Development and Character of Gothic Architecture/Chapter 9
CHAPTER IX
GOTHIC PAINTING AND STAINED GLASS IN FRANCE
Though colour was employed on many parts of the Gothic building, enlivening sculpture, and relieving plain surfaces by various ornamental patterns, the art of figure painting now became much less conspicuous and much less general than it had been, and than it still continued to be in the structures which were erected in those parts of Gaul which lay mainly outside of the region of the Gothic movement.
Yet wall painting was still more or less practised in the Ile-de-France, and some notice of this painting is therefore necessary to complete our study of the Gothic style. Unhappily no examples of wall painting in strictly Gothic buildings have been preserved uninjured, and such scanty and mutilated remains as those, for instance, in the transept of Noyon, and those in the wall arcades of the Sainte Chapelle at Paris, are insufficient to afford a clear understanding of their original character. But illuminated manuscripts of the time are abundant and well preserved, and from them, rather than from the almost obliterated examples of painting that are occasionally met with on the walls of churches, we may derive illustrations of this art.
Its character, as exhibited in these manuscripts, shows a very primitive state of pictorial development. Hardly more than the most elementary qualities of outline and colour are displayed; and these are, of course, ornamental rather than representative in motive. The drawing exhibits a curious mingling of archaic rudeness with much skill and freedom of line. In fact, as regards delineation of the figure and easy expression of movement, the French painters developed a skill by the beginning of the thirteenth century that was not attained in Italy till its close; yet joined with this skill the conventions of immaturity are everywhere conspicuous. The modelling of form is very imperfect. Saliences are indicated conventionally by paling the colour, while depressions are expressed by deepening it. Of natural effects of light, or even of indication of the direction from which light falls, there are none whatever, nor is there any expression of cast shadows. Flesh is rendered of a creamy-white, with slight reddening of cheeks and lips. The features are drawn in with fine lines of brown or black, and a frank outline describes every contour, whether of general form or of detail. In the twelfth century the outline is brown, and both figures and backgrounds are generally light in tone, while in the thirteenth century the outlines become black, and backgrounds and figures become more intense in hue—possibly through the influence of the brilliancy of the stained glass which was coming into more general use than ever before.
Usually in the thirteenth century the backgrounds are quite flat, and they are generally either of an ultramarine blue or of a brownish-red. In some cases, as in Fig. 190, from the Life of St. Denis, a manuscript of 1252 in the National Library of Paris, figures are represented with no ground under their feet. No correct expression of different planes of distance, or of perspective, is attempted. Where one figure has to be represented behind another, the farther one is but partially drawn, like the farther horse in this illustration, which is represented without legs. The whole character of the work is thus essentially conventional and decorative, yet it is often both tender in expression and beautiful in design, and it rarely fails, in its various quarterings, to exhibit a fine harmony of colour combinations.
This painting is, of course, largely derived from the traditional art that had, from the earliest times, been cultivated by the various religious orders of Europe. But, unlike sculpture, which, as we have seen, was also largely derived from the same sources, it failed to develop new principles or characteristics of importance. Technically it remained for the most part stationary all through the Gothic period, owing, doubtless, to the fact that the main artistic impulse of the time and the locality operated in the direction of an architectural development which was not favourable to the special development of painting.
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries painting as an art in France advanced rapidly under the influence of the example of the early Italian schools. But this painting had no connection with that Gothic architecture with which we are concerned.
FIG. 190.
Gothic painting in France was thus of a very primitive and conventional kind, though it was not ill adapted to its purpose as associated with architecture. How far its conventions and archaisms were the mere imperfections of immaturity, and how far they may have resulted from a sense of architectural fitness, I do not attempt to decide; but, judging from what was at the same time accomplished in sculpture, it would seem that had painting received equal attention in the Gothic scheme, its severer conventions would soon have given place to a more developed style.
It was not, however, in the field of painting proper, but in that of stained glass, that chromatic design, in Gothic architecture where the great openings afforded ample field that was denied to painting, reached its most splendid development.
Though simpler styles of this art had been practised earlier, in its full development it is peculiar to Gothic architecture. Small window openings were often filled with coloured glass in early Christian times. But the production of intricate designs, including rich patterns and figures, and the elaboration of them with details drawn with a pencil and afterwards burnt in, began in the Romanesque period, and was perfected in the early Gothic.
The inherent limitations of this art are indeed of such a nature as to confine its development within narrow lines. The material resources of the artist were limited to sheets of glass variously coloured while in a molten state by the use of metallic oxides. These sheets were cut up into the required shapes, and the pieces were fitted together, mosaic-fashion, to form the main design, while this patchwork of colour was supplemented by the very simplest delineation and rudest modelling by means of a pencil charged with a neutral pigment. It is plain that only a most conventional kind of art could be produced by such means. Yet with these materials the mediæval artist was able to work without embarrassment, and in the many examples of his skill which still remain we may see that he was no less unerring in his judgment, and constant in his obedience to the principles involved, than were, in their respective departments, the stonemasons and the sculptors.
The task of the designer in stained glass was, on the one hand, to subdue the light and give a comfortable sense of enclosure, and, on the other, to produce brilliant harmonies of translucent colours, and to add such pictorial interest as the conditions controlling his art would permit. The fundamental difference between this art and the art of wall painting is, of course, that in the one case light passes through the design everywhere, while in the other it falls upon its surface only. This difference separates the two arts by an impassable gulf. With wholly transparent media those scenic effects, which are dependent upon a greater or less development of light and shade, are impossible. In all arts the true designers willingly submit to the limitations which the nature of their materials imposes, and in no art have these limitations been more strictly observed than in that of stained glass in the Middle Ages. In stained glass proper not only is colour necessarily employed in an almost strictly heraldic manner, but the conventions of line are of necessity peculiar. The main outlines of objects are not outlines only, they are also the framework of metal which, while following the contours of forms, has, at the same time, to perform the function of a sash, and hold in position the small bits of glass of which the design is made up. These lines formed by strips or bars of metal are therefore of necessity coarse beyond any used in even the most conventional wall painting. Within the great lines of the lead framework the artist does, it is true, give with the pencil more or less delineation of the finer details of his figures. By applying his neutral pigment either heavily or lightly, and by scratching out lights with the point of a sharpened stick, he can even get considerable gradation in his modellings. But in a general or distant view such elaboration counts for little, and he has to depend mainly for his effect on the coarse general outlines and the patches of flat colours. These peculiarities, growing out of the nature of the materials employed, are not properly to be regarded as imperfections, but as conventions marking the limitations of the art. And even the archaisms of drawing which characterise the figures represented (and which do not grow out of the material conditions, but are largely the imperfections of undeveloped graphic skill) accord so well with the unavoidable conventions that we can hardly conceive of their being changed with good effect.
The art of designing in stained glass would seem to be incapable of real development beyond the conditions that were reached in the Middle Ages. The more modern attempts to give it a wider range, by introducing a more pictorial character, bespeak an imperfect recognition of its inherent principles. In the twelfth century the various resources of overlaying and fusing, by means of which the colours are gradated and blended somewhat as in the art of painting proper, and which have been extensively practised since the fifteenth century, were wholly unknown, and would hardly have been welcomed.
In the apsidal chapels of the Church of St. Denis are some fragments of stained glass dating from the middle of the twelfth century; and the Cathedral of Chartres retains, in almost perfect condition, some magnificent specimens of a somewhat later 
FIG. 191. date in the same century. Among these last is the well-known Jesse window, which may be taken as an example of the best work of the time, or indeed of any time, for this art hardly advanced in any respect after the twelfth century, though it retained its high character nearly to the end of the century following. Fig. 191, a figure from this window, will afford an illustration of its character. The design is produced, for the most part, of pure pot-metal, while white glass is introduced here and there to heighten the effect in draperies and in ornaments. Each piece of glass is of one even colour, another piece has to be inserted wherever a different colour is wanted, and each separate piece is encompassed by its sustaining framework of lead. On various parts of the design thus wrought out of many small fragments the necessary details are drawn with the brush charged with the neutral pigment. By this means a simple suggestion of shading is given, though nothing like real modelling is ever, at this epoch, approached. The figures are small, rarely more than two and a half or three feet high, and the separate pieces of glass, of which the design is composed, are rarely more than six inches in greatest dimension.
The Cathedral of Chartres is almost unique in its wealth of mediæval glass, nearly all of the original work of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries remaining in place, and, for the most part, in good condition. Though a fragile form of art, stained glass is, if undisturbed by accident or violence, one of the most permanent. But, unhappily, either accident or violence has despoiled the greater number of French cathedrals of the greater part of their ancient glass. Chartres, however, singularly fortunate in retaining its magnificent jewel-like window-screens, exhibits in its internal aspect, more than most other mediæval churches, the effect that it originally had.
Among other remaining examples of Gothic design in stained glass are the three magnificent roses of the Cathedral of Paris—those of the transept, and that of the west end, dating from the middle of the thirteenth century. Other fine examples of about the same epoch, though much restored at different times, are the windows of the Sainte Chapelle, and some of those in the Cathedrals of Bourges and Reims. As a general rule the effect of the French interior is now much injured by the extensive prevalence of modern grisaille, or, still worse, by wretched modern painted glass, in which the pictorial idea assumes an undue prominence, and the natural conventions and beauties of glass are lost.