“Medieval and Renaissance Stained Glass” at Sam Fogg

Date: 12-12-2004
Owning Institution: Sam Fogg
Publication:     Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2011    
Subject: Renaissance  Middle Ages & Earlier      

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 inevitably attends any exhibition made up, as displays of stained glass must be, of salvaged fragments: the relics of ruin, Reformation or revolution. Some of the most poignant items in the display are barely more than shards from the broken window of the past. Two Young Male Donors, with earnest faces, dark pools for eyes and vivid, scribbled, corn-yellow hair, survive in a tiny piece of leaded glass hooked in shape like the blade of some ancient agricultural implement. Their likenesses were probably created by an artist working in the Cotswolds in about 1480 to 1500 – distinctly similar facial types have been identified in the stained glass of the Church of St Mary’s, Fairford, Gloucestershire – although the miracle that they once knelt to witness, some scene perhaps from the life of an intercessory saint or other holy figure, who once meant much to them, has long since vanished. They stick in the memory but there is also something uncanny about the experience of looking at them, in isolation and close up –the uncomfortable sense of intruding on the intentions of these captured souls, as they pray in perpetuity for their own salvation, and for remission from the sorrows of Limbo.

Equally touching, in their disembodied, fragmentary state, are Twenty-eight Heads, assembled into two composite panels. They once formed part of the stained glass decoration at Bourges Cathedral and are probably the handiwork of the so-called Master of the Good Samaritan Window. Created at the start of the thirteenth century and subsequently formed into what is, in effect, a collection of Tetes d’Expression, they have been removed from the narratives in which they once played their dramatic roles and so resemble pieces from a jigsaw puzzle that can never be reassembled. They have a disconcerting emotional rawness about them. One beautifully drawn head of Christ, with a vividly mixed expression of disappointment and reproach etched on his noble features, may once have formed part of a Flagellation. The startled face of a disciple recoils in shock, caused by a miraculous revelation now only to be guessed at, while another face is twisted into rage (or perhaps merely outrage) and yet another is asleep, cheek resting on a slender, relaxed hand. The brow of this last face is furrowed, there are bags under the single visible eye and there is a sense of tired vulnerability in the set of the down-turned mouth. He may once have been a sleeping figure of Jesse, ancestor of Christ, but is more probably Joseph, exhausted by his travels, dozing at the scene of the Nativity.

The Bourges fragments were put together in their present form by Michel Acezat, a stained glass restorer active in the 1920s and 1930s. Beautiful and moving though they are, these modern assemblages of broken bits and pieces are also testament to the frequently regrettable restoration practices of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (as are the pair of composite windows formed from fifteenth-century Norwich School glass, once owned by the English restorer Dennis King, also in the exhibition). During that period, when the priority of many church authorities was simply to weatherproof their buildings, quantities of surviving stained glass windows were removed, or amalgamated with one another, to make space for clear glass windows that did not leak rainwater. The “restorers” responsible for those removals or alterations were often part-paid in the resulting, leftover fragments, which they then recomposed and reset, for sale to collectors and connoisseurs.

But despite such qualms there is something undeniably thrilling about being able to study such work at close quarters. It enables the viewer to admire the workmanship of the stained-glass artist in a way that is scarcely possible – or only with very good binoculars – in the case of windows still in situ. The subtlety of draughtsmanship and expression in many of these fragmentary panels, brought to earth and set before the audience in a modern art gallery, could never have been apparent when they were in their original positions, some twenty or more feet in the air. Many touches of detail and expression can only have been meant, originally, for the contemplation of God, his saints and angels.

Part of the brilliance of medieval stained glass stems from compression – the way in which complicated stories are squeezed within the narrow scope of a round or rectangular panel. An early thirteenth-century Execution of St John the Baptist, possibly from the Cathedral of Saint-Etienne in Auxerre, is exemplary, distilling a grisly tale to its barest essentials. There is the serpentine body of the executioner, clad in robes the yellow of a candle-flame, his sword raised to strike the fatal blow. There is the praying, resigned saint, his body emerging from the top of a tower designed to resemble some toothed beast, signifying both his imprisonment and the evil nature of his imprisoners. There is God in his heaven, abbreviated to a faceless flash of white beard and a single hand raised in the gesture of benediction. Yet all has been contained within a small circle of leaded glass, itself contained within an ornate patterned design evoking the brilliance and perfection of the City of God.

Even more impressive, and among the most remarkable examples of stained glass seen on the market for many years, are two panels showing scenes of the Baptism and the Adoration of the Kings, which once formed part of a Tree of Jesse window in thirteenth-century Austria. Housed in a design of grand simplicity, within great ascending circles of green embellished with schematic oak leaves – a geometrically perfected simplification of the idea of the family tree that sprouts from Jesse and grows into Jesus – the principal scenes are at once grand and compellingly beautiful. In one, the infant Jesus greets the worshipping kings, awe and wonder inscribed in every delicate feature of their faces and bodies. In the other he stands, now a young man with flowing hair, flanked by John the Baptist and an elegant archangel gracefully holding a towel or sheet to dry him. He is clothed from the waist down in what seems at first sight to be a garment of glowing green but is actually the artist’s visual shorthand for the waters of baptism. Fish swim within its sinuous folds. The panel is so monumental and finely worked that it must have come, not from some parish church, but from one of the great cathedrals. It is museum quality. The V&A might want to think about acquiring it; or perhaps some wealthy benefactor could give it to them for Christmas.

There is a heraldic clarity about the work of the best stained glass artists, a trait encouraged by the requirements of medieval symbolism and typology. This can be seen as a limitation but it also gave them certain types of freedom which were lost when art “advanced” into the Renaissance – which, as this exhibition also demonstrates in some later and lesser pieces, was a period when the glories of traditional stained glass were sacrificed for the weaker intricacies of painted glass – and would not be rediscovered by Western European artists until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The freedom, for example, to think in colour and pattern; the freedom to depart from the literal truth to embody the heart of an idea or a feeling; the freedom to abstract from, or intensify, the shapes of life. Medieval stained glass artists simplify, rather than falling into the trap of pointless elaboration, because they know instinctively that their pictures must work as strong designs if they are to read at a distance. They think in terms of bold colours and viscerally strong compositions, compositions capable of carrying the charge of a story simply through line and colour.

Even when they have no story to tell, they are masters of pure abstract design. Perhaps the most surprising exhibit of all in this display is a panel of early English grisaille glass, rising to a pointed arch. It was once perhaps a window in an abbey belonging to the Cistercian order, known for its suspicion of luxury, and a corresponding taste for monochrome austerity. The design is a miracle of harmoniously composed rectangles and curves, like a medieval Mondrian, undisturbed by colour or by story. Lest anyone should assume that the patterns thus created are merely functional, the byproduct of the need to hold all these differently shaped pieces of glass in place, close study of the panel has revealed the presence – extremely rare in stained glass – of so-called “false leads”, leads with no structural function that have been laid across the face of the window to complete its pattern. It is a thing of subtle wonder and extreme beauty, carrying within its subtle convocation of forms the implication of divine or transcendent beauty – of a perfect elsewhere that can only be glimpsed, here on earth, as though seen through a glass, darkly.