28 ON COLOUR. Paex I. 



It is true that Italy also had painted glass ; and that at a 

 very early period, some at Siena being of 1230 ; but coloured 

 glass windows were not generally adopted in Eoman churches; 

 and if in those of Northern Italy they were used, and some, 

 as at Perugia and elsewhere, were very beautiful in colour 

 and design, they were not of the same early period of which 

 Theophilus speaks ; nor do we now find in Italy the numerous 

 brilliant specimens of glass windows which abound in France 

 of the 1200 and the following century. Indeed, the earliest 

 specimens of painted glass windows in western Europe are in 

 France, some of which date before the end of the 1 100 ; as in 

 the Abbey of St. Denis, where the first crusade is represented 

 on glass of the year 1 1 94. Painted glass windows were also 

 made in Flanders and Germany in the 1200; but France 

 claims the precedence ; and Suger, Abbot of St. Denis, is said 

 to have patronised the art of painting on glass in France in 

 1152. 



It is difficult to ascertain how France arrived at the art of 

 painting glass, or whence she derived the first elements of 

 that knowledge. Some have at once pronounced that it was 

 from the Byzantine Greeks, and there is no doubt that 

 coloured glass had been used for windows by them, long 

 before it was employed for that purpose in Western Europe. 

 But those which remain are of stained, not painted, glass ; 

 and they afford no decisive solution of the question. The 

 same were adopted by the early Arabs from the Greeks, who 

 had used them long before the Arab conquests began; and 

 about the year 400, Prudentius (as Labarte has shown) speaks 

 of the employment of glass in the basilica of San Paolo-fuori- 

 le-mura at Eome, built by Constantine ; where, he says, " in 

 the rounded windows are displayed panes of glass of various 

 colours : thus do the windows shine when decorated with the 

 flowers of spring." " The existence of coloured windows " is 

 again more distinctly mentioned " in the 6th century " 



