Stained Glass
The Cathedral Age

The tenth century was the watershed of the Middle Ages. Behind lay five hundred years of barbaric decadence which followed the fall of the Roman Empire. Ahead lay a new European civilization.

In the darkest hour before this dawn, however, Western Christendom suffered more from invading hordes than it had at any time in the five preceding centuries. Muslims struck at the heart of Europe from the south, Vikings from the north and west, and Hungarians and Slavs from the east. Yet even then the vital foundation was being laid on which a bright future was to be built‑a growing population, recovering at last from the vast losses resulting from the appalling plague Of 742. With the coming of a more peaceful era, which also coincided with an improving climate, this population explosion brought about a revival in agriculture, which was of great benefit to feudal landowners and to the Church. The accompanying commercial expansion was even more remarkable, and it created a new, wealthy and eventually powerful class in society‑the merchants.

Such were the material advances which made possible the eventual flowering of medieval culture. The form it took was decided by the fact that this was Christendom. Through the darkest of centuries the Church, whatever its weaknesses, had not lost its influence and the faithful had not lost their faith. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, unbelief was totally alien to the medieval mind. Without belief in God, his angels, his saints and his Church what hope would man have, constantly besieged as he was by the Devil and his cohorts of demons? In these two centuries, the Church possessed more authority and was a more integral part of everyone's life than at any time since.

As villages and towns grew larger and more affluent, the boom in church building began; it was to last for three hundred years, until the middle of the fourteenth century. During that period, thousands of parish churches and eighty cathedrals were built in western Europe. Another factor contributing to this building boom was that the year AD 1000 had been confidently predicted as the date for the end of the world. When this proved wrong, the relief was unbounded and the effect striking. Ralph Glaber, a monk of St Bénigne in Dijon, described how "towards the third year after the year one thousand" the great rebuilding of minsters, cathedrals and village churches began. "Christian people vied with one another in erecting the fairest and richest churches. It was as if the whole world with one accord, casting off its ancient rags, was clothing itself anew in a white robe of churches." The cathedral became the status symbol of wealthy towns, gradually eclipsing the abbey as the main centre of religious and artistic activity. Here, too, in the vast naves, merchants congregated and business transactions were carried out. Many cathedrals were also centres of learning, having schools attached to them, as at Chartres. From these schools the first universities were to evolve in the twelfth century.

Genuine religious zeal, as well as a certain amount of pressure from the Church, ensured that there was no lack of money . Kings, princes, barons, knights, squires, merchants and clerics competed with each other in showering money on their churches, even in their wills, in the hope that thereby they would find favour with God in their lifetimes and their souls would find repose in death. Rich and poor gave in the same hope. Thus devotion to God combined with the new affluence to create the Cathedral Age – the inaugural age of stained glass.

Most of the cathedrals built in the eleventh and in much of the twelfth century were Romanesque. This was a powerful style of architecture based on Roman traditions, but influenced by Byzantium, the Near East and Asia. Characteristically, the Romanesque church had rounded arches and massive walls, which, because they were load-bearing, could not be weakened by being broken up with large expanses of window. The style of the Romanesque glazier was, therefore, necessarily different from that of the following generation of artists, who worked within the framework of the larger windows of the Gothic cathedrals that were built in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The most popular types of window from the early period were the medallion window and the figure window. In the medallion windows, scenes from the Old and New Testaments or the lives of the saints were depicted. They were usually placed along the aisles where they could easily be seen, and they eschewed subtlety so that there should be no mistaking their message. Square or circular iron frames enclosed each medallion scene. The borders surrounding the pictures were exceptionally broad, some up to one‑sixth of the window's total breadth.

Figure windows usually showed a single monumental figure in an unlikely pose, with heavy features and an emphatic gesture. They often occupied the clerestory and even at that height the figures had great impact because of their size. The so‑called five prophets in Augsburg Cathedral are the oldest such windows, and they are among the greatest art treasures of Germany. In England, a few remain of the eighty‑four figures in Canterbury Cathedral which depicted the genealogy of Christ. The most striking figure window is, however, the mid‑twelfth-century masterpiece in Chartres Cathedral, Notre Dame de la Belle Verrière, Our Lady of the Beautiful Glass.

Nowhere, even when the cult of the Virgin was at its height in the late Middle Ages, was the Virgin Mary more revered than at Chartres. According to legend, the first cathedral was built above a Druid grotto dating from about 100 Bc and dedicated to a virgo paritura, a virgin giving birth. The Blessed Virgin herself was said to have written, in Hebrew, to the martyrs who evangelized Chartres, agreeing to her coronation as the church's queen. The cult of the Virgin at Chartres was given great impetus in the ninth century, when , in 876, Charles the Bald, Charlemagne's grandson, gave to the cathedral the palladium, the tunic reputed to have been worn by the Virgin at the birth of Christ. This most sacred of relics, together with La Belle Verrière, survived the fire Of 1194 which destroyed the Romanesque cathedral. The people of Chartres interpreted these miracles as a sign that while the Virgin Mother, by allowing the cathedral to be destroyed, had indicated her wish for a larger and more magnificent cathedral, she had, by saving the relic, shown her love for the faithful.

When the cathedral was rebuilt in magnificent style, the figure of Notre Dame de la Belle Verrière was installed in the choir, where it is now the centrepiece of a large window, surrounded by thirteenth‑century angels. It portrays a seven‑foot‑tall enthroned Virgin with the Christ Child on her lap, his right hand raised in blessing. His left hand holds a book, showing a quotation from Isaiah: "Every valley shall be exalted." The ethereal quality of the colours of medieval glass has never been approached since, and it is the unbelievably luminous blue, set off by ruby and rose, that makes La Belle Verrière so overwhelming.

Romanesque cathedrals seemed particularly prone to being burned down. Canterbury, for example, went up in flames in 1174, Chartres in 1194, while Strasbourg in 1 176 was burned down for the fourth time in one hundred years. Other cathedrals collapsed or were replaced by larger buildings, and with changing tastes the Gothic style of architecture began to emerge in northern France, with dramatic effect on the art of stained glass.

[Appropriately,"the venerated stained‑glass image of Virgin and Child, known as Notre Dame de la Belle Verrière, is in Chartres Cathedral, which is traditionally associated with the glorification of the Virgin. The two sacred figures, surrounded by thirteen th‑cen tury angels, arc depicted in four panels in the centre of this window, which miraculously survived the great fire of 1194.]