Rose-coloured Glass
In my misspent youth, I briefly toyed with medieval art history, before modern weaving (!) and Anni Albers (!!) sunk their teeth into me, and neither have let go since. In many ways, dear reader, I still get to dabble in medieval subjects - the Bauhaus, like the Arts and Crafts Movement before them, were inspired by medieval guilds and artisans, after all. Part of the reason I was so tempted was stained glass. Photographs do not do it justice: 12th or 13th century stained glass, with its characteristic deep blue and blood red, glows like gems, making even the most sparse and colourless cathedral seem to radiate light like a jewellery box, or a reliquary, studded with precious stones. For medieval congregations, stepping into a cathedral thusly decorated was akin to making a brief visit to heaven - the stained glass windows with their unearthly light, the flickering candle flame illumiating the friezework and frescoes, making the interior design programme come alive, the heady scent of incense spiraling upwards, the unseen, disembodied voices of choral singing filling the space - it was all working to transport people to another plane of existence. Talk about bells and smells!
I was particularly taken with Tree of Jesse windows. These are window ‘types’, which is to say that there are a lot of them, and they more or less contain the same kinds of imagery. Put simply, the biblical figure Jesse reclines at the bottom of the window, and a ‘tree’ (ahem) sprouts from his body, showing us the metaphorical family tree of Christ, with each branch dedicated to one of his ancestors: Jesse, then David, then twenty-seven other guys, then Christ, right at the top. These windows have been around a long time, and for much of their early history, the person who preceded Christ on the family tree was Joseph. Do you see a problem? Joseph was not meant to be blood-related to Christ - whoops!
So somewhere around the 12th century, espeically in France, people began to substitute Mary for Joseph - makes a bit more sense, all things considered. Around the same time, Mary was becoming a much more prominent figure: she’d started out as little more than set dressing, a kind of human chair for Christ, and suddenly she was a main character, with a backstory and parents and a personality (sort of) - the whole lot. She got her own colours and symbols and everything. Nice one, Mary. And people used the metaphor of stained glass to understand some of Mary’s more, shall we say, peculiar, characteristics. A virgin birth is a lot of wrap your head around, so people linked the way light passes through glass without breaking it as a comparison to explain Mary’s miraculous pregnancy. As we discussed in this week’s episode, glass was rife with metaphor and meaning for the Victorians, and it seems like the same was true for Medieval Christians trying to parse the trickier bits of their developing doctrine.
The medieval world saw everything as a dichotomy, a sort of binary, with opposites paired together to create balance. The physical world was balanced with the spiritual one; sin counteracted holiness; darkness went with light. But the stained glass windows of cathedrals and abbeys were a sort of bridge, a place where the earthly and the divine coalesced. I think the Victorians felt a similar kind of resonance in their understanding of glass: windows and mirrors were, for them, liminal spaces, places where reality touched the dream world, where a lonely orphan might meet a looking-glass friend. Material, and immaterial; solid, and transparent; obscuring and revealing; reflecting and extending - glass held a kind of magic. And maybe, if the light hits just right, it still does.
Jennifer