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  • Stained Glass: Radiant Art by Virginia Chieffo Raguin
  • Guita Lamsechi
Virginia Chieffo Raguin, Stained Glass: Radiant Art (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum 2013) 112 pp.

Stained Glass: Radiant Art is an excellent introduction to a medium that has been much overlooked. Although often associated with the minor arts, stained glass was prized among the luxury arts of the high Middle Ages and Renaissance, and the most sought after artists—luminaries such as Albrecht Dürer, Hans Baldung Grien, Hans Sebald Beham, Albrecht Altdorfer, and Hans Holbein the younger, as well as glass specialists like Peter Hemmel of Andlau—created designs for windows destined for important religious buildings, palaces, halls, and residences. Stained glass transforms architectural spaces. The expanded fenestration in Gothic architecture allowed light to penetrate the interior of religious buildings, dematerializing the mural surfaces with translucent color. Later, smaller window roundels distinguished the homes of wealthy private citizens. The publication of this book followed the excitement generated by the 2000 exhibition Painting on Light: Drawings and Stained Glass in the Age of Dürer and Holbein. This exhibition organized by Barbara Butts and Lee Hendrix of the Saint Louis Art Museum and J. Paul Getty Museum, respectively, was accompanied by a scholarly catalogue with essays on late medieval and early modern German and Swiss glasswork. The enthusiastic reception of that [End Page 313] project demonstrated public interest in stained glass, prompting the Getty Center’s expansion of their collections in 2003. Works originating in Austria, Belgium, England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland were put on display in 2010.

The author of Stained Glass: Radiant Art, Virginia Chieffo Raguin, is a member of the International Corpus Vitrearum and a distinguished professor of Humanities. This book provides an engaging pan-European survey of the medium from its manufacture to restoration, featuring works in the Getty collection dating from about 1210 to about 1575. Raguin presents an overview of the art of stained glass in its architectural contexts from the windows of sacred buildings such as the cathedrals of Europe and monastic foundations of the high Middle Ages to the heraldic motifs and secular ornaments of private residences in mercantile towns around the end of the fifteenth century. The concluding pages of the penultimate chapter consider the history of collecting and display of stained glass beginning with its renewed appreciation during the Gothic revival in the eighteenth century. Near the opening of the twentieth century stained glass became valued as an independent art form and a subject for study.

This book discusses stained glass in relation to parallel artistic developments in other media including works on paper like drawings and preparatory sketches, as well as prints, panel paintings, illuminated manuscripts, glass vessels and sculpture. For example, decorative patterns composed of circles, petals, quatre-foils, or canted squares arranged in medallions to frame scenes in medieval stained glass were also adapted in manuscript illumination. Eventually, geometric medallions gave way to narrative scenes ordered sequentially and represented within illusionistic backgrounds or with schematic allusions to architectural settings. Attention to the details of their production and their social and historical contexts allows non-specialists to more fully appreciate the art of stained glass. In addition to the materials and techniques used and stages of production, the author outlines many themes and situations that stained glass addresses from its architectural functions in both sacred and secular buildings to the artists and patrons. Dr. Raguin explores factors such as the role of images in religious devotion that determined the rise and fall of stained glass. Innovations in printing, the use of paper, and increases in literacy and writing in the vernacular impacted the subject matter and quality of stained glass images, as it did other popular imagery. Conversely, devaluation of images during the iconoclastic movements of religious reform in the sixteenth century resulted in the destruction of stained glass windows.

Anecdotal and historical details enliven this narrative on stained glass. Considered a precious object, like jewels, glass has been linked to the splendor of the Heavenly City described in the biblical text of the book of Revelations as the place where Christ welcomes his faithful. The lavish decoration of great cathedrals was justified...

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