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Updated: June 7, 2025
"In other instances Architecture does not give everything to one art, but divides the bounty of her great façade between sculpture and painting; reserving to the former the hollows and nooks where statues may find niches, and giving to glass-painters the tympanum of the great door, where at Chartres the image-maker has displayed the Triumph of Christ.
Here we have paint, the result of the urinary compound laid on the inner surface of the covering, just as the chromatic ingredients of our glass-painters are laid on our stained-glass windows. At other places the skin is coloured in its very substance; the colouring-matter forms an integral part of it and can no longer be swept away with a camel-hair brush.
"In the twelfth century glass-painters made use chiefly of three colours; first, blue that ineffable, uncertain sky-blue which is the glory of the Chartres windows; then red a purplish red, full and important; and green inferior in quality to the two others. For white they preferred a greenish tinge.
Some one had had the happy idea of giving me, to distract me on evenings when I seemed abnormally wretched, a magic lantern, which used to be set on top of my lamp while we waited for dinner-time to come: in the manner of the master-builders and glass-painters of gothic days it substituted for the opaqueness of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many colours, in which legends were depicted, as on a shifting and transitory window.
That is, the glass-painters painted glass only, and were associated with the glass-blowers; those who decorated shields, with the shield or scutcheon makers, and so on; while the painters, pure and simple, worked at wall-painting, and a little later at panel-painting also.
It is precisely the sort of stuff that was turned out by English glass-painters about thirty years ago, the colours crude and distressing to the eye windows that our more cultured taste cannot now endure. But the French artists have not advanced, the windows put in to-day are as detestable as those they put in at the beginning of the revival.
Taking it up where the middle age had left it, they found their whole work among the last subtleties of colour and line; and keeping within the true limits of their material, they got quite a new order of effects from it, and felt their way to refinements on colour never dreamed of by those older workmen, the glass-painters of Chartres or Le Mans.
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