The Case of the Extra Lead Lines
Having constructed my own stained glass windows for many years, I have recently begun to examine how that expertise might illumine historical windows. I present here a brief case study of how technical expertise might inflect art historical understanding.
The nineteenth-century French architect and historian Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and glass artist Alfred Gérente collaboratively worked to complete damaged medieval windows and provide new bays for the choir of the Saint Denis Basilica in Paris in the 1840s. This intervention embodies Viollet-le-Duc’s views on nineteenth-century stained glass. He was generally averse to extensive glass painting and argued modern stained glass should not attempt to transform itself into a type of oil painting on glass – it should not reject its material conditions. Rather, he believed, its main compositional tools should be those provided by the medium, specifically, the quality and colors of the glass and the contrasting lead lines. The Saint Denis windows display a careful consideration of how lead lines, the structural skeleton of a window, can not only provide physical support but also structure a design. In these mosaic-like lancets, lead lines trace the compositional elements. Rather than dissecting the image, the lead lines reinforce the composition.
However, a technical knowledge of stained glass reveals further nuance behind Viollet-le-Duc and Gérente’s stylistic approach. In windows which incorporate both new and ancient panels, the new panels display a much greater use of lead than 'actually needed.' When I consider ‘actual need,’ I am thinking as a maker. First, these lines serve no compositional need. The lead lines seen in the bottom of the figures’ robes (Second Detail), for example, do not follow the contours of the composition. Unlike the other lead lines in these panels, these extraneous leads dissect the design as if they were indiscriminately laid over the image. For glass artists, such as Gérente and Viollet-le-Duc, who are designing with the lead structure, lead lines that work against the composition are both unnecessary and typically undesirable. Second, these leads are unrelated to structural need. A person technically familiar with glass recognizes these pieces are not large enough to require extra lead came. From the perspective of the lead framework, there is no reason to insert these lead lines.
How might one explain these extra lead insertions? In the windows that contain only new panels, these excess lead lines are notably absent. Similarly sized pieces remain unbroken. Given they only appear in the panels joined to medieval remnants, I would argue that these extraneous lead lines are false breaks. They are fake mending leads meant to resemble the pieces of lead typically inserted by later glass workers to repair broken pieces in ancient windows. The extra leads are meant to mimic visually the fragmented appearance of the adjacent medieval panels; they are a form of camouflage. The windows thus use lead not simply as a pictorial tool, but also as a means of integrating new panels and their ancient counterparts into a unified composition. As noted above, Viollet-le-Duc and Gérente use this technique of assimilation selectively. While they added extraneous lead to the panels proximal to medieval glass, they remained consistently stylistically efficient in the new bays. The two men seem unwilling to sacrifice lead’s clear compositional function when visual dissimulation was not a concern.
A technically informed perspective reveals how nineteenth-century glass artists balanced a need for convincing restorations with their desire to display lead’s compositional potential. In the study of glass, making is a promising tool for illuminating less visible tensions and concerns.
-- Thea Goldring, PhD Student, Harvard University