STAINED GLASS. – The forerunners of that kind of transparent music which is stained glass were the window closures of basilican churches in the 4th and 5th centuries, formed of geometric panels of selenite and latticework (as seen in the examples at S. Sabina in Rome).
Towards the end of the 10th century, stained glass was employed with metal supports and lead frames. The coloured glass paste was cut with a red-hot iron; the designs and shading were executed with copper oxide in black strokes and fixed by successive firings. Among the colours most favoured were deep blue, green, red and orange. In the late Romanesque period, the most abundant and finest production was in France, particularly at Cluny and St-Denis, from where it spread to Chartres, Poitiers, Rouen and then to England. Notable examples from this period also appear in some German lands, such as the hieratic, elementary figure of the prophet Moses in the cathedral of Augsburg and the later Madonna (12th century) in the Museum of Zurich. But the highest development, especially for the mystical edification of the faithful, came with the advent of the Gothic style in religious buildings. This is demonstrated, by the mid-13th century, by the works carried out in Paris and mainly by the superb windows of the Sainte-Chapelle and those in Germany at the cathedral of Bamberg and the choir of Ratisbon. In Italy, the earliest production centre seems to have been Siena, where in 1262 a certain Dono, a painter on glass, is mentioned, and then around 1330, an Andrea di Mino who worked for the cathedral of Orvieto, where shortly afterwards Giovanni di Bonino of Assisi, trained by the Sienese, executed the marvellous stained glass of the apse. The most important Gothic complex produced in Italy, on cartoons by Sienese masters including Simone Martini, is that of the lower church of S. Francesco in Assisi (chapels of S. Caterina, S. Martino, S. Ludovico and S. Pietro d'Alcantara). Towards the end of the 14th century and in the first decades of the following century, Florence saw a clear distinction between the creative work of the painters and the technical elaboration of the glassmakers. For the decorations of that cathedral, cartoons were provided at first by Agnolo Gaddi, and then by Lorenzo Ghiberti (the Assumption, on the central portal, S. Lorenzo and angels, on the right portal, the Presentation in the Temple, the Prayer in the Garden and the Ascension, in three lunettes of the dome). Among the other eyes worked Andrea del Castagno (the Deposition) and Paolo Uccello with the Annunciation, the Nativity and the Resurrection in which he seems to have sought to restore the unrealistic enamels of Romanesque stained glass. With the affirmation of Renaissance ideals throughout the Peninsula, even in this branch of figurative art naturalistic effects of relief, chiaroscuro and perspective were pursued, with the abandonment of the original ornamental functions of stained glass. Even in the first phase of Milanese activity around the cathedral (from 1400 to 1450), the painters, among whom were Michelino da Besozzo, the Zavattari, Paolino da Montorfano and Stefano da Pandino, vied with French and German masters, heirs of the Gothic tradition, as did the aforementioned Fra Bartolomeo di Pietro to whom we owe the large window of the choir of S. Domenico in Perugia (1441); but later we see a new chromaticism flourish in Bologna with the stained glass of S. Petronio, on cartoons by Michele di Matteo da Panzano and Lorenzo Costa, and of S. Giovanni in Monte, on designs by Francesco del Cossa. And in the second phase of the works for the cathedral of Milan, up to about 1515, classical realism imposed itself with Niccolò da Varallo, Cristoforo De Mottis and Antonio da Pandino, also active in the Certosa of Pavia. Yet above all the masters of the 16th century, with a stylistic breadth drawn from Raphael and Michelangelo and with a great richness of chromatic nuances simulating easel painting, towered the Dominican monk Guglielmo di Marcillat, originally from Berry. To him we owe the stained glass of S. Maria del Popolo in Rome (c. 1509), with a predominance of grey chiaroscuro, and other works at Cortona and above all at Arezzo, in the cathedral, with vivid crimson, chrome yellow, water green and fifty-blue tonalities (1519 and following). Marcillat founded in Tuscany a true school, consisting not only of his heir Pastorino da Siena, who executed the large rose window on the façade of that cathedral, on a design by Perin del Vaga, Stagio Sassoli and Lorenzo Borro d'Arezzo, and the Cortonese Maso Porro and Michelangelo Urbani. In the first half of the 16th century, the works painted with grotesques by Giovanni da Udine for the Laurentian Library were much appreciated in Florence, and the same pupil of Raphael is attributed the eight stained glass windows, with arabesques on a white ground, in the Certosa of Ema (1520), rich in most delicate tonalities. While in Italy the Mannerist and Baroque tastes were disastrous for the practice of this art, in Germany it continued during the 17th century even in private buildings, with abundant use of grisaille, heraldic elements and garlands of flowers and fruits. As in other ornamental manifestations, 19th-century Europe indulged in the pedantic reproduction of the antique in the revival of stained glass until William Morris, in the full bloom of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, achieved a new synthesis of lines and colours with the stained glass in the chapel of Jesus College, Cambridge, on designs by the painter Burne-Jones. Subsequently, characteristic stained glass was produced especially in France and England in the Art Nouveau or floral style, until in the first decades of this century the restoration of ancient principles, which ensured to stained glass its luminous function with the purity of colouring, infused a new originality of conceptions and visual effects. Notable, among others in Rome, was the activity of Cesare Picchiarini, who availed himself of cartoons by Vittorio Grassi, Umberto Bottazzi and above all Duilio Cambellotti to compose essays in lyrical exaltation in linear rhythms and in harmonies of amaranth red, havana, pearly and silvery tones, as attested, in the sacred sphere, by the Franciscan stained glass, that of the Crucifixion for the cathedral of Orvieto and the more complex and imposing triptych adorning the church of the Flagellation in Jerusalem (1929). – See plates CXXXVIII-XXXIX.