Windows: A Book About Stained & Painted Glass — Key Ideas to Explore

Workmanship Before Art

Day’s preface insists that workmanship is “naturally the beginning and root of art.” This conviction structures the entire book. Book I traces technique from the twelfth to the seventeenth century, following a movement from mosaic to painting, from archaism to pictorial accomplishment. Day’s language is evaluative: he wants to show “at what cost of perhaps more decorative qualities the later masterpieces of glass painting were bought.” The cost is a recurring theme. When discussing the King’s College windows, he faults the designers for not being “careful of conditions”—a phrase that recurs as a touchstone. For Day, the best glass painters understood the material’s limits; the worst ignored them in pursuit of painterly effect.

The Unevenness of Sixteenth-Century Design

Day’s analysis of specific windows reveals a sharp eye for inconsistency. He notes that some pictures at King’s College show “needless evasion of leading,” a trait he associates with the end of the century rather than the date of the second contract. The windows as a whole, he argues, are “not markedly enough of a period to serve as an object lesson in glass design.” They are neither late enough to illustrate decline nor workmanlike enough to show the culmination of sixteenth-century design. In contrast, he praises French and Flemish work at Ecouen and Montmorency, where the designer “knew how to make the most of the glass.” The figure of William of Montmorency, he says, might serve as a votive picture but is designed with full awareness of the conditions of glass painting.

Van Orley and the Limits of Pictorial Ambition

Day reserves his discussion of Bernard van Orley for the chapter on later Renaissance windows, even though van Orley worked in the first half of the sixteenth century. The reason is instructive: van Orley’s work at S. Gudule in Brussels marks “the summit of design, as well as of painting, in stained glass,” but it is design “of a kind not strictly proper to the material.” Day sees in van Orley’s transept windows a large and dignified conception, produced as simply as a Goth could wish. Yet the very motif—making figures and architecture stand in strong relief against the light—led to excessive use of paint. Day’s judgment is precise: the design is “in a measure at fault,” and the later Netherlandish work founded on it represents a decline. The architecture, once a frame, becomes a triumphal arch that overwhelms the glass.

Day writes as a craftsman who has entered the sanctuary, not as a scholar compiling facts. His book rewards readers who attend to his judgments about material propriety—what glass can and cannot do. The three-part structure (technique, design, separate questions) allows him to circle back to issues like style without breaking the narrative. Readers will find the most value in Day’s specific observations about individual windows and his willingness to call out failures of workmanship, even in celebrated works.

Opening my grandfather’s workshop, I remembered how he’d squint at old glass, muttering that skill could ruin a window’s soul. That tension—craft versus expression—haunts me. Later, reading A Pindarick Ode on Painting Addressed to Joshua Reynolds, Esq. — Context and Discussion and its meditation on art’s early innocence, I felt the same ache: a longing for purity that technique inevitably overwrites. A Pindarick Ode on Painting Addressed to Joshua Reynolds, Esq. — Context and Discussion quietly echoed that sentiment, like sunlight through a dusty pane.