Sam Fogg is a London art dealer with a discreet shop on Clifford Street in Piccadilly – the sort of shop where the visitor must ring a bell to gain admittance – which has been transformed, this Christmas, into a bright treasury of Christian art. “Medieval and Renaissance Stained Glass 1200-1550” is his second exhibition of stained glass, a medium that has long been regarded with suspicion by collectors, due to a combination of overingenious and often unadmitted modern restorations, unreliable provenances and difficulties of display. But recent innovations in lightbox design and a more scrupulous approach to the cataloguing of works for sale are transforming attitudes to this hitherto rather underappreciated field of art. Fogg’s first stained glass exhibition was bought, in its entirety, by the John Paul Getty Museum in California; and while the current exhibition has not been snapped up by a single buyer, those little red dots on the gallery wall indicating sales made are already in abundance. This is unsurprising, given that stained glass is virtually the only area in which it is still possible to acquire outstanding works of medieval art for tens rather than hundreds of thousands of pounds. The colours and the the delicacy of craftsmanship of many of the pieces on display are breathtaking and the exhibition as a whole is both spiritually uplifting and fantastically beautiful. Stained glass may have been designed to celebrate the creative properties of light, regarded as coterminous with God’s own generative power and grace by medieval theologians (as Abbot Suger wrote of one of the windows in his abbey church of Saint-Denis, “it urges us onward from the material to the immaterial”). But its jewel-like beauty is more than liable to arouse, in modern hearts, the sin of covetousness.

A sense of melancholy and pathos...

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