The Illuminated Church and the Rayonnant Style

Light, Vision, and Architecture.

There is an intimate relation between architecture and its decoration. Whereas in early Christian and early medieval churches mosaics and paintings on walls had been the primary medium for the presentation of sacred stories, the elimination of solid mural surfaces and the transformation of the Gothic building into a skeletal frame led to the ascendancy of stained glass during the twelfth century. No doubt, the importance of an aesthetic that emphasized light as a metaphor of the Divine and spiritual experience spurred the creation of an architectural system that made a maximum expanse of stained glass possible. A third factor to consider is the rise of interest, during the twelfth century, in vision and optics. Not only were scholars curious about how physical objects and visual phenomena—rocks or rainbows—were seen, but they also explored the nature of what might be called "spiritual vision." How was it possible to understand St. John when he wrote in Revelations, chapter 21, "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth—And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God"? As an explanation, Richard of Saint-Victor (d. 1173), the author of a commentary on Revelations, formulated four categories of vision. The first was the "simple perception of matter": I see a tree. The second viewed an object's "outward appearance," but saw a mystical significance in it: I see a rose that is a symbol of the Virgin Mary. The third level of vision was that of spiritual perception in which one discovered, to quote Richard, "the truth of hidden things by means of forms and figures." This is the experience described by St. John, who saw heaven in the form of a city. The fourth and highest level was the mystical mode in which the divine was encountered face to face. It is important to keep these notions of vision in mind when thinking about medieval architecture and its figurative decoration. Images, of course, were physical things, but through them Christians gained access to a realm beyond the mundane world. And the architecture of the church composed an elaborate frame for those pictures that could lead the worshipper to that higher, spiritual mode of vision.

STAINED
Glass

Historical Origins

Stained glass work is a phenomenon of the twelfth century, but one whose history can be traced far earlier. Indeed, the Romans had used glass made of local sand or silica in windows to transmit light and keep out insects and the elements. Decorative glass was used in windows in sacred buildings in the Byzantine Empire, in Syria, and in France (by about the sixth century at Lyon), as well as in Britain in Northumberland during the Anglo-Saxon period. Windows in the Carolingian period used colored glass, but the glass did not represent people or stories and was not painted. Augsburg Cathedral in Germany in about 1130 seems to have had decorative windows with fairly elaborate programs of painting, and Saint-Denis (1135) seems to have been the earliest full program (depicting a series of linked narrative episodes) in France.

Making Stained Glass

Shortly before the first mention of decorative stained glass windows in churches, detailed instructions for making them appeared in the treatise On Various Arts (c. 1100) by the monk Theophilus. He gave instructions for coloring glass, cutting and laying it out in designs on flat worktables, and assembling the pieces in a frame. The glass used in cathedrals and the wealthier parish church windows could be of two types—an older kind known as "potmetal" glass, colored in molten state by the addition of various metal oxides, or a "painted" type, further colored for detailed areas like faces or clothing folds by the addition of paints made of iron filings and pulverized glass suspended in a vehicle of wine or sometimes of urine. This paint could range in color from thick black to light gray, and it created a translucent effect. Once the pattern was achieved, the glass was fired in a kiln, bonding the paint to the surface permanently as a sort of glaze.

Color and Shapes

Ingeniously, the flat pieces of colored glass had designs traced on them with the tip of a tool like a hot poker, and then cold water was applied, causing the glass to crack exactly along the lines. The shape was further refined by using a holding tool called a grozer and a pair of pliers with a nipper-like jaw to crack off tiny pieces of the glass until the desired shape was reached. During the fourteenth century, a new addition to the glassmaker's toolbox was a stain made of silver oxide, which gives a range of colors from lemon yellow to bright orange, depending on how long the glass was fired. Thus, the artist could virtually paint on the glass and not have to join so many different colored pieces to obtain the desired design. Typical palettes included green, pink, yellow, blue, and shades of red. When the design was created, the pieces of glass were assembled on the flat glassmaker's board and held together in a mosaic of irregular shapes given structural strength by lead channels called cames. A groove along each edge of the came fit the piece of glass, and the resultant pattern was securely soldered together to form a large sheet that was shaped to fit in the arch of the window, encased in a stiffening iron frame.

Variations

About 100 years after the general introduction of stained glass, the dark, rich colors—reds and blues—changed to grisaille, a type of monochrome silvery gray which admitted more light. Grisaille could be unpainted when used in floral or geometric patterns, but was sometimes painted with foliate motifs, as at Salisbury Cathedral in England. From about 1150 on, grisaille glass in its natural state of green, pink, or clear was especially popular with the Cistercians, who avoided spectacular decoration; eventually grisaille was combined with the regular painted glass in some churches, such as Clermont Cathedral in France. As early as 1080–1100, stained glass was used in windows in York Minster in figurative scenes. Canterbury Cathedral was glazed with figurative windows from about 1180 to 1220. From about 1225, in addition to the scenes of New and Old Testament events and the lives of the saints, heraldic motifs and royal arms began to appear in church windows, often signifying the social status of a donor of the window or benefactor of the church. Patrons or donors sometimes had themselves memorialized in the windows of churches, as in the case of Abbot Suger, shown supplicating the Virgin in a window at Saint-Denis. Guilds who gave windows were often represented with scenes of their members (for example, shoemakers or bakers) pursuing their trades in the lower parts of the windows. Stained glass was carefully placed for best viewing, often in the windows of the end of the transept to give maximum visibility. Aisles had biblical subjects, and rose windows showed cosmological scenes or perhaps depictions of the Apocalypse and Last Judgment, while upper or clerestory windows often had large-scale individual figures, which were easier to interpret from far below.

Rayonnant Architecture.

The course of Gothic architecture can be described in terms of a series of structural innovations, all leading in the direction of greater light and visual space. The combination of the pointed arch, ribbed vault, and flying buttresses led to a new type of structure that was no longer an opaque box punctuated by intermittent window openings but rather a cage-like frame. As the size of windows expanded in the twelfth century, glass surfaces were subdivided into manageable sections. In the Chartres clerestory, the two tall pointed lancets with an oculus ("circular opening") are partitioned by flat pieces of stone, or plate tracery, that make them appear to be three holes punched through a solid wall. A new solution was proposed at Reims Cathedral in the 1210s, where the window was designed along the same lines as the other elements of the structure—as a taut network of slender ornamental shafts or mullions called "bar tracery." This invention had an enormous impact on the appearance of buildings, and, ultimately, on the way architecture was experienced. By the mid-thirteenth century, not only had bar tracery been developed into elaborate window patterns—at Amiens Cathedral, four-part windows decorate the clerestory while six-lancet compositions appear in the choir—but grids of delicate shafts began to spread over the remaining solid walls of the interior and exterior. In the interiors of new projects, including the rebuilding of Saint-Denis, the nave of Strasbourg Cathedral, or the choir of Clermont Cathedral, the networks of tracery were coordinated with piers composed of bundles of thin colonnettes to create an overall architecture of consistently delicate scale. On the exterior, the west façade of Strasbourg Cathedral (1275 fl.) in eastern France presents one of the most extravagant expressions of bar tracery, in which a fantastic fretwork of stone completely disguises the load-bearing walls behind. Gothic architecture between around 1240 and 1380 is often called the "Rayonnant," taking its name from the radiating spokes of the spectacular rose windows that dominate façades, as in the transepts of Notre-Dame in Paris or the west façade at Strasbourg. Although the Rayonnant is usually discussed as a phase in which architects refined forms to achieve an even greater degree of lightness and elegance, its development was a response to the visual experience of the church interior illuminated by stained glass.

The Sainte-Chapelle.

In two separate purchases of 1239 and 1241, Louis IX, king of France, acquired the most precious relics in Christendom: objects associated with the Crucifixion of Jesus. After bringing the Crown of Thorns, a large piece of the Cross, nails, the sponge, and the lance to his capital in Paris, he set about erecting an appropriately magnificent chapel to honor them in the heart of his palace. Like Charlemagne's chapel at Aachen, the Sainte-Chapelle, built between 1241 and 1248, contained two levels. A low, broad chapel on the ground floor, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, provided a base for the tall upper chapel where the relics of Christ were displayed and the king and his court worshipped. In this remarkable upper chapel, the architecture is reduced to thin clusters of vertical colonnettes, linked by iron chains that support the vault canopies and frame enormous, fifty-foot high stained glass windows. Its design resembles closely the triforium and clerestory of the nave of Amiens Cathedral, built in the 1220s and 1230s, producing the sensation that the visitor has been lifted up into a zone of space and light. Moreover, the architecture is clearly arranged as scaffolding that provided visual cues for apprehending the different ranks represented by the painting, sculpture, and stained glass. For example, closest to eye level and framed in the quatrefoils (four-lobed ornaments) of the wall arcade are paintings (now badly damaged) of local Parisian saints. Sculpted figures of the twelve apostles then appear attached to the columns, their architectural symbols, and lead the gaze up to the windows that present the entire cycle of divine history from Genesis to the Second Coming. Here the architecture creates distinct patterns for each level. The images of the earthly lives of local saints are framed by arcades organized in three units of two, while the stained glass narratives appear in twoand four-lancet windows. Second, as one moves upward across these architectural thresholds, the medium also changes from the more physical substance of opaque paint and three-dimensional sculpture to the jewel-like light of the windows. Although the architecture of the Sainte-Chapelle did not impose a rigid system that dictated the placement of certain images or media in specific locations, its careful organization and relentless subdivision of surfaces into panels, arcades, and niches on multiple levels created a flexible, but structured framework that measured the stages of devotional experience. A measure of the international impact of the Sainte-Chapelle and the French rayonnant style can be seen in the choir of Aachen Cathedral that was added to Charlemagne's church beginning in 1355. The majestic, solid masonry of Carolingian architecture has been replaced by an armature of shafts and ribs that frame enormous windows. Instead of Roman columns and Corinthian capitals, there are taut screens of tracery, animated sculpted figures of saints, and glowing panels of stained glass that combine in a building whose meaning no longer resides in historical references, but rather is created through the emulation of the dazzling effects of shrines and the evocation of a heavenly edifice.

Clermont Cathedral.

Clermont Cathedral, located in the modern city of Clermont-Ferrand in central France, may well have been inspired by the Sainte-Chapelle. The bishop of Clermont, Hugues de la Tour, attended the dedication of the royal chapel on 26 April 1248, and within a few months launched a new structure in his own diocese to replace the old Romanesque church. The thirteenth-century master mason, Jean Deschamps, adopted an up-to-date Rayonnant style that appears tailor-made for its role as a monumental picture frame. Looking into the deep chapels from the ambulatory, one first sees a section of bare, solid wall. Then, moving into the chapel, the eye first encounters a blind tracery pattern, and then is pulled to the expanse of luminous glazed walls. The colonnettes, moldings, and ribs that constitute the architectural structure define a sequence of thresholds through which one looks: from a location in the ambulatory into the chapel which only the clergy could enter; from a world of solid matter into a realm of light that presents the stories of sacred and saintly history. The paintings added to the lower wall beautifully articulate this visionary path. In one chapel, an angel leads a procession of canons forward into the presence of the saint, while in another, a canon kneels in devotion as his celestial guide points to the altar and the glass cycle beyond. As one gazes upward into the main space of the choir, the clerestory windows appear to hover above the dark band of the triforium that creates a gateway to the visionary realm above. In the clerestory, the rich color of the narrative windows of the chapels evaporates into the cool light of fields of grisaille glass (decorated monochromatically in shades of gray) in which figurative panels of Old Testament prophets, apostles, and in the axial lancets, the Assumption of the Virgin, float. This switch from full color to grisaille, a style of glazing that became widespread in the second half of the thirteenth century, offers another metaphor for spiritual ascent: from the almost tangible colored light, characteristic of terrestrial perception and appropriate to the subject of saints' lives to the brighter, flashing divine light at the highest level of the church.

Different Paths.

The Westminster Abbey choir (1245–1272), Cologne Cathedral in Germany (begun 1248), and León Cathedral in Spain (begun around 1254) adopted the Rayonnant style in its entirety along with stained glass as an essential part of the decoration. While this may reflect the prestige that French art and culture acquired during the reign of Louis IX, these royal churches were not trying to be French. Glazing programs were geared to local saints and rulers, suggesting that French architecture was emulated primarily because of its effective representation of the church as an image of heaven, as well as its ability to organize complex ensembles of pictures. Apart from a handful of clearly French-inspired edifices, European architecture between 1300 and 1500 presents an overwhelming variety. For example, the influential church of Saint-Rombout, Mechelen, in the Brabant region of Belgium was rebuilt after a fire in 1342 in the fashionable rayonnant style with wiry patterns of bar tracery that fill the windows and spread over the walls. But its enormous (unfinished) west tower, begun in 1452 and supervised by the architect Andries Keldermans between 1468 and 1500, looked to such contemporary German designs as Ulm Cathedral as well as the great towers of local secular civic structures. Finally, the choir of the church of St. Lorenz in Nuremberg, built 1439–1477, could hardly be more different from Amiens or Clermont in France. A hall church, a type in which the aisles rise to the same height as the central vessel, capped by an intricate net vault and exhibiting a variety of tracery designs, St. Lorenz offered fluid, indeterminate space in place of clear organization. Nevertheless, the ribbed vaults defined interior spatial compartments and the bar tracery created hierarchies of arches, repeated at different scales in which a worshipper was free to plot his own itinerary through stained glass panels, painted altarpieces, and sculpted keystones. Like the Sainte-Chapelle, St. Lorenz's architecture delineated the thresholds and setting of meditation in which the objects and images encountered as a spatial sequence became the material vehicles for an inward journey.

sources

Marcel Aubert, et al., Les Vitraux de Notre-Dame et de la Sainte-Chapelle de Paris. Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevii (Paris: Caisse nationale des monuments historiques, 1959).

Robert Branner, Saint Louis and the Court Style in French Gothic Architecture (London: Zwemmer, 1965).

Sarah Brown and David O'Connor, Medieval Craftsmen: Glass Painters (London: The British Museum, 1991).

Madeline Caviness, "Stained Glass," in English Romanesque Art 1066–1200. Ed. George Zarnecki et al. (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984): 135–145.

Sarah Crewe, Stained Glass in England 1180–1540 (London: HMSO, 1987).

Jean-Michel Leniaud and Françoise Perrot, La Sainte-Chapelle (Paris: Nathan, 1991).

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—, Stained Glass in England during the Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).