PLATE L
THE PROPHETS JOEL, ZEPHANIAH, AMOS, AND HOSEA,
FROM THE NORTH AISLE OF THE NAVE, FAIRFORD
Late Fifteenth Century
The general
scheme.
The "Doom."
Yet though one may thus trace various hands in the work, the windows form a connected whole, the planning of which must have been the work of one mind. The arrangement is the traditional one whereby the whole church forms an exposition of the foundations of the Christian faith. The windows of the nave contain single figures, the Prophets on the north side (Plate L.) facing the Apostles on the south. Each Apostle holds a verse of the creed, and the Prophet opposite him a corresponding verse from his writings. The four Evangelists face the four Latin Fathers. Farther east, within the now vanished screen, the windows unfold the Gospel story, those on the north leading up to the Passion in the east window, those on the south showing the Descent into Hell, the Resurrection, and the events that followed. Then, as the spectator turns to the west, there faces him, in the great west window, the tremendous "Doom" or Last Judgment. Do not look at the upper half where Christ sits enthroned as Judge, surrounded by saints and angels; it has suffered the fate of the Winchester College glass. Blown in by a storm in 1703, it was "restored" in the middle of the nineteenth century, which means that the old glass was removed and a bad copy substituted. Where the blue ring of Heaven passes through the tracery lights the original glass remains, and the difference between it and the new is an object lesson in good and bad stained-glass work.
But below the transom the window is still unspoilt. In the midst stands Michael with sword and scales, and below him the dead are rising naked from their graves. Michael himself, it must be confessed, is a somewhat lackadaisical figure; it was not possible for an artist of that time and school to give a figure the arresting quality of the Methuselah in Plate III.; neither does one's eye linger long over the Saved, who troop up the golden stairs on Michael's right, but is irresistibly attracted to the other side of the picture, where in a great glow of ruby glass are seen the Flames of Hell, to which devils—grey and blue at the outer edge of the fire, but darker and more purple as they are farther in—are carrying the wretched souls of the Lost. Just outside the flames an angel and a devil are fighting in mid-air for the possession of a soul, and a comparison of these figures with the similar ones in the Descent into Limbo or "Harrying of Hell," which is by the same hand as the east window, shows at once the difference between the work of the two men.
The west windows of the aisles.
On either side the west windows of the aisles contain, as types of the Last Judgment, on the north, the Judgment of Solomon, which protected the innocent; on the south, that of David on the Amalekite, which condemned the guilty. It seems to me not unlikely that the position of these windows was originally reversed, Solomon's judgment being on the side of the Saved in the "Doom" and David's on that of the Lost. They have both suffered greatly in the storm of 1703 and contain many blank spaces, but from what remains they seem to me, together with the "Doom," the most accomplished work in the church.
The clerestory.
Very splendid, too, are the Persecutors of the Church, who, clad in all the bravery of wickedness, fill the north side of the clerestory, fronting the somewhat insipid row of Martyrs on the other side. Here is Herod transfixing an Innocent; Nero, if it is he, with the head of St. Paul; the King of the Huns, and Diocletian, perhaps, with bows and arrows; and, in a dark blue robe, Judas, with the halter round his neck and the bag in his hand, between Annas and Caiaphas. In the tracery lights above the Martyrs are rather commonplace white and gold angels, but over the Persecutors are fascinating little figures of devils, grey, blue, and green, on a background of ruby flames. I am afraid there is no question which series the artist enjoyed doing most!
Fairford marks the end of mediæval stained glass in England. Conservative artists might still, as at Malvern and at St. Neots in Cornwall, try to carry on the older tradition, but their works are isolated survivals. The Fairford windows themselves represent, as I have said, a very short-lived phase in English glass, of which they are the most complete example, others being the fragments in Henry VII.'s Chapel at Westminster and the remains of Bishop Fox's glazing in Winchester Cathedral, now collected into the east clerestory window there. Flower's own work at King's College, Cambridge, twenty years later than Fairford, shows signs of change, and that of his successors in the same building, as at Basingstoke, at Balliol College and elsewhere must be classed as wholly of the Renaissance. With Fairford, then, these notes on Stained Glass of the Middle Ages may fitly end.
INDEX
- Becket, St. Thomas, 69, 74, 80, 87, 91
- "Blue Dick" Culmer, 56
- Bourges, 112
- Brabourne, 24
- Byzantine Influence, 24, 52, 69
- Canopy—
- Canterbury Cathedral—
- Chalons, 55
- Chartres Cathedral—
- Chartres, Church of St. Pierre, 185
- Chartres, Clement of, 46, 95
- His work at Rouen, 114
- Chartres, St. Denis and Canterbury, school of, 44
- Cloisonné enamel, 23
- Denis, St., Abbey of—
- Designs, method of drawing, 89
- Diaper, mosaic, 76, 80, 96, 103
- Diaper, painted, 59, 77, 149
- Egyptian glass, 16
- Enamel, brown, 5, 21
- Enamel, coloured, 6
- Evreux Cathedral—
- Evreux, Church of St. Taurin, 250
- Exeter Cathedral—
- Glass—
- Gloucester Cathedral, 197
- Grisaille—
- Mahommedan windows, 19
- Malvern, Great, 253
- Mans, Le, Cathedral—
- Matt shading—
- Mauclerc, Pierre, 99
- Medallion windows, 36
- Merton College Chapel, Oxford, 153
- Monkwearmouth, 22
- Montfort, Amaury de, 99
- Mosaic character of early glass, 34
- Mosaic character of early glass loss of, 218
- Natural plant forms in ornament, 145
- Natural plant forms, abandonment of, 221
- New College Antechapel, Oxford, 201
- Rheims, Cathedral, 112
- Rheims, Church of St. Remi, 118
- Roman windows, 17
- Rouen—
- Ruby glass, 33, 49, 223
- S-like pose of figures, 141
- Sainte Chapelle, 112
- Salisbury, 119
- Selling, 167
- Sens, 87
- Shrewsbury, 198
- Soissons, 118
- Sophia, St., 18
- Stain, silver, 8, 130, 240
- Suger, Abbot, 45, 53, 98
- Tewkesbury, 198, 207
- Thomas the Glazier, 201
- Thornton, John, 228
- Troyes, 77, 166
- "Type and antitype" windows, 61, 73, 88
- Wells, 198, 200
- Westminster Abbey—
- Westwell, 112
- William of Sens, 57, 87
- William of Wykeham, 201, 207
- Winchester Cathedral—
- Winchester College Chapel, 208
THE END
Printed by R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh
FOOTNOTES
[1] Pliny's word "nitrum" does not mean what we call nitre, which is potassium nitrate, but natron, or natural carbonate of soda, of which deposits are found in the Nile Delta. It is this that is meant in the passage in Jeremiah: "Though thou wash thee with nitre, and take thee much sope...."
[2] These panes are, I believe, of cast glass; but I have seen Roman window glass found at Silchester that was obviously "blown" glass and of very good quality.
[3] By some writers it has been claimed that the whole idea of stained-glass work was derived from cloisonné enamel; but from the fact that the glazing of windows in glass and metal had been known long before, I think the course of events I have suggested above to have been more probable.
[4] There is some at Augsburg and at Tegernsee in Bavaria which may perhaps be a little earlier, but it is not certain.
[5] It seems to have been the practice of glass-workers in the Middle Ages to describe the different colours in glass by the jewel they most nearly resembled. A survival of this at the present day is their universal habit of calling red glass "ruby."
[6] Some critics have thought the figure merely a copy from an earlier design, but I cannot agree with them.
[7] The little piece of white with yellow stain under the right toe is, of course, a fifteenth century scrap.
[8] Were it not for the difference in the source of the light one would be reminded of Kipling's lines:—
"The first are white with the heat of Hell and the second are red with pain,"
and
"... Tomlinson looked up and up, and saw against the night
The belly of a tortured star blood-red in Hellmouth light;
And Tomlinson looked down and down, and saw beneath his feet
The frontlet of a tortured star milk-white in Hellmouth heat."
[9] This is a later feature, and found at Bourges and elsewhere.
[10] The miraculous budding of Aaron's rod was considered a type of the Virgin Birth.
[11] "Westminster Abbey and the Kings' Craftsmen."
[12] This is not altogether conclusive. The fleur-de-lis and castle had been a favourite ornament in French glass since their adoption by St. Louis.
[13] From the east.
[14] In 1306 this would be William de Greenfield, under whom the nave was building, and in 1320 William de Melton, who finished it.
[15] Lasteyrie would have it that the existing windows represent this glazing,—an extraordinary mistake for him to make,—but it is just possible that they contain figures from the older windows.
[16] Perhaps it is unfair to blame Thornton, for in the contract he undertakes to work "secundum ordinationem Decani et Capituli."
[17] This is thought by some to be a piece of something else inserted here, but its effect on the design is very happy.
[18] It is true that the glass is not now in its original position, but I think it must always have filled two lights.
[19] This is fully gone into by Canon Carbonel in an article in Memorials of Old Gloucestershire. Another theory he examines and rejects is that they were the work of the Dutch painter Aeps.