A Panel of Thirteenth-Century Stained Glass from Canterbury

The President and Fellows of Harvard CollegeHarvard Art Museum

A Panel of Thirteenth-Century Stained Glass from CanterburyAuthor(s): Madeline HarrisonSource: Acquisitions (Fogg Art Museum), No. 1964 (1964), pp. 27-33Published by: The President and Fellows of Harvard College on behalf of Harvard Art MuseumStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4300749 .

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A PANEL OF THIRTEENTH-CENTURY

STAINED GLASS FROM CANTERBURY

IN November 1924 Professor A. Kingsley Porter gave to the Fogg Museum a medallion of stained glass alleged to have

come from Canterbury Cathedral.' The foreman of the Cathe- dral glassworks has now identified this panel as one alienated without authorization early in the I920'S. It was sold to Professor Por- ter in America with the story that it had been bought in London about i88o and had been in private collections for the previous two hundred years.

The medallion measures 26-2712 inches in diameter, without its modem white border (Fig. i). It would almost certainly have had three or four borders originally, in keeping with other medal- lions at Canterbury, which are set inferramenta about 3 I inches in diameter.2

To the left of the central column, which forms a vertical caesu- ra, is a throned ecclesiastic, identified as an archbishop by the pallium. Behind him stand three monks, their hands raised towards the group facing them. To the right is a young man, kneeling, with his arms stretched towards the throne, one hand clasped in the right hand of the archbishop. His dress contains so much restoration that it is impossible to say whether he is a cleric or one of

I. I924.I08. Gift of A. Kingsley Porter. Diameter, 26-27?2 in. 2. In 1926, Canon A. J. Mason, who had just completed his very sound Guide

to the Ancient Glass in Canterbury Cathedral (Canterbury, I925), commented that the medallion was too small to belong to the thirteenth-century series illustrating the miracles of St. Thomas Becket in the ambulatory of the Trinity Chapel, but he forgot the missing borders. He also rejected it on stylistic grounds, as later did Paul Frankl, who placed it in the "School of Chartres." More recently Bernard Rackham and the late Arthur Lane, to whom I am indebted for their opinions, expressed the view that the style is umistakably that of Canterbury, and particularly close to that of the Trinity Chapel.

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the laity, though his head appears to be tonsured. Behind him stands a youth in a secular tunic and cloak, in his right hand the archiepiscopal cross. Farther to the right is another figure. His short tunic indicates that he belongs to the laity, and his head is untonsured.

Most of the glass appears to be old, but restorations using modem glass may be detected in the archbishop's left knee, a part of his pallium, the hem of his alb and the fringe of his dalmatic. The lower part of the robe of the kneeling figure is of a purple too bright to be original, and the central turret of the architecture, colored by bright, oxidized silver stain, is also comparatively modem. A number of other features can best be explained by the re- use of fragments of old glass in restoration. The "Cufic" motif be- low the figures, which occurs in several variant forms at Canter- bury, here apparently replaces an inscription. It is broken in the center by a stylized shrub, an anomaly in an interior scene such as this. Several pieces of drapery have also been misplaced, so that the folds bear no relation to the garments they represent-as for instance the green drapery at the back of the kneeling figure, which is upside down.

The figures are fine and linear in their treatment, and the faces are drawn with economy of line, brittle strokes representing the hair and features. The youth on the far right is lightly poised, as though on tip-toe, and contributes to the forward movement of the kneeling figure. The flowing rhythm of this group and the staccato gestures of the opposed one are held by the static frame of the architecture.

The choir and east transepts of Canterbury Cathedral, of whi:ch the building was composed in the last quarter of the twelfth century, were glazed for the most part in the thirteenth century.3

3. In spite of the existing documentation relating to the building, it has not been possible to determine accurately when the windows were glazed. Louis Grodecki, "The Ancient Glass of Canterbury Cathedral," Burlington Magazine, xcni (I950),

294, and xcm (195I), 94, has suggested that even the clerestory windows of the choir, which Rackham believes to have been glazed ca. ii 8o, may not have been completed until some time early in the thirteenth century.

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i.- Stained Glass Medalion from Canterbury Cathedral (Fogg Art Museum, I9,24.io8)

Three partially complete series survive which are made up of small panels commensurate with the medallion in the Fogg Mu- seum. They may be assigned to several different hands, working over a period of about thirty years.4 Stylistically these windows may be grouped with the glass at the east end of the choir of Laon Cathedral, dated about I2I0, and with four of the windows of the ambulatory of Sens Cathedral, of about I220z5 There is, however,

4. A possible chronological sequence of glazing has been suggested by Rack- ham, The Ancient Glass of Canterbury Cathedral, pp. I5-17.

5. Louis Grodecki's dating; see Paris, Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Le Vitrail Franfais (Paris, I958), pp. I18, I23, 139.

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no reason to suppose that the Canterbury glaziers were actually French.6

The first of the surviving Canterbury series was formed by the twelve theological windows of the choir aisles, glazed between I200 and i2I5, according to Bernard Rackham,7 now reduced to two windows on the north choir aisle. The style is so distinctive that the author might usefully be identified as the "Master of the Choir Aisle Windows." Although little remains, it is enough to indicate that the Master's work was technically brilliant, his brush- work exquisite, and that he achieved flowing rhythms in the elon- gated, supple figures, clinging draperies and balanced composi- tions (Fig. 2).

The uneven quality of the Fogg medallion, with its oppbsition of stilted and sinuous figures, suggests not the Master of the Choir Aisle Windows but the work of a follower, a man who achieves the harmony of the Master's forms only occasionally. The brittle treatment of draperies and features in the Fogg panel is character- istic of much of the glass in the Trinity Chapel that emulates the first Master. The supple figure on the right in our medallion is similar to one in a window on the south side of the chapel (Fig. 3), on which the Master of the Choir Aisle also worked. The other figures in the Fogg panel are closer to the more careless work of such areas as Window xi (Fig. 4).8 These windows in the ambulatory of the Trinity Chapel, and others elsewhere in the cathedral, constitute the third series of early glass that survives in Canter- bury. They represent the lives of the saintly archbishops Thomas,

6. The relation between French and English glass painting was discussed by N. H.J. Westlake, A History of Design in Painted Glass (London, i88I), I, pp. I07-I08, who concluded that the glass at Lincoln and at Canterbury was French. Jean La- fond, "The Stained Glass Decoration of Lincoln Cathedral in the Thirteenth Cen- tury," ArcheologicalJournal, cIIa (1947), I5I-I56, has contributed an analysis of the influence of French glass, particularly that of Paris, on Canterbury and Lin- coln. Rackham, The Ancient Glass of Canterbury Cathedral, pp. I8-20, has sum- marized some aspects of the controversy.

7. Rackham, The Ancient Glass of Canterbury Cathedral, p. i6. 8. I have followed Rackham's numbering of the windows, which is continuous

round the Trinity Chapel from the north and west.

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2. Canterbury Cathedral, North Choir Aisle. Christ and the heathen. Photo: Victoria and Albert Museum, Crown Copyright.

3. Canterbury Cathedral, Trinity Chapel ambulatory, Window xii, Workmen returning after William of Gloucester was buried by afall of earth. Photo: Victoria and Albert Museum, Crown Copyright.



4. Canterbury Cathedral, Trinity Chapel ambulatory, Window xi, A dying man healed. Photo: Victoria and Albert Museum, Crown Copyright.

Dunstan and Alphege and can be dated I220-I230. In this series the Fogg panel belongs.

The iconography of the panel, and therefore its exact original location in the cathedral, remain impossible to determine. The archbishop could be any of the three whose lives are known to have been represented. In favor of Thomas Becket is the fact that the surviving panels with Sts. Alphege and Dunstan have a white pearled border instead of the red border of the Fogg medallion. Alternatively, the red border and the blue ground are in keeping with scenes of the miraculous healing of William of Kellett, the remnants of which are in Window viI, but no archbishop figures in the story. William prays to St. Thomas, who intercedes for

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him. IIt is tempting to think that the Fogg panel may be the only surviving one from a life of St. Thomas, but the scene cannot be exactly paralleled in the lives represented in the windows either at Sens or at Chartres, nor in a manuscript.10 The presence of the cross-bearer may have some connection with the murder, but Ed- ward Grim (as later tradition named him) was generally represented at the altar where he tried to defend Thomas Becket. No final identification is likely to be made in view of the imperfect state of preservation both of the panel itself and of the glass re- maining at Canterbury. Stylistically it is important as an example of English glass of the I220'S, of which so little has survived.

MADELINE HARRISON

9. Of the versions of the miracles that are known to have been extant at the time of glazing, the Vita, Passio, et Miracula Sancti Thomae Cantuariensis Archiepis- copi, auctore Willelmo, Monacho Cantuariensis, ed. J. C. Robertson, Materialsfor the History of Thomas Becket (Rolls Series, London, I875), I, seems to have had most influence on the illustrations in the glass. The episode of William of Kellett is on pp. 273-274. It is not contained in the other contemporary account, by Benedict of Peterborough.

Io. Tancred Borenius, St. Thomas Becket in Art (London, I932), does not de- scribe any illustrated lives of earlier date than a fragmentary mid-thirteenth-century example, illustrated pl. XI and xII.

This article will be supplemented by a more detailed account in a forthcoming issue of The AntiquariesJournal.

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A Panel of Thirteenth-Century Stained Glass from Canterbury