Windows: A Book About Stained & Painted Glass. Lewis F. Day
surface (darker or lighter, according to the amount of stippling). This was not only more translucent than the smeared colour but more easily graduated, and capable of being so manipulated, and so softened at the edges, as readily to give a very fair amount of modelling. This shading was often supplemented by dark lines or hatchings put in with a brush, as well as by lines scraped out of the tint to lighten it. But in any case there was for a while nothing like heavy shading. Even in work belonging to the fifteenth century, and especially in English glass, as at York, Cirencester, Ross, &c., it is quite a common thing to find that the drawing is mainly in line, very delicately done, helped out by the merest hint of shading in tint. This glass is sometimes a little flat in effect, and it is not equal in force to contemporary foreign work; but it is peculiarly refined in execution, and it has qualities of glass-like sparkle and translucency which more than make amends for any lack of solidity in painting. Solidity is just the one thing we can best dispense with in glass.
A comparison of the two borders on pages 38 and 175, both German work, will show how little difference of principle there was between the thirteenth century craftsman and his immediate successor. The difference in style between the two is strikingly marked—the one is quite Romanesque in character, the detail of the other is comparatively naturalistic; but when you come to look at the way they are executed, the way the glazing is mapped out, the way the leads emphasise the outlines, whilst paint is only used to make out details which lead could not give—you will see that the new man has altered his mind more with regard to what he wants to do in glass than as to how he wants to do it. Very much might be said with regard to the two figures on this page and the opposite. The French designer has departed from the archaic composition of the earlier Englishman, and put more life and action into his figure, but there is very little difference in the technique of the two men, less than appears in the illustrations; for, as it happens, one drawing aims at giving the lines of the glass, the other at showing its effect. The fourteenth century figure on page 51 relies more than these last upon painting. The folds of the saint’s tunic, for example, are not merely traced in outline, but there is some effect of modelling in them.
It will be instructive also to compare the fourteenth century hop pattern on page 173 with the fourteenth century vine on page 364, and the fifteenth century example on page 345. In the first the method of proceeding is almost as strictly mosaic as though it had been a scroll of the preceding century. Leaves, stalks, and fruits are glazed in light colour upon dark, and bounded by the constructional lines of lead. In the second, though the main forms are still outlined by the leads, much greater use is made of paint: the topmost leaf is in one piece of glass with the stalk of the tree, and all the leaves are relieved by means of shading. In the third the artist has practically drawn his vine scroll, and then thought how best he could glaze it; and the leads come very much as they may.
This last-mentioned proceeding is typical of a period not yet under discussion, but the second illustrates very fairly the supplementary use of paint made in the fourteenth century.
A rather unusual but suggestive form of fourteenth century glazing is shown on page 176. It was the almost invariable practice at this period, as in the preceding centuries, to distinguish the pattern, whether of scroll or border, by relieving it against a background of contrasting colour, usually light against dark; but here the border is varicoloured, without other ground than the opaque pigment used for painting out the forms of the leaves, etc., and filling in between them. The method lends itself only to design in which the forms are so closely packed as to leave not too much ground to be filled in. A fair amount of solid paint about the leaves and stalks does no harm. A good deal was used in Early work, and it results in happier effects than when minute bits of background are laboriously leaded in. The main point is—and it is one the early glaziers very carefully observed—that the glass through which the light is allowed to come should not be made dirty with paint. It was mentioned before (page 35) how, from the first, a background would be painted solid and a diaper picked out of it. Further examples of that are shown overleaf and on pages 88 and 103, though, as will be seen, a considerable portion of the glass is by this means obscured, the effect is still brilliant; and in proportion as lighter and brighter tints of glass came into use, it became more and more necessary; in fact, it never died out. The diaper opposite belongs to the fifteenth century, and the minuter of the three diapers above, as well as those on pages 88 and 103, belong to the sixteenth century.
32. Diapers scratched out.
Now that the reader may be presumed to have a perfectly clear idea of the process of the early glazier, and to realise the distinctly mosaic character of old glass, it is time mention should be made of two important intermediate methods of glass staining which presently began to affect the character of stained glass windows.
Allusion has been made (page 2) to the Roman practice of making glass in strata of two colours, which they carved cameo-fashion in imitation of onyx and the like; at least, one tour de force of this kind is familiar to every one in the famous Portland vase, in which the outer layer of white glass is in great part ground away, leaving the design in cameo upon dark blue. The mediæval glass-blower seems from the first to have been acquainted with this method of coating a sheet of glass with glass of a different colour. As the Roman coated his dull blue with opaque white glass, so he coated translucent white with rich pot-metal colour. It was not a very difficult operation. He had only to dip his lump of molten white into a pot of coloured glass, and, according to the quantity of coloured material adhering to it, so his bubble of glass (and consequently the sheet into which it was opened out) was spread with a thinner or thicker skin of colour. The Gothic craftsman took advantage of this facility, in so far as he had any occasion for its use. The occasion arose owing to the density of the red glass he employed, which was such that, if he had made it of the thickness of the rest of his glass, it would have been practically opaque. To have made it very much thinner would have been to make it more fragile; and in any case, it was easier to make a good job of the glazing when the glass was all pretty much of a thickness. A layer of red upon white offered a simple and practical way out of the difficulty.
What is called “ruby” glass, therefore, is not red all through, but only throughout one half or a third of its thickness. The colour is only, so to speak, the jam upon the bread; but the red and the white glass are amalgamated at such a temperature as to be all but indivisible, to all intents and purposes as thoroughly one as ordinary pot-metal glass.
For a long while glass painters used this ruby glass and a blue glass made in the same way precisely as though it had been self-coloured. But in shaping a piece of ruby glass, especially with their inadequate appliances, they would be bound sometimes to chip off at the edges little flakes of red, revealing as many little flaws of white. This would be sure to suggest, sooner or later, the deliberate grinding away of the ruby stratum in places where a spot of white was needed smaller than could conveniently be leaded in. As to the precise date at which some ingenious artist may first have used this device, it may be left to archæology to speculate. It must have been a very laborious