Stained Glass Window

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Cathédrale de Chartres: Death and Assumption of the Virgin

Technical Development

Stained glass is not so much a medieval craft, as a craft that was brought to perfection in the Middle Ages. (Reyntiens 1990, 8)

Theology

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. (Genesis 1:3–4)
For the evolution of stained glass the influence of the author known as the Pseudo-Dionysius is of paramount interest. . . . Writing in the sixth century, he produced two books which, brief though they were, proved to be highly influential. His two treatises, The Heavenly Names and The Celestial Hierarchies, which dealt with the composition of heaven and angels, in their ascending degrees of importance, were the inspiration of most theologians in the Middle Ages. From the point of view of the stained-glass artist these two books triggered-off the concept of light being the main constituent, if not the bed-rock, of matter. All was made of light, and the light was the material reflection of the heavenly light, the wisdom of God. (Reyntiens 1990, 19)

Art and Architecture

The medieval lay masters wanted to master their materials, and to bend and fashion them in such a way that anything was possible. They vaulted huge spaces on slender points of support. They introduced light into their enormous covered spaces in such a way that this light itself constituted a kind of decoration, indeed painting. There were no longer walls but rather translucent tapestries. (Viollet-le-Duc 1990, 260)
Imagine a world in which everything was bright and shining and new, a world in which one thing reflected off another in such a way as to enhance the attractiveness and beauty of both—and further, that the visual quality of reflection and transparency was an indication of a higher, moral order, an order which was the beginning of the ultimate reality, which, in a word, reflected heaven. This is the concept of ‘claritas’ as it was understood in terms of scholastic philosophy of the thirteenth century and probably earlier. It was the most highly prized of medieval visual qualities. (Reyntiens 1990, 20)

Repositioning

Works Cited

Raguin, Virginia Chieffo. 2003. Stained Glass: From Its Origins to the Present. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

Reyntiens, Patrick. 1990. The Beauty of Stained Glass. London: The Herbert Press.

Sowers, Robert. 1954. The Lost Art: A Survey of One Thousand Years of Stained Glass. New York: George Wittenborn, Inc.

Tasker, Edward G. 1993. Encyclopedia of Medieval Church Art. London: B.T. Batsford Ltd.

Tryggvadottir, Nina. 1968. Painting with Light through Colored Glass. Leonardo, Vol. 1, No. 2. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel. 1990. The Foundations of Architecture: Selections from the Dictionnaire Raisonné. Translation by Kenneth D. Whitehead. New York: George Braziller, Inc.