The Ancestors of Christ Windows at Canterbury Cathedral by Jeffrey Weaver and Madeline H. Caviness (review)

From 20 September 2013 to 2 February 2014, the J. Paul Getty Museum hosted visitors from England that came to the United States for the first time: six of the large stained glass windows from the Ancestors of Christ series at Canterbury Cathedral. Accompanying the windows was another rare offering for the museum-going public—the Saint Alban’s Psalter unbound and laid out page by page. In honor of this exhibition, two catalogues were produced by Getty Publications involving essays from one of the exhibition’s co-curators and other scholars invested in the topic; one features essays related to the stained glass (The Ancestors of Christ Windows at Canterbury Cathedral), and the second offers contributions on the Psalter and Romanesque manuscript painting (The St. Alban’s Psalter: Painting and Prayer in Medieval England). Though the glass and illuminations were united in the exhibition, titled Canterbury and St. Alban’s: Treasures from Church and Cloister, the separation of the publications perhaps reflects the general sense of the show, which is that two diverse treasures of twelfth-century painting, shone each in its own right within a shared exhibition space. This review considers Jeffrey Weaver and Madeline H. Caviness’s catalogue for the stained glass.

Weaver, associate curator of Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Getty, provides for the book an essay entitled “The Ancestors of Christ Windows: Context, Program, Development,” as well as a section featuring more traditional catalogue entries for some of the windows. Madeline H. Caviness, Professor Emeritus at Tufts University and the leading expert on the Canterbury glass program, contributes an essay titled “The Visual and Cognitive Impact of the Ancestors of Christ in Canterbury Cathedral and Elsewhere” which might be considered a sort of epilogue to the exhaustive treatment that Caviness gave to the stained glass program of Canterbury throughout the 1970s and 1980s. This corpus included, among a number of essays and articles, a monograph called The Early Stained Glass of Canterbury Cathedral, Circa 1175–1220 (1977) and The Windows of Christ Church Cathedral, Canterbury for the Corpus Vitrearum (1981).

Naturally, the predominant audience of this publication is the museum-going public, which is well served by the text. Weaver’s essay gives a broad sweep of the cathedral’s glass program with a focus on the Ancestors and provides a useful summary of the literature on the glass for a general audience. That so much of the material comes from Caviness’s early work comes as little surprise given her expertise, but Weaver’s treatment makes the work accessible, and proves to be a useful contribution to the catalogue. He is somewhat heavy-handed with the assertion that the legacy of the Alexis Master’s paintings in the St. Alban’s Psalter’s had a strong impact on the Methusaleh Master, the figure thought to have produced a significant number of the windows in the beginning and end of the cycle. This idea falls a bit short, since the idea of transmission between the psalter and the windows is vague. One sees how painters in England—regardless of medium—were influenced by the Psalter in the 1130s, and can accept that aspects of its composition and use of space are identifiable in later English works. In spite of this, it is a connection that would not necessitate such an explicit argument except for the fact that the glass and manuscript were joined together in the Getty show. The goal of this argument seems to be to unite the two catalogues (and perhaps the exhibition as a whole), but instead it seems to highlight the tenuous link between them, which is doubtless one of the reasons why a two-volume catalogue was chosen in lieu of a comprehensive one.

Madeline Caviness’s essay, “The Visual and Cognitive Impact of the Ancestors of Christ in Canterbury Cathedral and Elsewhere,” is an exploration of the Ancestor windows; she analyzes their...