34 ON COLOUR. Part I. 



abounded in Italy ; and when the marriage of Otho II. with 

 Theophania, daughter of Nicephorus Phocas, in 967 a.d., 

 brought so many Greek artificers into Western Europe. The 

 leading country in art always has had an influence on other 

 people ; and this of Byzantium was even felt in a minor 

 degree in Britain and Ireland at those early periods. 



Mr. Whinston cites proofs of the early French painted 

 glass displaying Byzantine features, and traces a resemblance 

 between the glass paintings of the middle of the 1100, and 

 the illuminations of contemporary Greek MSS. ; and he thinks 

 that " the glass-paintings which, on the whole, most closely 

 resemble the antique, are those executed between 1170 and 

 1240, or thereabouts." These Byzantine features, however, 

 are disputed by some French writers of eminence, who 

 maintain that though the use of stained glass for win- 

 dows was adopted by the Byzantine Greeks long before it was 

 known in France, the art of painting on glass was a French 

 invention. But here again the Greeks have a prior claim ; 

 as Theophilus (ii. 14) shows that they painted glass and 

 burnt in the colours at the same period; and no one will 

 maintain that they derived the secret from the French. And 

 though he mentions the painted glass windows of France, 

 " he attributes," as Labarte observes, " to the Greeks alone 

 the production of vases of ornamental glass," and the French, 

 even in " the fourteenth century," had recourse to the Greeks 

 for every "piece of decorated glass."* 



24. The distinction between stained and painted glass con- 

 sists in the former being of one uniform hue, while in the latter 

 the colour is applied to the white surface and then burnt in. 

 This last is used in the "Enamel Method," which admits 

 no stained glass, and requires the whole picture to be painted 

 on the previously colourless surface. The other is called the 

 " Simple Mosaic Method," and in it the whole picture is made 



* Labarte, "Handbook of the Arts of the Middle Ages," pp. 336, 337. 



