The Illuminated Window: Stories across Time
Virginia Chieffo Raguin
Reaktion Books, £30, 272 pages
Writing in the first half of the 12th century, the monk and craftsman known as Theophilus Presbyter – in his three volume treatise on devotional art, De Diversis Artibus – lifted the lid on the ecclesiastical furnishings of his own day, their creation, function and use. His first and third books are devoted to painting and metalwork respectively, while the second concentrates on the use of stained glass, with its potential for what he calls works of “inestimable beauty”.
A skill that went back to Roman times came into its own with the development of Gothic architecture, with soaring vaults and spaces to be filled. Beginning with Abbot Suger’s work at Saint-Denis in the 1140s, it spread out across Europe and has left behind some of the f nest architecture that the world has ever seen. Stained-glass windows enhanced the new style, with long coloured shafts of light caressing and warming cold carved stone.
Hugh of St Victor associated the provision of natural illumination in churches with the enlightenment of the soul, while William Durandus noted windows’ impermeability to wind and rain, while still allowing light through. Metaphor abounded, although in a more practical sense stained-glass windows also provided a perfect means of presenting biblical stories to the illiterate – which was, after all, almost everyone.
Some of those great buildings feature in Virginia Chieffo Raguin’s The Illuminated Window, including Canterbury, Chartres and Cologne. Perhaps the f nest example she presents is the famous Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, partly designed out of devotion to the great relic of the Crown of Thorns that used to be kept there, and partly as physical propaganda to advance the political interests of Louis IX and his Capetian line.
Humbler buildings have their place, too. At a parish level, especially in England, iconoclasm means that survival rates are inevitably low. Dr Raguin, who teaches medieval history at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, knows where to look; she includes the spectacular pieces of early glass at All Saints, North Street, in York, with its set of the Corporal Works of Mercy, and the outstanding work at Fairford in Gloucestershire.
The Fairford glass is some of the most remarkable that we have: scenes from the life of Our Lord and Our Lady in the nave and aisles, with angels and demons in the clerestory above a who’s-who of biblical saints and sinners. Made in the Netherlands, they speak of the interplay between late-medieval England and the Continent, and the lofty ambitions of those who commissioned them for a par ish church in a sleepy village.
Importantly, Raguin does not conf ne herself to the Middle Ages. She takes a long view of the glazier’s art through the centuries, drawing out themes and – importantly – linking stained glass to other media like illuminated manuscripts, engravings and paintings and enunciating the relationships between them. The bottom line, I suppose, is that in every period these artefacts have something to tell us, if we know where to look.
Away from medieval churches, Raguin ranges from civic works commissioned for Swiss guildhalls to the geometric designs of the Pink Mosque in Shiraz, Iran, and from the Tiffany Chapel (created for the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893) to the choices made for clients’ homes by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
If too often we think of an ecclesiastical monopoly over stained glass, Raguin shows that we shouldn’t. The numerous lavish images that accompany the text are phenomenally good. What is particularly fascinating is how modern some of the ancient stuff looks – vibrant and angular – and simultaneously how timeless some of the later work seems.
Raguin could hardly have chosen better examples. This is an invigorating and engaging book, full of learned scholarship hidden in readable and compelling prose, and awash with colour and beauty. Food for thought, the next time you go to church and see daylight streaming through a kaleidoscope of different hues. Gerard Manley Hopkins had the sum of it: “Glory be to God for dappled things.”
<em>Mary Walker lives and teaches in Oxfordshire</em>.
