Ch. 8 - The Twelfth Century Glass - Page 2

is readable, the best hope will be to provide the
best glasses with the largest possible field; and, choosing an hour
when the church is empty, take seat about halfway up the nave,
facing toward the western entrance with a morning light, so that the
glass of the western windows shall not stand in direct sun.

The glass of the three lancets is the oldest in the cathedral. If
the portal beneath it, with the sculpture, was built in the twenty
or thirty years before 1150, the glass could not be much later. It
goes with the Abbe Suger's glass at Saint-Denis, which was surely
made as early as 1140-50, since the Abbe was a long time at work on
it, before he died in 1152. Their perfection proves, what his
biographer asserted, that the Abbe Suger spent many years as well as
much money on his windows at Saint-Denis, and the specialists affirm
that the three lancets at Chartres are quite as good as what remains
of Suger's work. Viollet-le-Duc and M. Paul Durand, the Government
expert, are positive that this glass is the finest ever made, as far
as record exists; and that the northern lancet representing the Tree
of Jesse stands at the head of all glasswork whatever. The windows
claim, therefore, to be the most splendid colour decoration the
world ever saw, since no other material, neither silk nor gold, and
no opaque colour laid on with a brush, can compare with translucent
glass, and even the Ravenna mosaics or Chinese porcelains are
darkness beside them.

The claim may not be modest, but it is none of ours. Viollet-le-Duc
must answer for his own sins, and he chose the lancet window of the
Tree of Jesse for the subject of his lecture on glass in general, as
the most complete and perfect example of this greatest decorative
art. Once more, in following him, one is dragged, in spite of one's
self, into technique, and, what is worse, into a colour world whose
technique was forgotten five hundred years ago. Viollet-le-Duc tried
to recover it. "After studying our best French windows," he
cautiously suggests that "one might maintain," as their secret of
harmony, that "the first condition for an artist in glass is to know
how to manage blue. The blue is the light in windows, and light has
value only by opposition." The radiating power of blue is,
therefore, the starting-point, and on this matter Viollet-le-Duc has
much to say which a student would need to master; but a tourist
never should study, or he ceases to be a tourist; and it is enough
for us if we know that, to get the value they wanted, the artists
hatched their blues with lines, covered their surface with figures
as though with screens, and tied their blue within its own field
with narrow circlets of white or yellow, which,