behind, the mullions. The expansion to a picture right across the window was only a question of time. Not that the artist ventured as yet to disregard the architectural setting of his picture—that happened later on—but that he often composed it with such cunning reference to intervening stonework that it did not interfere with it. It has been argued that each separate light of a window ought to be complete in itself. On the other hand it has proved possible to make due acknowledgment of architectural conditions without cramping design in that way. There can be no doubt as to the variety and breadth of treatment gained by accepting the whole window as field for a design. And, when a number of lights go to make a window, it is the window, and no separate part of it, which is the main consideration.
By the end of the Gothic period, glass painters proceeded on an entirely different method from that of the 13th century. The designer of early days began with glazing: he thought in mosaic and leadwork; the lines he first drew were the lines of glazing; painting was only a supplementary process, enabling him to get what lead lines would not give. The Late Gothic draughtsman began with the idea of painting; glazing was to him of secondary importance; he reached a stage (Creation window, Great Malvern) where it is clear that he first sketched out his design, and then bethought him how to glaze it in such wise that the leadwork (which once boldly outlined everything) should not interfere with the picture. The artful way in which he would introduce little bits of colour into a window almost entirely white, makes it certain that he had always at the back of his mind the consideration of the glazing to come. So long as he thought of that, and did not resent it, all was fairly well with glass painting, but there came a point where he found it difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile the extreme delicacy of his painting upon white glass with the comparatively brutal strength of his lead lines. It is here that the conditions of painting and glazing clash at last.
It must not be supposed that Late Gothic windows were never by any chance rich in colour. Local conservatism and personal predilection prevented anything like monotonous progress in a single direction. There is (St Sebald, Nuremberg) Middle Gothic glass as dense in colour as any 13th-century work, and Late Gothic (Troyes cathedral) which, from its colour, one might take at first to be a century earlier than it is. In Italy (Florence) and to some extent in Spain (Seville) it was the custom to make canopywork so rich in colour that it was more like part of the picture than a frame to it. But that was by exception. The tendency was towards lighter windows. Glass itself was less deeply stained when painters depended more upon their power of deepening it by paint. It was the seeking after delicate effects of painting, quite as much as the desire to let light into the church, which determined the tone of later windows. The clearer the glass the more scope it gave for painting.
It is convenient to draw a line between Gothic art and Renaissance. Nothing is easier than to say that windows in which crocketed canopywork occurs are Gothic, and that those with arabesque are Renaissance. But that is an arbitrary distinction, which does not really distinguish. Some of the most beautiful work in glass, such for example as that at Auch, is so plainly intermediate between two styles that it is impossible to describe it as anything but “transitional.” And, apart from particular instances, we have only to look at the best Late Gothic work to see that it is informed by the new spirit, and at fine Renaissance glass to observe how it conforms to Gothic traditions of workmanship. The new idea gave a spurt to Gothic art; and it was Gothic impetus which carried Renaissance glass painting to the summit of accomplishment reached in the first half of the 16th century. When that subsided, and the pictorial spirit of the age at last prevailed, the bright days of glass were at an end. If we have to refer to the early Renaissance as the culminating period of glass painting, it is because the technique of an earlier period found in it freer and fuller expression. With the Renaissance, design broke free from the restraints of tradition.
An interesting development of Renaissance design was the framing of pictures in golden-yellow arabesque ornament, scarcely architectural enough to be called canopywork, and reminiscent rather of beaten goldsmith’s work than of stone carving. This did for the glass picture what a gilt frame does for a painting in oil. Very often framework of any kind was dispensed with. The primitive idea of accepting bars and mullions as boundaries of design, and filling the compartments formed by them with a medley of little subjects, lingered on. The result was delightfully broken colour, but inevitable confusion; for iron and masonry do not effectively separate glass pictures. There was no longer in late glass any pretence of preserving the plane of the window. It was commonly designed to suggest that one saw out of it. Throughout the period of the Renaissance, architectural and landscape backgrounds play an important part in design. An extremely beautiful feature in early 16th-century French glass pictures (Rouen, &c.) is the little peep of distant country delicately painted upon the pale-blue glass which represents the sky. In larger work landscape and architecture were commonly painted upon white (King’s College, Cambridge). The landscape effect was always happiest when one or other of these conventions was adopted. Canopywork never went quite out of fashion. For a long while the plan was still to frame coloured pictures in white. Theoretically this is no less effectually to be done by Italian than by Gothic shrinework. Practically the architectural setting assumed in the 16th century more and more the aspect of background to the figures, and, in order that it should take its place in the picture, they painted it so heavily that it no longer told as white. Already in van Orley’s magnificent transept windows at St Gudule, Brussels, the great triumphal arch behind the kneeling donors and their patron saints (in late glass donors take more and more the place of holy personages) tells dark against the clear ground. There came a time, towards the end of the century, when, as in the wonderful windows at Gouda, the very quality of white glass is lost in heavily painted shadow.
The pictorial ambition of the glass painter, active from the first, was kept for centuries within the bounds of decoration. Medallion subjects were framed in ornament, standing figures in canopywork, and pictures were conceived with regard to the window and its place in architecture. Severity of treatment in design may have been due more to the limitations of technique than to restraint on the part of the painter. The point is that it led to unsurpassed results. It was by absolute reliance upon the depth and brilliancy of self-coloured glass that all the beautiful effects of early glass were obtained. We need not compare early mosaic with later painted glass; each was in its way admirable; but the early manner is the more peculiar to glass, if not the more proper to it. The ruder and more archaic design gives in fullest measure the glory of glass—for the loss of which no quality of painting ever got in glass quite makes amends. The pictorial effects compatible with glass design are those which go with pure, brilliant and translucent colour. The ideal of a “primitive” Italian painter was more or less to be realized in glass: that of a Dutch realist was not. It is astonishing what glass painters did in the way of light and shade. But the fact remains that heavy painting obscured the glass, that shadows rendered in opaque surface-colour lacked translucency, and that in seeking before all things the effects of shadow and relief, glass painters of the 17th century fell short of the qualities on the one hand of glass and on the other of painting.
The course of glass painting was not so even as this general survey of its progress might seem to imply. It was quickened here, impeded there, by historic events. The art made a splendid start in France; but its development was stayed by the disasters of war, just when in England it was thriving under the Plantagenets. It revived again under Francis I. In Germany it was with the prosperity of the free cities of the Empire that glass painting prospered. In the Netherlands it blossomed out under the favour of Charles V. In the Swiss Confederacy its direction was determined by civil and domestic instead of church patronage. In most countries there were in different districts local schools of glass painting, each with some character of its own. To what extent design was affected by national temperament it is not easy to say. The marked divergence of the Flemish from the
