Heart of stained glass: divinity and wealth in windows

Many modern structures, from the Crystal Palace to the Bauhaus Dessau, have centred around transparency. Stained glass, by contrast, is seen as an archaic relic. Yet this belies the complexity of its origins and continual reinventions. A deceptively adaptable medium, stained glass acts as a societal mirror, reflecting power, conflict, belief and change. With Christianity in decline in the West, this 1,000-year-old tradition faces a different future. Stained glass offers us not only a respite from present-day sensory bombardments, but a space to re-examine who we are. 

The early history of stained glass is as fragmentary as the form itself. For millennia, humans were fascinated by natural glass born of cataclysms: lightning striking desert sands (fulgurites) and volcanic eruptions (obsidians). As with cities, artificial glass-making probably began in Mesopotamia. It travelled along trade routes, via bottles and jewellery, reaching Ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome and, later, Byzantium. The spread of Islam accelerated proliferations and innovations in coloured glass, particularly with the Umayyad conquest of the Maghreb and Iberia. For an art form that reached its peak in Gothic Christendom, it is intriguing that stained glass may have been brought back, like the pointed arch, by crusaders returning from the lands of the ‘infidel’.

‘Stained-glass windows also represented power: the translucent walls of the Sainte-Chapelle are as much a declaration of the might of the French crown as they are of God’s’

In the largely preliterate, and pre-electric, age, stained-glass windows were part of the ‘poor man’s Bible’: the Great East Window at York Minster, for example, is effectively an illuminated library, a narration from Creation to Revelation. They were the source of moral instruction and repositories of culture and folkloric history, from the murder of Thomas Becket (Confessors’ Chapel, Chartres) to the plague (St Lawrence’s Church, in Eyam, Derbyshire). They promised redemption but also damnation (Strasbourg Cathedral’s demons). They articulated desperate times and offered portals to realms beyond feudal reality. For medieval Europeans, stained-glass windows were their books, their cinema, and their virtual worlds.

Given the cost and expertise involved, stained-glass windows also represented power: the translucent walls of the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris are as much a spectacular declaration of the might of the French crown as they are of God’s. They are the product of intertwining threads of technological development too, one in the manufacture of glass itself, which had advanced with the use of wood ash to make forest glass, breaking Venetian glassmakers’ stranglehold on the trade with their expert – and classified – knowledge. Equally important was the revolutionary use of flying buttresses in architecture, which enabled the building
of high slender walls with vast spaces for illuminated windows to mimic heaven.   

A century after being destroyed by German shells, Notre-Dame de Reims in France installed stained-glass windows by the Dessau artist Imi Knoebel in a gesture of reconciliation

Credit: John / Alamy

However glorious the architecture, there has always been a view within Abrahamic religions that the built environment is morally compromised compared with the God-given natural world. In Islam, this was addressed with a prohibition on figurative representation, which encouraged a mastery of pattern in Islamic architectural ornament. Entering the radiant stained-glass Nasir al-Mulk Mosque in Shiraz, Iran, is like stepping inside an echo chamber, not of sound but of colours, conducted by the rise of the sun. With the exception of ascetics like the Cistercian Order, there was no such prohibition in Christianity, so the risk of idolatry and egotism abounded. Wealthy patrons would pay to offset their sins, buy their way out of purgatory, or purchase spiritual blessings, making the commission of stained glass a lucrative business. This can be seen in exclusive ‘donor windows’ featuring living figures, whether regents like Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry Plantagenet in Poitiers Cathedral or wealthy merchant families like the Blackburns in All Saints’ Church, York. 

‘Such icons did not entirely vanish, instead they merely shifted ideology’

When the Reformation erupted, stained-glass windows were among its main targets. Surviving works of art, like the once-hidden Fairford windows at St Mary’s Church in Gloucestershire, hint at what was lost to the waves of iconoclasts. As with later outbreaks, from Mao’s Cultural Revolution to ISIS, the destruction of cultural heritage was part of a wider power grab by one self-appointed ruling class over another. This benefited opportunists and fanatics, like the English Puritan William ‘Smasher’ Dowsing, who made their names erasing in seconds what had taken centuries to build. Such icons did not entirely vanish, instead they merely shifted ideology, mainly because they move people in a way that is more elemental than doctrine – hence Stalin-era Soviet stained glass on the Moscow Metro ‘recycled’ from Latvian churches.

In the industrial era, stained-glass windows were reborn with the rise of companies like Tiffany, and the building of ‘temples of retail’ such as Galeries Lafayette, reflecting shifts in economic power where these once charted successive ages of popes, princes and burghers. They have also been employed in attempts to retain the spirit of earlier ages and the soul of humanity in the age of machines – Gothic Revival, Art Nouveau, Gesamtkunstwerk from Frank Lloyd Wright to Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Bruno Taut’s now-lost utopian glass pavilion, and so on. For every celebration of imperial pomp in stained glass came expressions of independence – the swirling supernova of Rigalt’s Palau de la Música Catalana, the enchanting Symbolist half-light of Harry Clarke and Wilhelmina Geddes in Ireland, Afewerk Tekle’s defiant Total Liberation of Africa in Addis Ababa.

Kehinde Wiley’s windows reinvent Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ iconography of patriarchs from the 19th century, presenting not emperors or saints but young Black men and women

Credit: Azoor Photo / Alamy

The Arts and Crafts Movement gave rise to a constellation of exceptional stained-glass artists based around the Glass House in Fulham, set up by Mary Lowndes and AJ Drury, and 61 Deodar Road in Putney – ME Aldrich Rope and her cousin Margaret Agnes, Rachel de Montmorency, Joan Howson, Caroline Townshend, Theodora Salusbury, Lilian Josephine Pocock, Clare Dawson, Moira Forsyth, and others. There were many obstacles to the advancement of female artists at the time – Clara Driscoll, for example, the gifted head of the Tiffany Girls, was forced to retire after getting married, allowed to return only as a widow. Still, figures like Veronica Whall, Katharine Lamb Tait and Florence Camm managed to use dynastic skills and secrets, as well as the anonymising cloak of initials and surnames to set up their own flourishing firms. Sarah W Whitman helped set up Radcliffe College, while Mary Lowndes spearheaded the Artists’ Suffrage League so that others would have support and not be held back. 

With the advent of Modernism, stained glass faced a quiet apocalypse but an unlikely, furtive romance began between Modernist architects and the Catholic Church, driven by the likes of dynamic Dominican friar Father Couturier. Even techno-Calvinist Minimalists like Le Corbusier became convinced of the virtues of polychromy in their church designs, seen in his hand-painted windows of Notre-Dame du Haut, Ronchamp. And the excesses of Modernist puritanism could be tempered, even redeemed, with illumination, it seemed. Within the mountainous Neviges Mariendom by Gottfried Böhm, a stained-glass rose acts like the beating heart of a structure that, though stunning in impact, might otherwise appear cold, hard and dissonant. 

‘Here we find God – or the Sublime – for the computer age’

With innovations in structural engineering and reinforced concrete, Modernist ecclesiastical architecture could be built in all manner of shapes, and more space than ever could be allowed for stained glass. The parabolic columns of Oscar Niemeyer’s Cathedral of Brasília, rising like hands to the heavens, enabled Marianne Peretti’s serene glasswork to flood the inner chamber with coloured light. Though the forms were radical, the spirit behind them was often well established. Many absorbed the vernacular iconography of the church, albeit in inventive structures – four long, stained-glass windows rise from the floor of the Metropolitan Cathedral of Saint Sebastian by Edgar Fonseca in Rio de Janeiro to form a soaring cross at the peak of what is essentially a neo-Mayan pyramid. Inuce’s recent Luoyuan Church turns the circular Tulou architecture of Fujian China into an ‘embracing gesture’, using 100,000 panes of oceanic stained glass. The Santuário Dom Bosco in Brasília is similarly flooded with glimmering phosphorescence, which has a digitised pixellated feel. Here we find God – or the Sublime – for the computer age. Gazing inside Auguste Perret’s lantern tower St Joseph’s Church, Le Havre, illuminated brilliantly by Marguerite Huré, is like being enveloped in an interstellar science-fiction Gothic, suggesting faith has a place not just in the past but in the future, not just Earth but the cosmos.

the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision carries this ancient medium into the digital landscape of the future, the naturally illuminated glass panes recalling the glow of an LCD screen

Credit: Scagliola Brakkee

One of the reasons stained glass is not defunct is that the past is never finished with us. The removal of Bristol Cathedral’s windows honouring the slave trader Edward Colston shows they are a vessel not merely of remembrance but of re-evaluation and reckoning. They can also be a means of reconcilation with an emphasis on common humanity, the universality of suffering and the healing of divisions. Helen Whittaker’s strident depiction of St Ethelburga is constructed from the fragments of an earlier window destroyed by an IRA bomb in Bishopsgate, London, and in Basil Spence’s rebuilt Coventry Cathedral, the Baptistry Window, consisting of 195 lights designed by John Piper and executed by Patrick Reyntiens, depicts a blazing sun as a nucleus of life, rather than the epicentre of destruction, as the Luftwaffe intended.

This sacred life is to be found beyond churches, throughout the contemporary world; in the figures of Kehinde Wiley’s stained glass; in the mesmerising semi-mythic landscapes of Thomas Denny rooted in the otherworldly vernacular tradition of Samuel Palmer and William Blake; in the innovative energy-harvesting glass of Marjan van Aubel; and in Sigmar Polke’s agate windows for the Grossmünster in Zurich. 

Housed in a stained-glass cuboid, the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision seems an elegy to the medium. It represents the world of TV, cinema and computer screens that has captivated and captured us. How can an art form that arguably saw its peak in the 13th century compete for our attention now? The answer requires that we consider what we desire and deserve in a transient materialistic world, and what is lost within us with the gradual disappearance of such ruminative spaces. Perhaps the fact that stained glass lies outside the world of technological mass media is its greatest appeal. As its Gothic patron Abbot Suger noted, stained glass guides us ‘onward from the material to the immaterial’. The popularity of the expansive environments of teamLab and Yayoi Kusama has proved that the desire for the numinous never left us. With the ascendancy of the virtual world, as with the industrial before it, we will be ever more in need of spaces to escape back into the real, where time slows to match the changing of light and images become luminescent, powered by nothing more than our nearest star.