In last week’s blog, I focused mainly on the sculpture and religious works at The Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum’s home for its medieval collections. There’s even more color this week, as I focus on glass and handcrafts.
While the glass comes almost entirely from religious establishments, a great deal of it is actually not focused on religion at all, but on letting light into large dark spaces. As you can see from these samples, many of the windows are not deeply colored; light colors let in more light.
That said, there is certainly plenty of figurative imagery in smaller panels that were sometimes set into larger, lighter windows. At The Cloisters, many of these small pieces have been mounted in windows at viewing height; it was fascinating to see up close so much of what is usually high overhead.
Looking closer, and with excellent signage, I learned things I’d never known about stained glass, including the fact that what we most often see, especially in figurative scenes, is a combination of stained and painted glass.
Glass can be made in various colors, often vivid, by adding metallic salts as the glass is being made. But the detailed shading, the delicate features are done with a variety of paints and stains, often vitreous—that is, with elements of glass in them—that are painted on and then heated in a kiln to fuse them.
The different yellow-to-gold-to-orange shades in these pieces are produced by a silver nitrate compound called ‘silver stain’ which came into use around 1300. About 150 years later, another stain made it possible to put pink color into the cheeks or faces of previously very white people.
Speaking of very white people, these two portraits sitting on an altar are not the decorative items they appear. They are actually reliquaries, created to contain the skulls of female saints; these two are believed to have been martyred along with St Ursula. According to legend, eleven thousand died with her, which might account for why some churches had rows and rows of these.
Turning away from reliquaries and somewhat from religion, the late medieval period had a penchant for precision, a showing off of what better tools and more time could do. Not only the miniature lettering and painting of the Book of Hours featured last week, but also woodcarving. The piece above is actually a large rosary bead, about the size of a tennis ball. The carving could only be possible with a good quality magnifying glass.
The detailed carving make this hinged letter P look large, but it is actually only a few inches high. It was only found a few years ago, and has episodes from the life of St Philip inside. No surprise: it was made for another Philip, Philip the Handsome, Archduke of Austria, King of Castile, Duke of Burgundy and Brabant. He inherited all those titles at age 3, and died at 28 in 1506.
The late medieval period was a time of reviving trade, of the social and economic changes that led to the Renaissance, and a time when renewed attention was given to the less formal arts, items that were both useful and lent grace to the homes of their wealthy owners. Household pottery and furniture flourished in the period, as well as metalware.
Although most of the pottery and stoneware on display tends toward symmetry and recognizable motifs, that’s not true of all.
In fact, some of the designs are not that far different from work that might be on display at a modern crafts display, with abstract and asymmetric designs.
The lion is just what you would think it is, a finely-crafted symbol of power. But even though made in a similar vein, the rooster and rider below let us go out on another surprise: They are actually hollow vessels meant to hold water for handwashing.
I admit to a long-time fascination with the medieval; I’ve always hated the common term ‘Dark Ages,’ which imply that nothing much was going on from the fall of Rome to the Renaissance. A visit to The Cloisters helps dispel that idea and show that the era was one of innovation on every front of art and architecture, and was marked by deep technological change as well.
