equalled and never surpassed, the great stained-glass windows of the 12th and early 13th centuries actually predate significant technical advances in the glassmaker’s craft by more than half a century. And much as these advances undoubtedly contributed to the delicacy and refinement of the stained glass of the later Middle Ages, not only were they unable to arrest the decline of the art, but they may rather have hastened it to the extent that they tempted the stained-glass artist to vie with the fresco and easel painter in the naturalistic rendition of their subjects.

Neither painting on stained glass nor its assembly with grooved strips of leading is an indispensable feature of the art. Indeed, the leaded window may well have been preceded by windows employing wooden or other forms of assembly such as the cement tracery that has long been traditional in Islamic architecture, and the single most important technical innovation in 20th-century stained glass, slab glass and concrete, was a variation on the earlier masonry technique.

Elements and principles of design

Of all the painter’s arts, stained glass is probably the most intractable. It is bound not only by the many light-modulating factors that affect its appearance but also by comparatively cumbersome, purely structural demands. And yet no other art seems so little earthbound, so alive, so intrinsically beguiling in its effect. This is because stained glass, far more directly and intensively than other media, exploits the interaction between two highly dynamic phenomena, the one physical and the other organic. The physical factor is light and all of the myriad changes in the general light level and the location and intensity of particular light sources that occur as a matter of course not only from moment to moment but from place to place—a prairie to a forest, a greenhouse to a dungeon. The other phenomenon is the spontaneous light-adaptive process of vision, which seeks to maintain orientation in all luminous environments.

Architecture, by determining the apparent brightness value of the light seen through its window openings, always establishes a definite scale of brightness values with which the stained-glass artist must work. Because the light that penetrated the interior of the 12th- and early 13th-century church took on a brilliance, even harshness, in contrast to the surrounding darkness, the artisans of the period logically composed their windows with a palette of deep, rich colours. When for doctrinal or economic reasons only clear glass could be used, it was decorated with a fine opaque mesh of grisaille, or monochromatically painted ornament, that effectively broke up and softened the light. Later, as the walls of the churches were opened up to admit more and more light, the difference between the interior and exterior light levels was no longer great enough to illuminate the dense, saturated rubies and blues of the earlier period. In the 14th and 15th centuries, generally higher keyed, drier, and more muted colour harmonies were developed. This reflected a growing preference for lighter, less awesome effects and an actual limitation that the architecture of the time imposed upon the medium of stained glass.

The static elements of the glass and its architectural setting are modified by the element of change inherent in natural light. A seemingly endless spectrum of changes in the appearance of stained glass is a result of the changes in the intensity, disposition, atmospheric diffusion, and colour of natural daylight. The luminous life of stained glass, therefore, can best be observed by watching the organic effect of light on the window through the course of a day. If one were to enter Chartres Cathedral just after sunrise on the morning of a clear day, it would be to the east windows, especially those in the clerestory, that one’s eyes would first be drawn. They alone will have come fully to life, and all of the others will still seem to half-exist in a kind of hushed twilight. Gradually, as the sun rises in the sky, these windows will become more luminous. Then the east windows will begin to lose their earlier brilliance to those all along the south flank of the cathedral, which by midday will be fairly aglow from the direct rays of the sun. The light streaming through the south windows, however, will have raised the light level inside the north windows opposite them sufficiently to create a distinct, though by no means unpleasant, muting of the radiance of the latter. If the sun at this point disappears behind a cloud and the sky becomes generally overcast, the appearance of all of the windows is immediately and dramatically altered. Because the light, now diffused, comes more or less equally from all directions, the south windows will lose some of their earlier brilliance and vivacity and the north windows will recover theirs. The overall atmosphere of the cathedral is distinctly cooler and graver in its effect, and more than ever before one begins to become aware of absolute differences in the tonality of the various windows themselves. The grisaille windows in the east end of the cathedral, the highly keyed 15th-century window in the Vendôme Chapel in the south aisle of the nave, and the three 12th-century windows over the great west portal all stand out as being substantially more luminous than the rest. If, late in the afternoon, the sun reappears, the viewer is treated to an extraordinary spectacle as the blues in the west windows, by far the most intense in the cathedral, are further emblazoned by the direct rays of the sun. Should the main doors of the cathedral be opened, the direct rays of the late afternoon sun, streaming halfway down the nave of the cathedral, will cast a blinding pall over all the windows within their vicinity until the doors are closed once more. Then as the sky begins to redden with the setting sun, the intense 12th-century blues in the west windows lose their former intensity, and the warmer colours, especially the rubies, become so fiery and assertive that they seem almost to have displaced the blues as the predominant colour in the windows. Finally, when the sun is gone the whole cathedral is plunged once more into a deep twilight, which gradually diminishes until there is no light at all.

Insofar as stained glass may be considered an art of painting, it must be considered an art of painting with light. Whatever techniques or materials it may employ, its own most unique and indispensable effects are always the product of colouring, refracting, obscuring, and fragmenting light.

Materials and techniques

Contrary to popular belief, the glassmaker and the stained-glass artist could seldom have been the same person even in the earliest times; in fact, the two arts were rarely practiced at the same location. The glassmaking works was most readily set up at the edge of a forest, where the tremendous quantities of firewood, ash, and sand that were necessary for the making of glass could be found, whereas the stained-glass-window-making studios were normally set up near the major building sites. The stained-glass artist, thus, has always been dependent upon the glassmaker for his primary material. Coloured with metallic oxides while in a molten state—copper for ruby, cobalt for blue, manganese for purple, antimony for yellow, iron for green—sheets of medieval glass were produced by blowing a bubble of glass, manipulating it into a tubular shape, cutting away the ends to form a cylinder, slitting the cylinder lengthwise down one side, and flattening it into a sheet while the glass was still red hot and in a pliable state. It was then allowed to cool very slowly in a kiln so that it would be properly annealed and not too difficult to cut up into whatever shapes might be required for the design. Since these sheets of glass, with the exception of a type known as flashed glass, were intrinsically coloured with one basic colour throughout, changes from one colour to another in the design of a window could be effected only by introducing separate pieces of glass in each of the requisite colours.

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Whether by accident or by deliberate intent, the glass made in the 12th and 13th centuries had almost the ideal combination of crudity and refinement for stained glass. The sheets, 10 by 12 inches (25 by 30 centimetres) in size, were both flat enough and thin enough to be cut very accurately into the necessary shapes, yet still variable enough in thickness (from less than 1/8 inch [3 millimetres] to as much as 5/16 inch [8 millimetres]) to have rich transitions in the depth of their colours. With the progress of glass technology in the Middle Ages and Renaissance came the ability to produce larger, thinner, and flatter sheets of glass in a considerably larger range of colours than had been possible in the 13th century. At each distinguishable stage in this development, however, the glass became less visually interesting as an aesthetic element in its own right. The Gothic Revivalists later recognized this effect, and in the mid-19th century they initiated a return to the earlier methods of producing glass. They developed the so-called “antique” glass, which is remarkably similar in colour, texture, and shading to the glass that was used in the 12th- and 13th-century windows. “Antique” glass remains the basic material used in stained-glass windows to this day.