Glass-painters [antikvár]

Introduction Most medieval artists and craftsmen remain anonymous, but the resulting obscurity has been particularly impenetrable as far as glass-painters are concerned. Very little has: been written on the lives and careers of those who were responsible for one of the most public of all medieval arts. The names of outstanding glass-painters - John Thornton, Peter Hemmel or Engrand Le Prince, for example - are not widely known, whereas manuscript illuminators like Jean Pucelle or the Limbourg Brothers, panel painters like Jan van Eyck, and sculptors such as Claus Sluter, have all been the subjects of major art historical studies. Had the finest glass-painters worked instead on canvas or panel their reputation would no doubt be similarly established. It is profoundly ironic that outstanding glass-painters, working in a medium which after all is concerned with light, should end up in relative obscurity. The reasons for this are that documentary evidence for their activities is often scarce; it frequently relates to lost works and its interpretation may be problematic in other ways. In addition, medieval stained glass contains the seeds of its own destruction for the glass of that period is subject to chemical deterioration and the lead which holds the windows together has a limited life. Furthermore, stained glass has been the object of deliberate programmes of destruction at the hands of iconoclasts from the sixteenth century onwards; general neglect, war and changes in fashion have taken their toll on this most vulnerable of art forms. An appreciation of the glass-painter's craft all too often requires a considerable feat of creative imagination from the onlooker eager to reconstruct the original appearance and effect of the window, when the images themselves may often be scarcely legible. A visitor to a huge cathedral such as Chartres, Cologne or York Minster can be forgiven for finding the overall effect of the windows impressive but the meaning of the individual panels baffling. Interest in the medium may also have suffered from a widespread lack of understanding of the techniques of the glass-painter's craft. The situation is further clouded for the layman by potentially confusing terminology: in the English language the term 'stained glass' is used in a very wide sense for what might, more accurately, be referred to as 'painted glass'. The term is derived from one specific glass-painting technique, yellow stain, a method of colouring white glass yellow. This was not invented until the early years of the fourteenth century, but nevertheless, 'stained glass' is the term used for leaded windows made before and after its invention, and whether or not the windows are coloured or grisaille (predominantly white glass). Brown or black paint, employed in the Middle Ages for drawing and shading, was used for windows, although not all were painted. Sometimes the yellow stain technique was employed, but again, not always. Only in the post-medieval period was the palette of 'paint-able' colours enlarged with the development of enamel glass-painting which was alien to the traditional medieval craft in nearly every respect. The English artist-craftsman Christopher Whall even refused to admit this type of glass-painting into his definition of stained glass, writing in his technical manual of 1905 that: 'stained glass means pieces of coloured glass put together with strips of lead into the forms of windows; not a picture painted on glass with coloured paints'. In languages other than English this confusion between painting and staining is less acute. In German, the medium is called die Glasmalerei and in French le vitrail. In fact, in all three languages, the term for the artist -Glasmaler, peintre-verrier and glass-painter - are almost equal in according the painter of glass the same linguistic status as artists working on vellum, in fresco, or on panel. Because of a combination of historical circumstances, glass-painters, unlike artists working in