The Curated Aperture, Windows as Theaters of Identity and Artifice

“ The true perfection of a painted window is to be serene, intense, brilliant, like flaming jewellery; full of easily legible and quaint subjects, and exquisitely subtle, yet simple, in its harmonies. In a word, this perfection has been consummated in the designs, never to be surpassed, if ever again to be approached by human art, of the French windows of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. ”

“ The most irreparable loss is that of the great stained glass windows, which the mysterious artists of the thirteenth century so religiously composed, in meditation and dream, gathering the saints by hundreds, with their translucent draperies, their luminous halos. There also German scrap-iron rushed in great stupid bundles, crushing everything. The masterpieces, which no one will ever reproduce, have scattered their fragments on the flagstones, forever impossible to separate, the golds, the reds, the blues, whose secret is lost. ”

“ Scarcely any white was used; in the ancient windows no spots spring out unpleasantly.
To St. Denis’ school succeeded that of Chartres, which predominated during the first part of the XIII century, while its second half was ruled by the school of Paris, when windows of the Sainte-Chapelle type were the rule. Gradually the craftsmen gave up their sound tradition that a window should be a transparent mosaic, subordinate to its architectural setting. They began to treat a window as an isolated picture and the art declined.
Abbot Suger’s school of glassmakers carried their art to its zenith. ”

“ The leading of a window is the framework of its design, the skeleton to be filled out presently and clothed in colour; and, if the anatomy is wrong, nothing will ever make the picture right. The leads are the bones, which it is necessary to study, even though they were intrinsically without interest, for on them depends the form which shall eventually charm us. Beauty is not skin deep: it is the philosophy of the poet which is shallow. ”

“ No man in his senses, no artist at all events, ever denied that the designer of a stained glass window must take into consideration the architecture of the building of which his work is to form part. The only possible question is as to what consideration may be due to it. ”

“ A dining-room window admits of free treatment in both color and design, and full play can be given for every fanciful conceit in decoration. A hallway also gives scope for fine work, and this we may have, close beside us in our own home, the beautiful art hitherto confined to churches and cathedrals. "Storied windows" assume now a new value, because there is a new medium for the artist. The artist himself can well rejoice in the grand material now made in our glass-works, and feel confident that there is a steadily growing appreciation of the fact that whatever is good and true in art abides. ”

“ The wonderful success, as decoration of fragments of ancient stained glass pieced together almost at random, goes to prove, almost as clearly as the pictorial errors of modern designers, that a stained glass window should be conceived, not as a picture, hardly even as a pattern, but as a simple arrangement of broken patches of colour. This is what the designers of the windows in the choir have done, for they have seen that by that means, and not by the representation of architectural forms, they obtain the best contrast with the real architectural forms of the building. ”

“ A notable thing about the work is its scale, which is much larger than is usual in French glass of that period. Nowhere will you find windows more simply and largely designed or more broadly treated. Nowhere will you find big Renaissance canopies richer in colour or more interesting in design. The fifty or more rather fantastically associated Prophets, Patriarchs, Sibyls, and Apostles depicted, form, with the architecture about them and the tracery above, quite remarkable compositions of colour. And it is very evident that the colour of each window has been thought out as a whole. ”

“ It is rather a curious thing that the avoidance of leading, the dependence upon glazing and paint, should manifest itself especially in windows designed on such a scale that it would have been quite easy to get all that was got in paint, and more, by the introduction of coloured glass; in windows, for example, on the scale of those at King’s College, Cambridge, with figures much over lifesize, where the artist, you can see, has been afraid of leading, and has shirked it. ”

“ These artists remembered that windows are openings in a building, through which light has to pass, and they did not, therefore, like many of the later imitators, render them opaque by masses of intense shadow, which perfectly obscure the colour of the glass upon which the picture is painted, and render the passage of light through it simply impossible. ”

“ The design is there absolutely regardless of any consideration of glass or architecture. Each window is treated as a vast oil picture, without so much as a frame. Here is no vista of distant architecture, nor any such relief of lighter colour as you find at Gouda. Force of colour is sought by masses of deep shadow, into which the figures merge. This shadow being obtained by paint, and the glazing being in the now usual squares, there are literally yards of painted quarries, which, except when the sun is at its fiercest, are all but black. ”

“ More to the latter half of the century belong the pictorial compositions in which architecture, more or less proper to the subject, fills great part of the window, the foremost arches adapting themselves, sometimes, to the stonework. In this case the architecture is in white glass, more or less obscured by painted shadow ”

“ Any of these men would have looked with infinite disgust upon the leafage and scroll-work which form the ground of colour in our modern painted windows, and yet all whom I have named were much infected with the love of renaissance designs. We must also allow for the freedom of the painter's subject, and looseness of his associated lines; a pattern being severe in a picture, which is over luxurious upon a building. ”

“ There is now more attention paid to the architecture and decoration of our churches, and a taste has sprung up for monumental windows. We cannot resist, therefore, the temptation to offer a few remarks upon the subject, now that so many mistaken views are taken as to the proper application of this beautiful art.
There seems to be a false idea abroad that the painted window is to be predominant, not assistant to the general impression which the architecture intends. In reality it loses, not gains, power by setting up for itself. ”

“ Of the colour, and its relations with that of the Saint James, one needs time and long acquaintance to learn the value. In the feeling, compared with that of the twelfth century, one needs no time in order to see a change. These two windows are as French and as modern as a picture of Lancret; they are pure art, as simply decorative as the decorations of the Grand Opera. The thirteenth century knew more about religion and decoration than the twentieth century will ever learn. The windows were neither symbolic nor mystical, nor more religious than they pretended to be. ”

“ However justly we may condemn the mode of execution, and the design of the works of that period, as being contrary to the fundamental principles of glass painting, and unsuitable to the nature of painted windows, we cannot deny the artistical character of such works, in general. At the present day, however, although we see the practical part of glass painting conducted according to truer principles, it is seldom that we meet with a window which is really entitled to be regarded as a work of art. ”

“ A line of open-mouthed, wide-eyed gazers is always to be found before it. Despair, wonder, envy, and rebellion smolder in the eyes of those gazers. No shop window show should be so diabolically set forth as to arouse such sensations in the breast of the beholder. It is a work of art, that window; a breeder of anarchism, a destroyer of contentment, a second feast of Tantalus. It boasts peaches, dewy and golden, when peaches have no right to be; plethoric, purple bunches of English hothouse grapes are there to taunt the ten-dollar-a-week clerk whose sick wife should be in the hospital ”

“ Because window display is recognized as advertising, the ceaseless work of the master window dressers upon the outer rim of the Macy store comes under the direct supervision of the advertising department which in turn reports direct to no less an authority than the triple partnership itself. ”

“ Under ordinary circumstances it is extremely difficult to photograph a window display, owing to reflections caused by dark objects in the display. These, acting in a similar manner to mercury on the back of a mirror, make the plate glass a strong reflector of objects outside the window. Frequently a photograph contains not only the window display, but trees, buildings, people, and even the camera itself, often to the total exclusion of important portions of the trim. If the glass is extra thick the reflections may be caused by a light colored display as well. ”

“ When you hear a decorator sneer at mechanical features you may be sure he has himself no mechanical genius or he would not endeavor to belittle so genuine an attraction. Not that mechanical displays are suitable for all occasions, but there are times in every decorator’s experience when a “motion window” is really a necessity, and many other times when mechanism is a desirable adjunct to a display that otherwise would be commonplace. People are naturally curious. ”

“ Down stairs, upon the square, is a modern restaurant with plate-glass windows, marble floor, Vienna cane chairs, and a general appearance of luxury. A flight of steps leads to an upper story, where there are numerous rooms of every shape and dimension, furnished with old-fashioned Italian simplicity, though with considerable cleanliness. Thither resort the large companies of regular guests who have eaten their meals there during most of their lives. But there is much more room in the house than appears. ”

“ A little restaurant with a chocolate face and with a plate-glass window, on which the fact is announced that it is an à la carte establishment. Two little trees are in front of the window—little evergreen trees are fashionable just now in Soho—and the name "Gustave" is well in evidence above, with an electric lamp to throw light upon it. Inside the window a long lawn curtain gives privacy to the restaurant. The card of the day, with half-a-hundred names of dishes written in black ink, hangs in a brass frame by the door. ”

“ The long façade, consisting only of balconied windows deeply recessed, erects itself on the summit of a considerable hill, which gives a fine, plunging movement to its foundations. The deep niches of the windows are all aglow with colour. They have been repainted with red and blue, relieved with gold figures; and each of them looks more like the royal box at a theatre than like the aperture of a palace dark with memories. ”

“ In the façade, the old German style prevails: arches of brick, resting upon short granite columns, support a gallery with ogive-windows. A row of blazons, inclined from right to left, bring out their brilliant color against the blackish tint of the wall. It would be difficult to form an idea of the character and richness of this ornamentation.
This gallery leads into the main building, a structure than which no scene-painter, seeking a medieval decoration for an opera, ever invented anything more picturesque and singular. ”

“ At least, most of the scenery that is painted in this fashion, or the inspiration for it, comes from there nowadays. May it not be possible that it is suggested to the scene-painter by the houses one sees in the small Italian towns, where windows with shutters often are painted on the façade? The fantasy of some of these windows is sublime. Occasionally, persons are painted looking out of them. Dogs sit on the sills ”

“ Therefore all imitation or device which may lead to a belief that it may be other than what it really is, is nothing less than a fraud—not criminal, we admit, but none the less a fraud upon good taste and architectural truth. ”

“ Is not the entire design a mean evasion? Why magnify this, that, or the other little thing, if the entire scheme of thinking that the building stands for is false, and puts a mask upon the people, who want true buildings, but do not know how to get them so long as Architects betray them with Architectural phrases? ”

“ If a blind window therefore be necessary for regularity, it ought to be so disguised, as not to be distinguished from the real windows. If it appear to be a blind window, it is disgustful, as a vain attempt to supply the want of invention. It shows the irregularity in a stronger light; by signifying that a window ought to be there in point of regularity, but that the architect had not skill sufficient to connect external regularity with internal convenience. ”

“ Above the portal, in the stonework, are two false windows, in which two figures, a man and a woman, apparently household servants, are represented, in sculpture, as looking down into the street. The effect is homely, yet grotesque, and the figures are sufficiently living to make one commiserate them for having been condemned, in so dull a town, to spend several centuries at the window. ”

“ The windows are so overdone in order to produce a striking external effect, that many of them are mere shams, and never were anything else, while others have a floor going across them, and light one storey with their lower lights and another with their upper. ”

“ Windows are arranged to suit a symmetrical facade, whether they are just what are needed for the rooms or not, and, even where it is possible, little attention is given to the direction of the sunlight in order that the living-rooms may receive the full benefit of the natural warmth, nor are those rooms where it is not needed, or minor offices, relegated to the exposed side. ”

“ The rule will apply to all alike, that whatever is pretended, is wrong; commonly enforced also by the exceeding ugliness and insufficient appearance of such methods, as lately in the style of renovation by which half the houses in Venice have been defaced, the brick covered first with stucco, and this painted with zigzag veins in imitation of alabaster. But there is one more form of architectural fiction, which is so constant in the great periods that it needs respectful judgment. ”

“ The window-tax—a result of war—laid an embargo on light, by restricting size and number, so the house, like most in the neighbourhood, having been built subsequently to “Billy Pitt’s” obnoxious impost, there were only two windows, and those were narrow. They were draped with heavy curtains, and festooned valances of dove-coloured moreen, trimmed with blue orris-lace, and worsted-bullion fringe, with spiral silken droplets here and there to shimmer in the rays of sun or chandelier. ”

“ I have often wondered why we do not adopt many of the details of this style of architecture; for instance, the broad light windows in two or three divisions, sometimes diversified with large bows and irregularly divided; only habit could make us endure the uniform rows of square holes which we call windows.
I went first to the so-called Theatre, which was built by a bishop three hundred years ago. The iron railing which surrounds it has, instead of pillars, a sort of ‘termini’ with the heads of the Roman Emperors, a strange fancy, but the effect is not bad. ”

“ In the later windows an unsightly effect is produced by the wide and bald plain splay or reveal which is usually formed round the window, outside as well as inside, and also by the placing of glazing behind the traceries in a separate wooden frame, so that they are completely concealed from view on the interior. The tracery of the second stage of the Doge’s Palace at Venice is probably equal to any that has ever been executed, and may well be the pride of the country. ”