Visual Arts: Despite the somewhat daunting title of this timely book, it is ood to see stained glass of all periods taking its rightful place among its contemporary architectural and applied art media, and not being segregated solely because of its predominantly ecclesiastical affiliations, writes Nicola Gordon Bowe.
Even so, this is still a book devoted to a medium whose principal role its American author, Virginia Raguin, describes as the incorporation of light-transmitting glass as an integral part of public buildings. This was the concept behind her foundation in 1996 of Luminar, an international research organisation for the study of 19th- and early 20th-century stained glass in its architectural setting. Its findings, and the detailed, 68-volume documentation of her colleagues in the dozen or so countries involved in the Corpus Vitrearum, are acknowledged in her introduction.
Between 1881 and 1894, such was the current interest in stained glass that the designer Nathaniel Westlake produced his widely influential four-volume History of Design in Stained and Painted Glass, described by the present author as "the first truly comprehensive overview of the medium". One hundred or so years later, now that colour printing techniques are increasingly able to approximate in dazzling two-dimensional form the seductive colours and depth of a medium currently enjoying a wide range of artistic attention, books on stained glass proliferate. The despondent title given in 1954 by the American artist, Robert Sowers, to his exhortatory book, The Lost Art: A Survey of One Thousand Years of Stained Glass, was to be unprophetic.
The comparatively few books published on the subject tended until recently to focus on medieval glass, its iconography, conservation and restoration, as well as the churches or collections where this magical work has survived. But, in the last 30 or so years, its popularity has been rivalled by Pre-Raphaelite, Art Nouveau and Art Deco stained glass, which has received some serious scholarship and a lot of popular exposure. The complex subjects of international Gothic Revival and Arts and Crafts stained glass have also begun to receive serious attention, along with studies of specific countries and cities where outstanding windows have been made during specific periods. There seems to be a steady market for picture-books on subjects such as Rose windows, techniques and angels; and a more specialised, informed one for those that consider generic forms, such as cabinet panels, roundels, the work of contemporary craft studios and designer/makers and architect/designer projects. Others zoom in on prolific, famous or brilliant individuals, such as William Morris or Louis Comfort Tiffany.
Apart from this book, only two others have attempted to give an umbrella account of all aspects and periods of stained glass. In 1976, Mitchell Beazley produced an outsized, profusely illustrated, collaborative reference volume, ambitiously called Stained Glass: The First Comprehensive Illustrated Guide to the World's Best Stained Glass, and in 1992, Studio brought out a much more selective, expertly informed and finely illustrated text, Stained Glass, by the English medievalist and archivist, Sarah Brown. While Raguin's book has twice the number (300) of her fellow- medievalist Brown's coloured illustrations, both books follow similar chronological structures, leading the necessarily somewhat informed reader through Romanesque, Gothic, the use of silver stain, Renaissance and Reformation, leapfrogging over the 18th-century adaptation of easel painting onto glass, onwards to 19th-century historicist revivals, to Art Nouveau, Arts and Crafts and a concluding section which they both call 'The Twentieth Century'.
While Brown began with the origins of stained glass and 'The Glass-Painter's Craft', Raguin begins with a discussion of the increasing secularisation of artistic patronage and the engagement of artists not only in stained glass as an autonomous art form but in environmental and architectonic installations. The translucency of glass and its developing technological possibilities make it a seductive ambient form, redolent of jewelled otherworldliness and, as a memorial, a fitting witness of "the ephemeral and personal nature of taste". Her aim is to try and characterise the specific cultural and spiritual expectations of each of the most notable periods in which stained glass flourished, and to consider these as philosophical, historical and material records of a fundamentally public architectural form. A tall order.
After a chapter on 'Origins, Materials and the Glaziers' Art', by Mary Clerkin Higgins, a restorer, Raguin launches forth, making continual reference to her ample treasury of illustrations, weaving into her searching text often beguiling details of windows from selected countries in Europe. But once she comes to the 19th-century rediscovery of medieval glass and the Gothic and other stylistic revivals, the US comes to the fore, where it continues. American readers will warm to her section on the 'opalescent' glass identified with Tiffany, La Farge and Art Nouveau. Curiously, she teams this up with a short piece on Arts and Crafts artist/ designers, to whom such textured arabesques and industrial production were anathema.
Irish readers will be impressed to see the Irish-born Thomas Jervais's exquisite interpretation of Joshua Reynolds's Virtues; surprised to see no less than two images of George Boole, the "pious and inventive" professor of mathematics immortalised in UCC in a rather shabby 1866 window by Hardman of Birmingham; and intrigued by the American Thomas O'Shaughnessy's flashy Celtic ornament windows in Chicago's Old St Patrick's Church, contemporary with A.E. (not Ernest) Child's remarkably un-Celtic Christ and Harry Clarke's St Albert from the Honan Chapel, Cork, both reproduced full-page.
Clarke, whose "geometrically conceived" colour harmonies are captioned as "often acrid" would have baulked at Raguin's assertion that he came from Sarah Purser's rival Tur Gloine studio, along with Child, Wilhelmina Geddes and Michael Healy, also mentioned but not illustrated. But they are given a laudatory mention, unlike their Polish, Hungarian and Finnish peers, who are among those omitted.
Christmas readers may be especially enchanted by one of Raguin's concluding contemporary images: Stephan Knapp's 2001 Stories Told and Untold, a dazzling dichroic glass sculptural light painting in the Women and Babies Hospital in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. By bathing the spectator in "an intense sense of colour", it brings her study full circle back to the timeless play of light and image in the medieval interior.
Nicola Gordon Bowe is an honorary fellow of the British Society of Master Glass Painters and course director of the MA in the history of design and the applied arts at NCAD. Her last publication is on early 20th-Century Hungarian National Romantic stained glass. She is preparing a book on the stained glass artist, Wilhelmina Geddes (1887-1955)
The History of Stained Glass: The Art of Light Medieval to Contemporary By Virginia Chieffo Raguin Thames and Hudson, 288pp, 335 illustrations. £24.95.