Stained Glass
The Age of Gothic Art

Gothic architecture, conceived by Abbé Suger at St Denis in the twelfth century, swept through western Europe in the thirteenth century with the speed of the plague. The number of Gothic cathedrals which were begun, completed or were in the process of being built during this period was staggering. France led the way, and her Gothic masterpieces included Chartres, Laon, Armens, Bourges, Notre Dame de Paris, Reims and Rouen. Salisbury, Wells, Lincoln (which was rebuilt after being destroyed by an earthquake, not by the more customary fire), Winchester and part of York were the main Gothic achievements in England. Germany, which embarked upon Gothic architecture later than France and England, produced Cologne, Freiburg and Regensburg cathedrals, as well as the cathedral in Strasbourg, which was at that time a city of the German Empire. Spain built cathedrals in this architectural style in Burgos, Toledo and León, and one of Italy's finest Gothic buildings is the cathedral of Siena; its façade, striped with bands of marble, shows the influence of northern Gothic modified to Italian taste.

To call the architecture of these cathedrals Gothic would have meant nothing to their builders‑the label was not used, until the seventeenth century. At the time when the new style came into vogue it was described as opus modernus, or opus Francigenum to indicate the country of its origin. (Romanesque, used to describe the architecture and art that Gothic superseded, was introduced even later than the term Gothic; it did not make its appearance until the nineteenth century.)

The term Gothic evokes a magnificent cathedral with glorious pointed arches and flying buttresses. But the essential Gothic quality is far more than its outward appearance. Gothic architecture represented an escape from the constraints of the Dark Ages, a new adventurous outlook, an explosion of the human spirit. When, by the fifteenth century, its youthful adventurousness grew into self-satisfied middle age, the life went out of it.

As the Gothic style spread from France throughout Europe it was at first copied and then adapted. The French themselves boldly experimented with techniques that would enable them to build ever more soaring cathedrals – from the modest seventy‑eight‑foot‑high vaulting at Laon, to 120 feet at Chartres, 125 feet at Reims and Bourges, 139 feet at Amiens and 157 feet at Beauvais, where "vaulting ambition" technically overreached itself and the vaulting fell down. While the French Gothic cathedral builders strove for height, the English builders developed a passion for length, and the Spanish for width. Germany made a special contri­bution to the Gothic style with the Hallenkirche, or hall­ church, which was characterized by aisles approximately the same height as the nave and choir and by the lack of triforium or clerestory. A typical example, and one of the earliest, is the Church of St Elis , abeth in Marburg.

It was climate, however, as much as national preferences which affected the development of stained‑glass windows. The ideal of building walls of glass, which was common to architects in France, England and Germany, was not shared by builders in Spain and Italy. In these countries the southern sun was too bright and too hot for vast expanses of glass to be tolerable. Indeed, some of the early large windows were later blocked up.

In northern Europe, as the windows grew larger, the colour of the glass, particularly the blues, grew darker. The aim was not to make the cathedrals dark‑although that was often the result‑but to give the light a mystical quality. Today, almost eight hundred years later, with so much original glass gone and what remains so affected by age, it is almost impossible to recapture the feeling of religious sensuousness which must have so excited the medieval worshipper. Such an experience might, however, still be possible at Chartres, in France. and at León, in Spain.

A contrary development during the thirteenth century was the increasing popularity of grisaille windows. Made of only slightly tinted glass, their effect depended upon light and design rather than on colour and figures. At first grisaille windows were simple, but later they became more elaborate and medallions were introduced into them. There are several much argued theories to explain the popularity of grisaille glass at a time when the art of figurative stained glass was reaching its apogee. Some of the reasons given are practical: that stained glass was too expensive; that there was not enough coloured glass available to fill all of the new acreage of windows; that the churches had become too dark, especially in sunless northern Europe. But these reasonable explanations are complicated by theological disputes, which centre around the ascetic St Bernard, founder of the Cistercian order.

In 1134 the general chapter of the Order had decreed that the windows in Cistercian abbeys should be of clear glass, without colour or cross (meaning representations of the Crucifixion). This ban must have been frustrating for the Cistercian master glaziers, who responded by creating the most beautiful designs with the leads in which the clear glass was set. There is a fine example, one of the few remaining, in the church of Obazine Abbey in the diocese of Tulle in southern France. But the appeal of such a window is intellectual rather than emotional.

Although Cistercian abbeys were austere, St Bernard reluctantly admitted that bishops, having to provide in their cathedrals for both the learned and the ignorant, "might have to arouse the devotion of fleshly people with material adornments, seeing that they cannot do so with the things of the spirit". But even there, it was emphasized, there was to be no excess.

Grisaille glass was first used more in England (for example, in York, Salisbury and Lincoln cathedrals) than in France, where stained glass was then at its most brilliant. How far the use of grisaille was the result of Cistercian influence it is impossible to say. Their monasteries had spread throughout Europe. When St Bernard died in 1153 there were three hundred and that number grew to more than five hundred by the end of the twelfth century. But by then the Cistercians had relaxed their rules to allow the use of figures in‑their windows.

In France and England, in the thirteenth century, medallion windows began to oust the figure windows of the previous century. There were also some notable rose windows in this period. The circle is not in the vertical Gothic tradition, but it was too elemental a shape to be ignored. Among the outstanding Gothic rose windows are those at Chartres, Notre Dame de Paris, Laon and Lyons. A rare example of an English rose of this period is M the north transept of Lincoln Cathedral. Although it is much mutilated, a great part of it is thought to be original. Rejoicing in the name the Dean's Eye‑because it looks out on the deanery – it depicts the Day of judgement and the Kingdom of Heaven.

Cathedrals were not the only wonders of the thirteenth century. Small chapels, too, were built at this time and, although they could not match the great cathedrals in grandeur, they often outdid them in splendour. In England there is St Stephen's Chapel, begun by Edward I as part of the Palace of Westminster. Ste Chapelle, built by Louis IX in the courtyard of his palace on the Ile de la Cité, Paris, stands out as one of the minor gems. A cage of coloured glass, it is indeed the epitome of this colourful century.

[The north rose in the cathedral of Notre Dame, Paris, epitomizes tile dynamic splendour of thirteenth‑century French stained glass. Concentric bands of predominantly blue and violet light, divided by dark stone bars, which emphasize their brilliance, radiate in tile form of an enormous wheel around the Virgin and Child, who are depicted at its centre.]