You probably know that God said “Let there be light” – and there was light.
And you may also know that God saw the light and decided it was good.
Indeed, it was very good. But what you may not know is that this happy state
of divine affairs, described in the Bible’s first breaths, continued for
many millennia, until about 1500, when, in Germany, a group of glass artists
emerged who took the light thing somewhere else. If you don’t believe me,
pop along to the National Gallery, where a small display devoted to German
stained glass of the Renaissance demands a big examination.
I should probably admit immediately that when it comes to stained glass, my
judgment is unreliable. I’m besotted with the stuff. There’s something that
happens to light when it passes through coloured glass, particularly blue
glass, that seems to focus it on my heart and turn me all queer.
A particularly cranky Swiss modernist called Johannes Itten ran a course in
stained glass at the Bauhaus, and a few years ago the Guggenheim in Venice
hosted an exhibition devoted to Bauhaus glass that included his fascinating
ramblings on the subject. Itten insisted that each colour of glass affects
you differently. His contention was that stained glass avoids the brain
altogether and appeals directly to the nervous system. In other words, you
can’t help feeling what you feel in front of coloured glass. It doesn’t
matter if the artist who made it is good or bad. When light passes through
glass, it does something to you.
I can personally vouch for the truth of this claim. The first time I stepped
into Chartres cathedral, as a young art-history student on a class outing,
dutifully doing my rounds, I started crying. Not from sadness or pain, but
from sheer, breathless awe. The windows attacked me. It’s happened again on
numerous occasions. Regular readers of this column will know I am not
generally a wholehearted admirer of Matisse, whose work I often find
decorative and limp. But the stained glass that Matisse installed in his
gorgeous Chapel of the Rosary, in Vence – where it isn’t any old light
streaming through the blue glass, but the particularly dangerous
Mediterranean light – left me blubbing like an abandoned toddler. Light
becomes something physical when it passes through glass and hits you in your
chest.
Fully aware of this weakness in my critical faculties, I approached the
National Gallery’s small survey of German stained glass expecting to be
quickly and fully intoxicated. Interestingly, it didn’t happen. The show’s
thesis is that the art of stained glass reached its apogee in Germany in
about 1500. Not just because the craftsmen of the era invented and perfected
a range of techniques that took stained glass to extraordinary levels of
possibility, but because these pioneering glass artists were being
influenced, and abetted, by their famous brethren in the painting
fraternity: Dürer, for instance, and Hans Baldung Grien.
The National Gallery’s show duly alternates stained-glass artists with old
masters – painting, window, painting, window – as it seeks to lead us past
the various hot spots of this relationship. I can certainly see why the
gallery chose this path. There are issues of real art-historical
significance being examined here. But the effect of the constant alternation
turns out to be a dampening one. You get neither the full impact of stained
glass, nor a particularly memorable outlook on German painting, but,
instead, a half-hearted gallery experience that flits rather irritatingly
between the two.
At its outset, however, I was much taken by a beautiful little panel from the
Lower Rhine, produced anonymously in about 1520 and showing Tobias and Sarah
tucked up in bed on their wedding night. Both of them appear to be sleeping
soundly. And so, at the foot of their bed, is their dog, curled up neatly in
a single circle of glass.
The story of Tobias and Sarah is one of my favourite examples of madly
inventive biblical moralising. If you don’t know it, then your own past has
been too godless and you are probably keener than you should be on sex with
married women. According to the Apocrypha, Sarah was a dangerous woman. No
fewer than seven of her husbands died on their wedding night, murdered
cruelly by wicked spirits as they tried, unsuccessfully, to consummate the
marriage. Undeterred by this nuptial carnage, Sarah’s cousin, Tobias, fell
in love with her, and was about to become her eighth victim when the
Archangel Raphael came down to him and advised him to catch a giant fish in
the River Tigris, and to remove its heart, gall and liver. On the appointed
wedding night, the angel advised Tobias to grill the fish’s liver in the
nuptial chamber, so its smell would scare off the evil demons. All this
Tobias did, and the marriage was successfully consummated. And the two of
them lived happily ever after.
But none of the scary sexual fearfulness that underpins this weird tale of
Sarah and Tobias, or any of its mad mood of fish-frying primitive magic, has
been allowed to disturb the air of quiet German domesticity that the
anonymous glass master of the Rhine has brought to his sweet telling of the
story. There’s no hint of wedding-night anxiety. No touch of conjugal
excitement. All of the story’s biblical terror has been smothered in an
eiderdown of comfortable married bliss. Look how properly Sarah and Tobias
are dressed for their wedding night, in their neat village bonnets. Look how
well ordered the fateful bedchamber is. Sarah might be a dangerous demon in
bed, but when it comes to cleaning and sweeping, she’s a perfect German Hausfrau.
The show’s point is that the stained-glass artists of Germany were mimicking
the moods and approaches of the painters of the time, and therefore avoiding
the ecstatic, light-filled sensuality you find in medieval stained glass.
It’s true; they were. Accompanying this lurch into an unexpected realism –
who would ever have imagined that a stained-glass window might one day go in
search of house-proud village moods! – were various technical and stylistic
developments that are, indeed, mightily impressive.
Look, for instance, at the rolled-up curtain hanging to the right of Sarah’s
bed. It’s a fabulous piece of illusionism that really captures the folds and
squashings of the cloth. And what about the decorated blue bedspread? All
its folds are amazingly convincing, but I particularly enjoyed the two lumpy
creases that mark the spot where Tobias and Sarah have chastely folded their
hands over their genitals. At least, I think that’s what the folds mark.
What’s happening here is that German stained glass is trying, rather
desperately, not to be stained glass at all. It’s trying to copy the
illusionism and detail you find in, say, a Dürer painting. The show has a
decent stab at describing the techniques involved in achieving this
difficult descriptive-ness. Some of the best effects were achieved not by
adding, but by taking away. The design of Sarah and Tobias’s fabulously
illusion-istic bedcloth involved covering the blue glass in a dark film,
then selectively scratching sections of it away. And how typical of the
Germans to be extra-good at this.
The exhibition’s high spot is a huge reconstruction of a window from a
cloister of the Mariawald Abbey, produced from designs by Dürer’s great
contemporary, Hans Baldung Grien. There are six busy biblical scenes in the
great window, plus two charming lunettes. From this close, you see exactly
how skilled and intricate is the work of these determined master craftsmen.
It’s staggering. Yet it did not stagger me in the way a pane of intense blue
glass, left almost untouched in a window by Matisse, managed to stagger me.
These German maestros knew many things. But they did not seem to know that
sometimes the best thing you can do to coloured glass is to leave it alone
and let God’s light do all the work.
Art of Light, National Gallery, WC2, until February 17
