Stained Glass

STAINED GLASS. — The precursors of that kind of transparent mosaic which is stained glass were the closures of basilican windows in the 4th and 5th centuries, formed of geometric panels of selenite and latticework (see the examples of St. Sabina in Rome).

Toward the end of the 10th century, stained-glass windows with metal supports and lead frames came into use. Glass colored in the mass was cut with a red-hot iron; the designs and chiaroscuro effects were executed with copper oxide in black strokes and were fixed by successive firings. Among the co-among whom Michelino da Besozzo, the Zavattari, Paolino da Montorfano, Stefano da Pandino rival the French and German masters, heirs of the Gothic tradition, and the same may be said of that Fra' Bartolomeo di Pietro to whom is owed the immense choir window of St. Dominic in Perugia (1441); but afterward a new chromaticism is seen shining forth at Bologna with the stained-glass windows of St. Petronius, after cartoons by Michele di Matteo di Panzano and Lorenzo Costa, and of St. John in Monte, after designs by Francesco del Cossa. And in the second phase of the works for the cathedral of Milan, down to about 1515, classicizing realism asserted itself with Niccolò da Varallo, Cristoforo De Mottis and Antonio da Pandino, also active in the Certosa of Pavia. Above all the masters of the 16th century, however, excelled — with a stylistic breadth derived from Raphael and Michelangelo, and with a great wealth of chromatic nuances simulating easel painting — the Dominican monk Guglielmo di Marcillat, a native of Berry. To him are owed the stained-glass windows of St. Mary of the People in Rome (c. 1509), with a predominance of gray chiaroscuro, and other works at Cortona and above all at Arezzo, in the Cathedral, with vivid tones of crimson, chrome yellow, sea green and ash-gray blue (1519 and following years). Marcillat founded a true school in Tuscany, made up not only of his heir Pastorino da Siena, who executed the great rose window in the facade of that Cathedral, after a design by Perin del Vaga, but also of 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 admired in Florence, and to the same pupil of Raphael are 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 Mannerist and Baroque taste were fatal to the practice of this art, in Germany it continued during the 17th century also in private building, with abundant use of "grisailles," heraldic elements and festoons of flowers and fruits. As in the other ornamental manifestations, 19th-century Europe, in the revival of stained glass, engaged in the pedantic reproduction of the antique, until William Morris, in full Pre-Raphaelite flowering, achieved a new synthesis of lines and colors with the stained-glass windows in the chapel of Jesus College, Cambridge, after designs by the painter Burne-Jones. Subsequently there were characteristic stained-glass windows, especially in France and England, in the Art Nouveau or floral style, until in the first decades of this century the restoration of the ancient principles, which assured to stained glass its luminous function through the purity of its colorations, infused a new originality of conceptions and visual effects. Memorable, among others, in Rome, was the activity of Cesare Picchiarini, who turned to the cartoons of Vittorio Grassi, Umberto Bottazzi and above all Duilio Cambellotti to compose essays of lyrical exaltation in linear rhythms and in harmonies of violet, amaranth red, Havana brown, pearly and silvery tones, as attested, in the sacred sphere, by the Franciscan window, the Crucifixion window for the cathedral of Orvieto and the more complex and imposing triad that adorns the church of the Flagellation in Jerusalem (1929). — See plates CXXXVII-CXXXIX.

Alberto Neppi