Battle of Clavijo by Mathieu Blevile

Church of Notre-Dame-en-Vaux

  The Renaissance and Reformation

During the first three decades of the fifteenth century, as the Middle Ages began to wane, the high Gothic style of stained glass continued to flourish with the influx of new found wealth from the seeds of capitalism in Italy and Flanders. By the mid 1400's, however, the new realism in painting by people like Jan Van Eyck, and eventually the great Renaissance painters, led to a decline of traditional stained glass. Painters now became glass designers, and their attempts to portray minute details did not translate into the Gothic style with its bold lead lines and strong figures. Glaziers began to imitate fresco and easel painting, which gradually began to obscure the beautiful translucency of the glass, the essence of Gothic windows.

This is not to say, however, that there wasn't a prodigious amount of stained glass produced during the Renaissance with occasionally exceptional masterpieces. As in Renaissance painting, it is easy to see the changes in stained glass from the medieval period. Figures were depicted as individuals with attention to realism through delicate shading. The development of linear perspective is evident in the prominent use of architectual settings with bold receeding columns and elaborate decorative detail. Secular scenes became more prominent, and with a disdain for the enormity of Gothic cathedral architecture, more in proportion to man than God. Lead lines that interfered with the naturalistic designs of the painter were eliminated, until whole windows simply became paintings on glass. Advances in enamel paints made bright and colorful scenes possible, but the power of the glass itself was obscured. Because of the wholly unaesthetic appeal of too much paint on glass, painters turned their eyes elsewhere, the quality of glass painting declined, and stained glass basically became a lost art.

Until the sixteenth century stained glass was primarily a Catholic art, depicting a panoply of images of Catholic saints and traditional icons of the Church. With the coming of the Reformation, Calvinist reaction to Spanish repression in the Netherlands, Henry VIII's break from the Church, and vicious wars of religion in Germany, stained glass was recklessly destroyed throughout Europe because of its "popish" imagery. In 1644 the English Parliament ordered all images of the Virgin Mary destroyed. A fanatical Puritan rector of Canterbury Cathedral, Richard Culmer, Stood on a ladder sixty steps high and attacked the the stained glass image of Becket with a pike. These scenes were repeated all over Protestant Europe. The destruction of glass making facilities and the subsequent dearth of colored glass led to the use of more clear glass with enamel paint and silver stain used to produce stained glass like effects.

Religion was not the only factor in the decline of the use of colored glass. The new Baroque style with its painted interiors and sumptuous decoration required the use of more clear glass. Bright interior light had become the fashion in Paris. The upheaval of the French Revolution also was responsible for the destruction of glass artificies of the nobilty throughout France. Fortunately, many French windows found their way to England where they were preserved. In general, the taste in stained glass declined after the Renaissance. Many stained glass windows, which required intermittent restoration of decaying leads, were lost through lack of attention, and few new windows were created until the Gothic Revival of the nineteenth century.