46 ON COLOUR. Part I. 



tempted to throw away oils in despair." This admiration of 

 a false principle has unfortunately become too prevalent with 

 some persons at the present day, and we are therefore fre- 

 quently horrified by some large " painting " on glass in our 

 London churches, made worse by discords of colour, and by 

 being contrasted with a whitewashed wall ; the whole window 

 too cut into squares by monotonous parallel and cross lines 

 passing over the figures and their drapery, having the aspect 

 of a prison or a cage, with a badly coloured landscape in the 

 background. 



33. When in the 1200 the medallion was placed on the co- 

 loured ground, it was not as an independent picture, but as a 

 portion of the ornamentation of the window, and was conven- 

 tional. It was subservient to, and part of, the general effect, and 

 was not there for itself, but for the whole subject of which it 

 was an accessory. It is on this same principle that we tolerate 

 small figures of cupids, animals, chimeras, and other conceits 

 in an arabesque scroll pattern ; they are not intended to be 

 representations of such objects, but are only part of the orna- 

 mental pattern; and we look upon them simply as conventional. 



Labarte (in his admirable "Handbook of the Arts of the 

 Middle Ages"*) makes these very just remarks: "The chief 

 merit of the windows of the xii. and xiii. centuries, ... is their 

 perfect harmony with the general effect of the edifices to which 

 they belong In the middle of the xv. century the revo- 

 lution in the art of painting upon glass was complete 



Thenceforth glass was nothing more than the material sub- 

 servient to the painter, as canvas or wood in oil painting. 

 Glass-painters went so far as to copy upon white glass, as upon 

 canvas, the master-pieces of Eaffaelle, Michael Angelo, and 

 the other great painters of the Italian Eenaissance. . . . We 

 also find entire windows painted in mono-chromatic tints. . . . 

 But the era of glass-painting was at an end. From the 



* Pages 70, 75, 76. 



