Medieval Stained Glass

Si les lambris peints de la chapelle de Merléac (22) font depuis longtemps
déjà parler d’eux, de même que les splendides vitraux qui ornent encore
l’édifice, l’impressionnant décor héraldique des intrados des grandes arcades de la nef est resté le parent pauvre de cette récente redécouverte d’un patrimoine d’exception. Aux yeux des historiens de l’art, ces peintures
héraldiques ne constituent peut-être pas la part la plus séduisante d’un
très riche décor, mais elles ne fournissent pas moins une clef de lecture
essentielle de l’édifice et du contexte de son élévation. Elles font par
ailleurs écho à d’autres éléments du décor conservé de la chapelle à
commencer par la peinture murale de la partie supérieure de la nef. Ce
décor héraldique rassemble en effet en un même lieu les membres les
plus prestigieux de la parenté et du réseau d’alliés des Rohan et plus
précisément du vicomte Jean Ier au moment où sa famille s’impose comme la cheville ouvrière de la paix civile retrouvée après les décennies de luttes fratricides de la guerre de Succession. Mais, pour être apprécié à sa juste valeur, ce type de décor emblématique mérite d’être analysé dans le détail de sa mise en scène et confronté à quelques rares exemples contemporains, trop peu nombreux hélas à avoir été conservés jusqu’à nous.

This chapter deals with the origins of stained glass: why, when, and what was used to screen the windows in buildings before c. year 1000. Archaeological finds made in the last few decades have confirmed what was hinted by textual sources and by occasional finds: glass was indeed employed in the windows before the High Middle Ages, although it was cut in geometrical shapes and did not show any painting. While Roman and late Roman buildings – baths, private dwellings, then Christian basilicas – have shown remains of geometrical panes, the earliest instances of figurative stained-glass windows, made with panels cut like sectilia, date to the early eight century and have been found in Merovingian France and Anglo-Saxon England. A large fragment of what is by now the earliest figurative window in the West with its original leading, in which pieces of coloured glass are held together to create the bust of Christ – still like an opus sectile, with no painting on it – has come to light in 2007 in a central-Italian monastery destroyed in 881 AD. The appearance of the painting called grisaille, with which it was possible to achieve more detailed figurative designs than simply by juxtaposing geometrically cut panes, is instead to be localized in the northern Carolingian domain, and dated after the mid-eighth century. The contemporary evolution of window screens in Byzantium and in Islam will also be taken into account in a comparative approach.

In due passi del De Administratione, Suger, abate di Saint-Denis, celebra le vetrate policrome
del coro della sua abbaziale, menzionando la spesa profusa per la materia saphirorum
fornita ai maestri vetrai, con riferimento al blu intenso che fortemente caratterizza
le vetrate. Questo articolo si propone di indagare i possibili significati dell’espressione
materia saphirorum, tradotta in maniera discordante e non soddisfacente nelle moderne
traduzioni esistenti e si propone, inoltre, di ricondurre il suo significato al più ampio
contesto in cui si inserisce l’opera di Suger, tenendo in considerazione il valore spirituale
che l’abate assegnava alle vetrate policrome del coro e alle pietre preziose dell’arredo
liturgico, entrambe variamente interpretate come prefigurazioni materiali della Gerusalemme
celeste. L’analisi sarà condotta nel contesto più ampio degli studi sul colore,
che coinvolge aspetti linguistici, culturali ed antropologici. Saranno inoltre considerate
le questioni relative ai cromonimi in uso nel Medioevo, la nomenclatura delle pietre
preziose e gli studi sui pigmenti per vetrate, ricorrendo all’analisi di diverse fonti scritte
medievali (testi esegetici, trattati tecnici, lapidari, enciclopedie) e ai risultati delle analisi
archeometriche eseguite su vetri da finestra risalenti al XII secolo.

Een kuil vol vensterglas en glazeniersafval uit Oldenzaal geeft een schat aan informatie. Niet alleen over gebrandschilderd glas uit de vijftiende tot de zeventiende eeuw en over het wereldbeeld van de inwoners van Oldenzaal in die tijd, maar vooral over het ambacht en het netwerk van een glazenier.

In Artistic Change at St-Denis: Abbot Suger's Program and the Early Twelfth-Century Controversy over Art (Princeton University Press, 1990), I apply the conclusions of my earlier study of the social theory of medieval art as presented in The "Things of Greater Importance": Bernard of Clairvaux's Apologia and the Medieval Attitude Toward Art (University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1990) to a complex and previously only partially understood case--that is, I test the practicality of my earlier study.  The art program of the monastery of Saint-Denis, just outside Paris, under Abbot Suger (1122-1151) is of enormous importance in the history of art, being considered to be the origin of Gothic architecture, sculpture, and stained glass.  Suger's writings, upon which I base my study, are among the most famous in the history of art.  In applying the issues of the early twelfth-century controversy over art to this program, it becomes clear that the situation at Saint-Denis was more complex than previously thought.  For example, rather than being the artistic expression of centuries-old Pseudo-Dionysian light mysticism, as has been believed, it can be shown that the artistic change initiated at Saint-Denis was a middle-ground reaction to the current controversy over art, especially to the criticism that art acted as a spiritual distraction to the monk.  And far from being the product of the personal idiosyncrasies of Suger, as has often said, the well known obscurity of the art of Saint-Denis was an intentional obscurity whose purpose was to provide an art so complex that it could be used as a justification of monastic art in its claim to function on the same level as scriptural study, which was unquestioned as a legitimate monastic pursuit.  It was in this sense that Suger wrote that his art was "accessible only to the litterati"--and not to the visiting illiterate pilgrim--previous scholarship not realizing that, in the vocabulary of early twelfth-century monasticism, litteratus is a technical term referring to the literate choir monk.  At the same time, however, I also show that Suger's claim can be fully understood only with recognition of the inherent contradiction that these same artworks were in fact fully accessible visually, if not intellectually, to the visiting illiterate lay pilgrim as well--a contradiction of which Suger was fully aware.  My conclusions, which have become broadly accepted, have fundamentally changed our view of the best-known moment of artistic change in medieval art history.

The chapter house and vestibule of York Minster contains one of the best preserved ensembles of medieval stained glass of its period in England.  The imagery of the vestibule glazing has often been overlooked by scholars; perhaps due to the lack of documentary evidence or the fact that many of the figures depicted in the glass are unidentifiable. Although it is briefly mentioned in general works on the Minster, there has been no attempt to analyse the window’s subject matter or to consider the iconography of the scheme in relation to its setting. York provides a unique opportunity as one of the windows in discussion has recently been restored; offering an extra dimension to this dissertation. This study aims to highlight the key themes within the vestibule by focusing on two windows on the north wall: CHn9 depicting saintly kings, and CHn8 depicting kings and queens. Using unpublished sources, James Torre’s account in the 1690’s and restoration documentation, alongside background research, it reveals possible identities of the figures within the two windows. It then investigates comparisons between the two windows and how the themes and iconography of medieval kingship coincides with the imagery and function of the chapter house. The results suggest that the imagery used in the vestibule forms a correlation with that of the chapter house through a pictorial pathway, in which to promote the richness and power of the chapter of York.

A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, Blackwell Companions in Art History, 2nd ed. (Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 2019) (a collection of thirty-nine original essays from leading and upcoming scholars in the field, each historiographically analyzing one of a systematic and editorially determined range of subjects in the development of Romanesque and Gothic art history; eleven new essays were added to the revised original thirty essays of the first edition; this includes my introductory essay, "A Sense of Loss: An Overview of the Historiography of Romanesque and Gothic Art").

1. Introduction
A Sense of Loss: An Overview of the Historiography of Romanesque and Gothic Art
Conrad Rudolph

2. Artifex and Opifex – The Medieval Artist
Beate Fricke

3. Vision
Cynthia Hahn

4. Materials, Materia, "Materiality"
Aden Kumler

5. Reception of Images by Medieval Viewers
Madeline H. Caviness

6. Narrative, Narratology, and Meaning
Suzanne Lewis

7. Formalism
Linda Seidel

8. Gender and Medieval Art
Brigitte Kurmann-Schwarz

9. Gregory the Great and Image Theory in Northern Europe During the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries
Herbert L. Kessler

10. Iconography
Shirin Fozi

11. Art and Exegesis
Christopher G. Hughes

12. Whodunit? Patronage, the Canon, and the Problematics of Agency in Romanesque and Gothic Art
Jill Caskey

13. Collecting (and Display)
Pierre Alain Mariaux

14. The Concept of Spolia
Dale Kinney

15. The Monstrous
Thomas E. A. Dale

16. Making Sense of Marginalized Images in Manuscripts and Religious Architecture
Laura Kendrick

17. Definitions and Explanations of the Romanesque Style in Architecture from the 1960s to the Present Day
Eric Fernie

18. Romanesque Sculpture in Northern Europe
Colum Hourihane

19. Modern Origins of Romanesque Sculpture
Robert A. Maxwell

20. The Historiography of Romanesque Manuscript Illumination
Adam Cohen

21. The Study of Gothic Architecture
Stephen Murray

22. France, Germany, and the Historiography of Gothic Sculpture
Jacqueline Jung

23. Gothic Manuscript Illustration: The Case of France
Anne D. Hedeman

24. “Specially English”: Gothic Illumination c.1190 to the Early Fourteenth Century
Kathryn A. Smith

25. From Institutional to Private and from Latin to the Vernacular: German Manuscript Illumination in the Thirteenth Century
Michael Curschmann

26. Glazing Medieval Buildings
Elizabeth Pastan

27. Toward a Historiography of the Sumptuous Arts
Brigitte Buettner

28. Reliquaries
Cynthia Hahn

29. East Meets West: The Art and Architecture of the Crusader States
Jaroslav Folda

30. Gothic in the Latin East
Michalis Olympios

31. Art and Liturgy in the Middle Ages
Eric Palazzo

32. Architectural Layout: Design, Structure, and Construction in Northern Europe
Marie-Thérèse Zenner

33. Sculptural Programs
Bruno Boerner

34. The Art and Architecture of Female Monasticism
Jeffrey F. Hamburger

35. Cistercian Architecture
Peter Fergusson

36. Art and Pilgrimage: Mapping the Way
Paula Gerson

37. "The Scattered Limbs of the Giant": Recollecting Medieval Architectural Revivals
Tina Waldeier Bizzarro

38. Medieval Art Collections
Janet Marquardt

39. The Modern Medieval Museum
Michelle P. Brown

Most of the medieval window glass in England remains unpublished. This thesis contributes to the eventual realisation of a comprehensive history of this fragile
medium, through a study of window glass in the two Midland’s counties of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire from the period 1400 to 1550. In it the evidence of
surviving glass and the evidence of lost glazing (derived from a wide range of published and unpublished sources) are presented as a unified whole in an analytical catalogue, following the conventions of the International Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi. A good deal of this material is presented for the first time. The catalogue forms the basis for a brief introduction, in which the themes of the patronage, iconography, style and technique of the glass are briefly considered.

Die Westrose der Pariser Sainte-Chapelle, gestaltet um 1490 im Auftrag von  König Charles VIII., ist in vielerlei Hinsicht eine rätselhafte Schöpfung. Sie repräsentiert ein Werk der Glaskunst des ausgehenden 15. Jahrhundert, in einem ansonsten stilreinen Bauwerk aus der Zeit Ludwigs des Heiligen (1214-1270). Andererseits stellt sie ein Thema dar, dem man in der Glasmalerei nur selten begegnet: eine Apokalypse. Die Offenbarung des Johannes ist hingegen sehr stark vertreten in der frühen Buchmalerei, und wird, seit Albrecht Dürer 1498 seine Holzschnitt-Apokalypse publizierte, auch zunehmend im gedruckten Buch populär. Der anonyme Künstler der Pariser Apokalypsenrose, der seinen Notnamen diesem monumentalen Werk verdankt, war ein besonders aktiver Illustrator in der Pariser Buchwelt um 1500. Er illuminierte Handschriften und schuf Holz- wie Metallschnitte für Inkunabeln. Sein vielfältiges Werk wird in der vorliegenden Studie vorgestellt.

The vast examination and analysis of Abbot Suger and the choir of Saint-Denis have mainly focused on the role and importance of the light coming through the stained-glass windows, neglecting the role of color in defining the cathedral's interior space. The same can be said of the references in Suger's writings to the colors of the stained-glass windows as well as of other early medieval goldsmithery objects once held in the basilica. This article analyzes mentions of color in Suger's writings in connection with related works of art. Considerations include the different ways in which color was understood in medieval culture, possible interpretations of the expression materia saphirorum and the vexata quaestio of the links between Suger and the metaphysics of light in Dionysius the Areopagite. Altogether, these considerations show how a full understanding of color-related issues is necessary for a correct interpretation of both Suger's writings and the stained-glass windows in the basilica's choir.

Normandy is today one of the areas of France that retains the
largest group of ancient stained glass. At the beginning of the
XIXth century, an important number of windows moved to the art
market and Rouen was particularly affected by this phenomenon.
The example of Rouen cathedral is well documented and allow
to follow the journey of a medieval stained glass, from the
windows of the church to the collector. The painted glass was
removed from its original location after a restoration, then stolen
by the glass painter in charge. He transformed an hagiographic
stained glass into a small royal portrait, much more adapted
to the market requirements. Then ready to be selled, this work
went to the parisian market, in the hands of art dealers who
had connections with americans collectors. This communication
will retrace the journey of this stained glass, which became the
property of the famous William Hearst.

31. 3. 2022 StředověC JinaX Lecture - Hans Belting Library, Deaprtment of Art History, MUNI Brno

Abstract:
Color appears to us as something whose most intimate nature definitely eludes us. In the society of images, color informs, as in maps, it seduces, as in advertising, it narrates, as in cinema, it organizes, as in infographics, it prohibits, as in road signs, it shows off, as in sample collections. Yet still today, color is commonly perceived as something that belongs to colored things, as a material element. Very rarely, outside the scientific sphere, is color understood as the visual perception of the various electromagnetic radiations included in the visible spectrum.
In pre-industrial times, and in particular, in the Middle Ages, color was considered mainly in its material aspects, but, at the same time, it was intimately linked to the symbolic meanings attributed to it. These meanings varied according to historical moments, social situations, religion, etc., and they were never fixed: depending on the context of use, the same color could be given very different meanings.
This lecture aims to show some of these aspects related to the perception and role played by color in medieval societies with particular reference to the art of the central Middle Ages (twelfth-thirteenth century) and to the medium that perhaps more than any other focused on the visual power of colors: stained glass. The role played by color in the Middle Ages, medieval color-theories and other aspects related to colors’ materiality will be also retraced.

The art program of Abbot Suger at the monastery of Saint-Denis in the mid-twelfth century has long been credited with the reintroduction of “allegory” into Western European visual art after centuries of disuse.  While such sweeping claims can no longer be considered to be the case in regard to the exegetical level of allegory per se, Suger’s program does very much seem to be the principal initial source of a new elite art–at first in the very public claims of an exegetically based monumental art “accessible only to the litterati,” that is, understandable only to the spiritually literate choir monk, and then, later, in the widespread use of a more or less similar art by a segment of the newly emerging urban class on the basis of a certain participation in religious literary culture.

In this study, I show how Suger invented a new exegetical art that, in its complexity, claimed to function on the same level as scriptural study and so claimed to be acceptable in the context of the current controversy over monastic art spearheaded by Bernard of Clairvaux, in which art was seen by some as a spiritual distraction to the monk.  I show how Suger’s claims were based on the traditional dichotomy of the uninitiate (the layperson) and the initiate (the monk), but how this two-level spiritual hierarchy was contradicted by new thought on the use of art and the senses in the form of a three-level spiritual hierarchy that excluded the users of such art from the highest level.  I consider what this can tell us not only about the works of art at Saint-Denis but also about the nature of visual art in this crucible of intellectual and artistic activity–monasticism–during a remarkable period of artistic change by relating differing understandings of this three-level hierarchy to a representative spectrum of contemporary monastic images.  I demonstrate the presence of Hugh of Saint Victor or his thought in the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit panel of the so-called Allegorical Window and so, to whatever degree, in the window program in general.  And I argue that this new systematized and fully exegetical art appeared first not at Saint-Denis around fifteen to twenty years before the consecration of the east end of Suger’s new church in the highly successful large-scale image of The Mystic Ark, painted at Saint Victor in Paris around 1125 to 1130, although Saint-Denis remains the principal source for its eventual widespread employment in Western European artistic culture.

Unintended by Suger, however, the special potential of his particular conception of a fully exegetical, monumental, publicly accessible, and systematically deployed work of art in the medium of the stained glass window gradually became apparent beyond the highly circumscribed confines of monastic culture in the emergence of a new elite art for the literate lay user–as seen, for example, in the Good Samaritan Window of Chartres Cathedral.  These new exegetical stained glass windows acted as both vehicles and even sites of “textual communities,” that is, a voluntary association based not upon the ability to read, although some members were literate, but upon the ability to interpret a text recognized as authoritative that forms the basis of a shared belief.  The social dynamics of twelfth-century France were changing dramatically and the increasingly better educated public, no longer content to remain at the lowest level of the spiritual hierarchy, wanted to participate more actively in the acquisition of elite spiritual knowledge.  In borrowing this strongly literarily and exegetically based art for religious exercises, this aspect of lay spirituality grew out of monastic spirituality, and both Suger and Hugh took part–however indirectly–in the construction of a new elite art for the properly literate and the spiritually literate lay person, an essentially new form of visual art that would become a fundamental part of artistic culture in the West for centuries to come.

I investigate what the consequences of this particular reintroduction of exegesis were at this time of great demographic transformation.  I suggest that, in the early and mid twelfth century, the relatively restricted elite images such as the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit panel were beyond the intellectual understanding of the uninitiate in the two-level hierarchy of the initiate and the uninitiate and so tended to affirm the social distinction between the two groups and thus reinforce the social structure because the uninitiate would have recognized that the monks knew the meaning of these images even if they did not. However, with the increasing lay literacy of the later twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the case with the new elite public art of the same time–even if it were seen as operating in the three-level spiritual hierarchy–seems to be quite different.  For the relatively public, new elite images such as the Good Samaritan Window of Chartres with their textual communities would seem to have contributed to the social transformation of medieval society in that, at least in the beginning, they would have challenged the centuries-old monopoly on literacy of the various wings of the Church and so played a part, however small, in the visible emergence of the literate new urban elite, broadly understood. At the same time, they would have intensified the distinction between this literate new urban elite and what might be called the illiterate lower class–both of them formerly conceived of as forming the same social group.  In this way, far from reinforcing the current social structure, works of art like these would seem to have contributed to the dynamic of change that pervaded contemporary society.

Finally, I ask what the invention of the exegetical stained glass window at Saint-Denis, one of the most original art programs of Western culture, reveals about the nature of originality in the twelfth century. And I reconsider the roles of Suger and, now, Hugh in the invention of the exegetical stained glass window and in the construction of a new elite art more broadly speaking.

My Ph.D dissertation, that I reworked to publish my first monograph, Illuminando colorat”. La vetrata tra la tarda Antichità e l’alto Medioevo attraverso le fonti e l’archeologia. (2003), was praised as one of the most meaningful and groundbreaking publications in the history of stained-glass and architecture by B. Kurmann-Schwarz and C. Lautier, Recherches récentes sur le vitrail médiéval 1998–2009, 1st part in “Kunstchronik”, 63 (2010), 261–84, esp. 269: «les multiples articles et la thèse sur le vitrail de l’Antiquité tardive et du haut Moyen Age de F. Dell’Acqua ont changé notre regard sur ce sujet et ont inspiré de nouveaux travaux dans ce domaine».

The aim of present paper is to demonstrate the iconographical interpretations of the
north rose window of the cathedral of Chartres. In the centre of the upper section Virgin Mary is enthroned, with prophets and kings from the Old Testament depicted around her. Between the rose and the five lancets underneath, the Capetian lilies and Castilian castles encompass the whole window. The lower part presents kings and prophets from the Old Testament, with Saint Anne holding the Virgin in their midst. The hardly explicable program suggests that the regent-queen, Blanche of Castile donated the windows. This presumption raises the question: how could the iconographical program can be read in the light of the Capetian lilies and the Castilian castles? After the reconstruction of the architectural chronology, I propose an iconographical interpretation comparing the transept- and choir windows. One part of the stained glass window, the five lancets, could be placed in the iconographical tradition of the virtues and vices. The complex relationship of the royal family in the representations of choir and transept could help to identify the queen’s role in the donation. It is well-known that in the French Kingdom that kings defined their ideal role as that of successors to the Old Testament kings. The north stained glass window could be an early instance of Capetian royal ideology.

The origin of Cistercian stained glass – can theology serve as aesthetic inspiration?
The statutes of the general chapter of the Cistercian Order, which define principal rules governing the lives of Cistercian monks, also provide regulations regarding Cistercian churches and monasteries. They repeatedly stress, that these structures should not be decorated with colourful glass or with glass decorated with any sort of depictions. The earliest Cistercian stained glass, of which the oldest preserved can be dated to around mid-12th C., was made of colourless glass that was not painted. Its only decoration consisted of geometric and foliage patterns made with lead came strips. The immediate question is whether the development of Cistercian stained glass was inspired by any source other than succinct Cistercian statutes? The famous Apologia to Abbot William written by St. Bernard of Clairvaux does not discuss the question of stained glass. Furthermore, it is doubtful whether the author had any interest in art and consciously wanted to shape Cistercian aesthetics. Nonetheless, his theological writings include elements that bring to mind associations with constitutive features of Cistercian stained glass – Bernard extensively discusses and explores the rich symbolic meaning of light and lilies which, in a simplified form, appears in early Cistercian stained glass. It is evident that compared to colourful stained glass, which was frequently used at the time, Cistercian blank glazing let significantly more light inside the buildings they decorated. In fact, white colour was present everywhere in Cistercian iconography: from various elements of Cistercian churches to Cistercian habits. It had rich symbolic meaning – in the context of the colour of Cistercian habit the monks themselves explained that white is associated with chastity, clarity and piety. It is therefore, justifiable to presume that similar values have been associated with Cistercian stained glass. It is clear that studies of the origins of ascetic Cistercian stained glass ought to consider both purely practical factors and theological background. After all, stained glass formed one of the elements of the Cistercian world – well organised and consistent in every detail.