Various

“ GLACIER (adopted from the French; from glace, ice, Lat. glacies) , a mass of compacted ice originating in a snow-field. Glaciers are formed on any portion of the earth’s surface that is permanently above the snow-line. This line varies locally in the same latitudes, being in some places higher than in others, but in the main it may be described as an elliptical shell surrounding the earth with its longest diameter in the tropics and its shortest in the polar regions, where it touches sea-level. ”

“ Between the period when it was glazier’s work eked out by painting and when it was painter’s work with the aid of the glazier lies the entire development of stained and painted window-making. With the eventual endeavour of the glass painter to do without the glazier, and to get the colour by painting in translucent enamel upon colourless glass, we have the beginning of a form of art no longer monumental and comparatively trivial. ”

“ All are passable at certain times of the year to small parties, and all are uncertain. In no case do they present insuperable difficulties in themselves, glaciers and snow-fields and mountain staircases being common to all; but the gorges and precipices which distinguish the approaches to them from the south, the slippery sides of shelving spurs whose feet are washed by raging torrents, the perpetual weary monotony of ascent and descent over successive ridges multiplying the gradient indefinitely—these form the real obstacles blocking the way to these northern passes. ”

“ It is convenient to draw a line between Gothic art and Renaissance. Nothing is easier than to say that windows in which crocketed canopywork occurs are Gothic, and that those with arabesque are Renaissance. But that is an arbitrary distinction, which does not really distinguish. Some of the most beautiful work in glass, such for example as that at Auch, is so plainly intermediate between two styles that it is impossible to describe it as anything but “transitional.” ”

“ The charm of medieval glass lies to a great extent in the material, and especially in the inequality of it. Chemically impure and mechanically imperfect, it was rarely crude in tint or even in texture. It shaded off from light to dark according to its thickness; it was speckled with air bubbles; it was streaked and clouded; and all these imperfections of manufacture went to perfection of colour. And age has improved it: the want of homogeneousness in the material has led to the disintegration of its surface ”

“ Later History.—Less than fifty years from the time that they emerge out of Hungary, or even from the date of the Charter of the emperor Sigismund, they found themselves exposed to the fury and the prejudices of the people whose good faith they had abused, whose purses they had lightened, whose barns they had emptied, and on whose credulity they had lived with ease and comfort. Their inborn tendency to roaming made them the terror of the peasantry and the despair of every legislator who tried to settle them on the land. ”

“ If we have to refer to the early Renaissance as the culminating period of glass painting, it is because the technique of an earlier period found in it freer and fuller expression. With the Renaissance, design broke free from the restraints of tradition.
An interesting development of Renaissance design was the framing of pictures in golden-yellow arabesque ornament, scarcely architectural enough to be called canopywork, and reminiscent rather of beaten goldsmith’s work than of stone carving. ”

“ Of late years each country has been learning so much from the others that the newest effort is very much in one direction. It seems to be agreed that the art of the window-maker begins with glazing, that the all-needful thing is beautiful glass, that painting may be reduced to a minimum, and on occasion (thanks to new developments in the making of glass) dispensed with altogether. A tendency has developed itself in the direction not merely of mosaic, but of carrying the glazier’s art farther than has been done before and rendering landscapes and even figure subjects in unpainted glass. ”

“ The ruder and more archaic design gives in fullest measure the glory of glass—for the loss of which no quality of painting ever got in glass quite makes amends. The pictorial effects compatible with glass design are those which go with pure, brilliant and translucent colour. The ideal of a “primitive” Italian painter was more or less to be realized in glass: that of a Dutch realist was not. It is astonishing what glass painters did in the way of light and shade. ”

“ About the middle of the 13th century Nicola Pisano had renewed that art, first by strict imitation of classical models, and later by infusing into his work a fresh spirit of nature and humanity, perhaps partly caught from the Gothic schools of France. His son Giovanni had carried the same re-vitalising of sculpture a great deal further; and hence to some critics it would seem that the real inspirer and precursor of Giotto was Giovanni Pisano the sculptor, and not any painter or wall-decorator, whether of Florence, Siena or Rome. ”

“ To the horrors of the arena we may attribute in part, not only the brutal treatment of their slaves and prisoners, but the frequency of suicide among the Romans. On the other hand, we should be careful not to exaggerate the effects or draw too sweeping inferences from the prevalence of this degrading amusement. Human nature is happily illogical; and we know that many of the Roman statesmen who gave these games, and themselves enjoyed these sights of blood, were in every other department of life irreproachable—indulgent fathers, humane generals and mild rulers of provinces. ”

“ When the king bestowed upon the tanners or weavers or any other body of artisans the right to have a gild, they secured the monopoly of working and trading in their branch of industry. Thus with every creation of a craft fraternity the gild merchant was weakened and its sphere of activity was diminished, though the new bodies were subsidiary to the older and larger fraternity. The greater the commercial and industrial prosperity of a town, the more rapid was the multiplication of craft gilds, which was a natural result of the ever-increasing division of labour. ”

“ A painter’s method is partly the outcome of his individuality. One man would float on his colour and manipulate it to some extent in the moist state; another would work entirely upon the dry matt. Great use was made of the pointed stick with which sharp lines of light were easily scraped out; and in the 16th century Swiss glass painters, working upon a relatively small scale, got their modelling entirely with a needle-point, scraping away the paint just as an etcher scratches away the varnish from his etching plate. ”

“ To what extent design was affected by national temperament it is not easy to say. The marked divergence of the Flemish from the 110 French treatment of glass in the 16th century is not entirely due to a preference on the one part for colour and on the other for light and shade, but is partly owing to the circumstance that, whilst in France design remained in the hands of craftsmen, whose trade was glass painting, in the Netherlands it was entrusted by the emperor to his court painter, who concerned himself as little as possible with a technique of which he knew nothing. ”

“ There was at no time a general struggle in England between the gild merchant and the craft gilds, though in a few towns there seems to have been some friction between merchants and artisans. There is no exact parallel in England to the conflict between these two classes in Scotland in the 16th century, or to the great continental revolution of the 13th and 14th centuries, by which the crafts threw off the yoke of patrician government and secured more independence in the management of their own affairs and more participation in the civic administration. ”

“ This did for the glass picture what a gilt frame does for a painting in oil. Very often framework of any kind was dispensed with. The primitive idea of accepting bars and mullions as boundaries of design, and filling the compartments formed by them with a medley of little subjects, lingered on. The result was delightfully broken colour, but inevitable confusion; for iron and masonry do not effectively separate glass pictures. There was no longer in late glass any pretence of preserving the plane of the window. ”

“ The full-face portrait of a woman in the Borghese gallery at Rome has the marks of the master’s design and inspiration, but in its present sadly damaged condition can hardly be claimed for his handiwork. The head of a boy with a pipe at Hampton Court, a little over life size, has been enthusiastically claimed as Giorgione’s workmanship, but is surely too slack and soft in handling to be anything more than an early copy of a lost work, analogous to, though better than, the similar copy at Vienna of a young man with an arrow, a subject he is known to have painted. ”

“ Sun-baked in summer and frost-riven in winter, the mountain sides are but immense ramps of loose rock débris, only awaiting the yearly melting of the upper snow-fields, or the advent of a casual rainstorm, to be swept downwards in an avalanche of mud and stones into the gorges below. Here it becomes piled and massed together, till the pressure of accumulation forces it out into the main valleys, where it spreads in alluvial fans and silts up the plains. This formation is especially marked throughout the high level valleys of the Gilgit basin. ”

“ An appreciable part of the beauty of old glass is the result of age and accident. In that respect no new glass can compare with it. There is, however, no such thing as “the lost secret” of glass-making. It is no secret that age mellows.
Stained and painted glass is commonly apportioned to its “period,” Gothic or Renaissance, and further to the particular phase of the style to which it belongs. ”

“ What they lack as yet is experience in their craft, and perhaps due workmanlike respect for traditional ways of workmanship. When the old methods come to be superseded it will be only by new ones evolved out of them. At present the conditions of glass painting remain very much what they were. The supreme beauty of glass is still in the purity, the brilliancy, the translucency of its colour. To make the most of this the designer must be master of his trade. The test of window design 112 is, now as ever, that it should have nothing to lose and everything to gain by execution in stained glass. ”

“ If in France we come also upon the names of well-known artists, they seem, like Jean Cousin, to have been closely connected with glass painting: they designed so like glass painters that they might have begun their artistic career in the workshop.
The attribution of fine windows to famous artists should not be too readily accepted; for, though it is a foible of modern times to father whatever is noteworthy upon some great name, the masterpieces of medieval art are due to unknown craftsmen. ”