Even northern french light

Above and below: Church of St Martin, Romilly-sur-Seine. Windows by Joël Mône.

For our last day of stained glass sight seeing in France we chose, from another excellent tourist leaflet complete with map, two churches with windows made in the twenty first century. The large church of St. Martin in Romilly-sur-Seine has a series of windows by Joël Mône above what looks like a huge layer of bird netting. There is a very effective white, textured one above the west door, and a spectrum of coloured windows from yellow to red (in the south transept) through pink and purple to blue (in the north transept) and finally to turquoise and green. The colour sequence is interrupted by nineteenth century stained glass windows around the apse and, as you can see in the photos where similar glass can be seen in the lower windows of the church, the new windows sit well with the old ones by not imitating them in any way.

St. Martin, Romilly-sur-Seine, with blue window representing the baptism of Christ in the centre.

Initially I found the new windows, installed in 2013, uninteresting and the concept of the rainbow colours clichéd. In the church was a diagram that explained the sequence in terms of water and light at the green and yellow ends (cliché upon cliché) with each window linked to a bible story in the traditional way, starting with the old testament at the west and ending with the new testament either side of the altar. Now that I look at the window designs in more detail next to the verses that inspired them, I am more appreciative of the scheme and the attempt to interpret the words of the bible in an abstract manner.

Church of St Peter and St Paul, Villenauxe-la-Grande. Windows on the south side by David Tremlett.

Our last stop was Villenauxe-la-Grande, and a scheme of windows - all the glazing in the church of St Peter and St Paul - by the British artist David Tremlett that I’ve wanted to see since I read an article about them in 2005 when they were installed. 200 square metres of glass over 25 windows makes this the most significant church commission in France for twenty years, according to the leaflet. David Tremlett had not designed much for stained glass before he won this commission which was executed by the studio of Simon Marq in Reims, but this typically French stained glass system, where an artist is paired with a master stained glass maker, works perfectly here, as indeed it does in many of the churches we’ve visited on this trip.

Villenauxe-la-Grande. Windows on the north side by David Tremlett.

I think of these windows as giant watercolours, they are opalescent rather than transparent, with white lines bordering colours that remind you of the edge of a piece of paper. There is a bewildering variety of design but a consistency of scale and technique, Tremlett says that he wants each window to relate to the next one, but also to stand on its own. I imagine how satisfied the artist would have felt on seeing the commission completed - daring, original and seeming to add light to the interior with a wonderful range of light, bright colours.

Villenauxe-la-Grande. Left: Window 2 (Christ). Right: Windows 4 (Christ), windows 6 & 8 (the vine).

I chose as my favourite window no 2 in the scheme (above left), which with its pair, represents Christ. I had to keep blocking the next two windows out of my vision (above right) their spottiness represents to me the worst aspects of decorativeness - what was he thinking of? The diagram of the windows, spookily similar to the one in the church at Romilly-sur-Seine, says they represent the vine. The subject matter for the other windows goes from earth, through fire, ceramic (for the benefactor of the windows) to the virgin Mary, the paschal mystery, Christ, air and water.

Villenauxe-la-Grande. Left: Window 9 (fire), windows 7 & 5 (ceramic). Right: Windows 3 & 1 (The Virgin Mary).

Villenauxe-la-Grande. Left: Window 12 (air), windows 14 & 16 (water). Right: Windows 20 & 22 at the south west corner.

This was my favourite stained glass interior of all the ones we visited on this trip - see my last four blog posts for comparisons. I knew I would like the designs and the differences between the windows, but the success of stained glass windows, their luminosity, colour and detail, depend on their manufacture and in this case they were made by the best there is. I thought a view of the outside of the windows would give a clue as to how they’re made (below), it’s also interesting to see the wire mesh over them all that is hardly visible from the inside and to see the colour of the sky - the even northern french light that is perfect for the viewing of stained glass.

Villenauxe-la-Grande, windows 7 and 3 from the outside.

Stained Glass City

Troyes Cathedral. Left and centre, three tiers of windows around the nave. Right, rose window in south transept.

Troyes, capital of the Aube département, calls itself the stained glass city. ‘The saying goes that France is home to 80% of the world’s stained glass windows, that 80% of French stained glass windows are located north of the Loire, that 80% of the stained glass windows north of the Loire are in the Champagne region, and that 80% of the stained glass windows in the Champagne region are in the Aube département ‘ - this from the city’s tourist web site. The opening of Troyes’ stained glass museum is imminent, meanwhile a wonderful map and series of leaflets leads you from cathedral to basilica to church after church, some of them (mercifully) locked as you begin to overdose on the best medieval and renaissance stained glass you could hope for.

After all the modern stained glass we’d been seeing, the windows in the Cathedral of St Peter and St Paul in Troyes were a reminder of another side of stained glass - the one where you stand in wonder at the intricacy of the pattern making and then stay for hours finding the stories, the characters and the landscapes in the windows.

Troyes Cathedral. Left, the south side of the nave. Right, windows in the chapels on the south side of the nave.

Forgetting to take my proper camera (apologies for mentioning this again!) gave me more time to stand and stare and to focus on pattern rather than on finding favourite details. I loved looking at the rows of striped leading filled with stories and parables high up on the south side of the nave (above left) and then looking down to the chapels at ground level with a whole variety of rich styles and colours in windows made from the 13th to 19th centuries. The most useful leaflet imaginable tells you the date, the makers’ names when known and the date of restoration of each window. Best of all was a window in the chapel of the Immaculate Conception made in 1524 in the workshop of Jean Soudain (below right).

Troyes Cathedral. Left and centre, C13th glass in chapels around the apse. Right, window of the Immaculate Conception.

St Urban Basilica, Troyes.

You get a more concise stained glass experience inside the Basilica of St Urban, a massive but delicate gothic church a short walk away from the cathedral. This church was begun in 1262 at the expense of Pope Urban IV, a native of Troyes. The stained glass windows are from the late thirteenth century, they soar above the alter, creating a luminous area that shines right out of the church (above). This effect comes not only from the height of the bands of windows, but also from the large amount of pale grisaille glass that is used around the strip of bright figures. The ornaments in the borders are simple and heraldic, with flashes of rainbow chevrons that contrast with foliage patterns on the white glass ground. Another set of windows (below right) has an all over circular pattern, stronger than the little figurative scenes they encircle. All these windows with their jazzy details are seen through an interior screen of empty stone windows that contribute to the effect of a delicate cage.

The windows of St Urban Basilica.

Church of St Madeleine, Troyes. Centre and right, creation window (c.1500).

The map took us through medieval streets to St Madeleine, a church with a claim to being the oldest and most beautiful in the city. The atmosphere is quite different, intimate and rich with an astonishing carved stone rood screen right across the centre of the space and a series of incredibly fine windows in the apse. It’s great to be able to get close to these and to read the stories, strip cartoon style, of the creation (above right), the lives of Saints Eloi and Louis, The Passion of Christ (below right), and a wonderfully composed and painted Jesse’s Tree (below) in a design that scrolls across the mullions and leading stripes. Seeing this series side by side shows up the stylistic differences, some with captions under each picture and some with words floating on banners. The designs are organised around elaborate top tracery, different in each one and daringly complicated with figures using up every scrap of glass as they tell the story right to the top of each window.

Windows in the church of St Madeleine, Troyes. Centre, Jesse’s Tree (c.1500). Right, The Passion of Christ (c.1490).

Fashions in Stained glass

Cathedral of St Mary of the Assumption, Vaison-La-Romaine

In this account of our road trip we are now on the way home, travelling from the south of France back to Calais. First stop Vaison-La-Romaine where, at the top of the medieval town with a view over Mont Ventoux, is the recently restored Cathedral of St Mary of the Assumption. All the windows are the work of the artist and Dominican preacher Kim En Joong, who has been making stained glass for French cathedrals and churches since 1989. These are the first I have seen in reality and the semi restored state of the cathedral seemed the perfect setting for his floating calligraphic style.

Vaison-La-Romaine, all windows by Kim En Joong, 2018-19 (above and below).

Kim En Joong travelled from South Korea, where he studied traditional taoist calligraphy and fine art, to Switzerland where he studied art history, theology and metaphysics before entering the Dominican order. For this commission of nineteen windows, Kim painted the designs on canvas, using mixed materials, tools and layers. These paintings were then interpreted by the German glass studio Derix, with air brushing, hand painting and some layering of the glass to get a perfect imitation of the paintings. The windows are abstract with no overt story telling, they seem both ancient and modern and I think, very safe.

Abbey St Philibert, Tournus.

Our next visit took us further back in time, with exquisite stained glass from the 1960s in the romanesque Abbey of St Philibert, Tournus, built from the eleventh century onwards. Most of the windows are by Brigitte Simon, an artist from a famous stained glass family in Reims and, with her husband Charles Marq, the maker of many of Chagall’s windows. Here, she said her goal had been ‘to extend the impression of the stones and to preserve in this mother-of-pearl space the full melody of its true colour, rose.’

Tournus, all windows by Brigitte Simon, 1964-7 (above and below).

As well as rose, there are glowing golden windows around the apse (top) and very subtle grey ones high up in the nave (above left). The most beautiful one is in a gothic transept windows, with a combination of pink, lilac and neutral coloured glass in wandering lead lines that match the cobwebs (below).

An account of the windows in the abbey tells us a lot about changes in stained glass fashions, some of them due to the course of history. The original alabaster windows from the 11th century were replaced by 12th century stained glass ones. These were destroyed in the 16th century Wars of Religion and another set was installed in the 19th century then blown out during the Second World War. When new windows were installed in the 1950s, they were the work of Pierre Choutet and Max Ingrand. Three of these have been retained, but the rest proved so controversial that they were removed and replaced by Brigitte Simon’s series which take a purely architectural even decorative approach. The controversial windows, at least the ones I’ve seen, are figurative with angular typically 1950s figures in muted colours (below left). The sort of thing we are so used to seeing in european churches that they fade into the background with no chance of offending anyone.

Tournus, Left, chapel window by Choutet or Ingrand. Centre and right, windows by Brigitte Simon.

Nevers and Rodez Cathedrals

Morning sun in Nevers Cathedral

The Cathedral of Saint Cyr and Saint Juliette of Nevers, in the middle of France on the river Loire, is an essential stop on a stained glass road trip as its windows are filled with modern stained glass - that is 1052 square metres in 130 windows designed by five different artists. The gothic east end was blazing with colour on the morning of our visit, projecting right up to the opposite end of the cathedral (below left) where there are four subtle, rhythmic windows by Raoul Ubac. These were the first to be commissioned for this ambitious stained glass project initiated almost forty years after the building was bombed by the Royal Air Force.

Nevers: Left, four windows in the romanesque west end by Raoul Ubac, 1983. Right, upper choir windows by Claude Viallat, 1992.

It is the upper windows in the choir that project most of the colour, this set by Claude Viallat contains a repeated motif (which we called the floating toast) in a gorgeous bright and light colour palette. They act as a bridge between the set of geometric designs by Gottfried Honegger in the windows of the upper nave, and the many windows by Jean-Michel Albérola in the chapels around the apse which you can see in bursts through the cathedral’s interior arches as soon as you enter (above right and top).

There are several useful information boards about the windows in the cathedral, the one below particularly so as it gives the names of the glass studios that worked with each artist and a detail from each set of windows - something I can’t do as I forgot to take my good camera on this trip. The commentary, as always, is keen to interpret the designs in terms of subject matter, whereas in fact the only artist who used figurative imagery is Jean Michel Albérola.

Useful information board in Nevers Cathedral

Nevers: Left, Chapel of the Joyful Mysteries. Right, Blessed Sacrament Chapel, Jean-Michel Albérola, 1993-4.

The figurative path is, I think, the hardest one to choose and to admire. Look at the gorgeous saturated green, orange and pink projected on the floor of the radiant gothic Blessed Sacrament Chapel, and then look again and realise that the white shape is a giant hand silhouette, one of the hands of God. Albérola’s imagery is saturated with motifs from the whole history of European painting, as well as borrowing from traditional stained glass design as you can see in the floral ornamentation, crosshatching and cartoonish figures and hands in the example below.

“I took pieces of images either figurative or decorative which I mixed together, as I usually do… From the beginning, I started with the idea of quotation, without inventing anything”. Albérola quoted in a comrehensive article about these windows in The Spirit of the Eye.

Nevers: Left, two windows by Albérola in the apse. Right, two windows by Gottfried Honegger in the crypt, 2001.

Gottfried Honegger’s windows seem to be exercises in elegant shape and colour, even the information board resists the urge to interpret the simple shapes in his windows for the nave and the crypt (above right). But are they enough? My favourite set, the windows in the side chapels of the nave by François Rouan, hover between the worlds of imagery and abstraction. They play sensitively with the complicated patterns in the tracery using restrained colour combinations and have a huge impact when you stand in front of them (below).

Nevers: Windows by François Rouan in the side chapels of the nave, 1991-6.

Our next stop, 250 miles south, was Rodez and the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Here one artist, Stéphane Belzère, was chosen in a competition launched in 2002 to design seven tall gothic windows in the side chapels around the choir. A condition of the competition was that the windows should contain Christian iconography on set themes using figurative imagery appropriate to the twenty first century. Atelier Duchemin, who made Albérola’s Nevers windows, was chosen as the manufacturer and these windows are also beautifully made and slightly cartoonish with a digital, twenty first century feel.

Rodez: Windows by Stéphane Belzère in the chapels on the east side of the nave (windows completed 2006).

The first window interprets the theme The Blood of Christ (above left) with oversized hands (again) and blood cells. The second window, Resurrection, uses glass that goes from the deepest red to the palest yellow - extreme colour saturation to extreme light - with minimal leading and all details etched, painted and silverstained by the artist (above right).

Rodez: Windows by Belzère in the chapels on the west side representing Saints in Heaven (left) and Genesis (right).

The windows on the west side are taller still, and the top tracery of each is filled with wonderfully multicoloured glass, made with coloured frits. My favourite of them all is the one with the slightly terrifying red border (below centre and right). This one, The Dream of Boaz, contains a version of Jesse’s tree, you can make out figures and faces in the beautifully painted, etched and silverstained bubble. It’s interesting to see the collision of a twenty first century approach to picture making with the cathedral’s architecture and the declared intention of giving people images that interpret the bible in the traditional manner of stained glass windows, a view outlined in the comprehensive explanation panels on display. The whole effect is jumbled, patternless and full of religious content, a thing you rarely find in modern church or cathedral windows.

Rodez: Windows by Belzère in the chapels on the west side, representing Fire (left) and The Dream of Boaz (right).

Introduction to the French Road Trip

Rouen Cathedral with stained glass by Max Ingrand 1956 (below)

The first leg of our road trip consisted of a journey from the north - Calais - to the south - Mazamet - with stops along the way, some for stained glass and some for camping. Our first stop was Rouen and a quick evening visit to Notre Dame Cathedral, famous for its façade painted by Monet, drawn by Ruskin and admired by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones on their sight seeing visit in 1855. On our trip the heat wave was on and the sun was blazing through tall thin windows filled with excellent examples of stained glass from the 13th to the 16th century. The 1950s windows, most notably by Max Ingrand, replaced the ones that were bombed during the Second World War. They are similar to the cathedral’s medieval and renaissance windows in terms of composition, with colours and imagery that fit in, in an unremarkable way. I loved the patterned windows (top right) in a design of squares and diamonds with painted details that makes the glass look padded, like a quilt.

Stained glass windows in the church of St Ouen, Léry.

Early the next morning we stopped outside a church 15 miles away, and found it open, the interior beautifully kept. It looked, sounded (taped organ music) and smelt in perfect order, with painted walls, tiled floors, wooden sculptures and a complete set of twentieth century windows. The ones in the lower windows (shown above) were all of a similar design in different colour combinations and they became more satisfying the longer we looked at them. Like the patterned windows in Rouen Cathedral, I couldn’t find a name or a date, and like those windows they were in harmony with the architecture. When I was an art student I used to call this sort of stained glass ‘subservient to the architecture’, now I tend to think that’s a positive quality for a stained glass window to have.

Chartres Cathedral: east window, west window and Notre Dame de la Belle Verrière. 12th and 13th century glass.

We spent a day in Chartres, where I hadn’t been since I was a school student. I knew the interior had been controversially cleaned, so the pools of coloured light projected through the glass don’t seem so intense now that the interior is mostly white, rather than mostly black. However the medieval stained glass in its entirety is the best there is; huge and intricate, overwhelming and predominantly cobalt blue. The windows above the west door are beautiful (above centre) and so is the window of Notre Dame de la Belle Verrière (above right) that was always one of my favourites in my stained glass picture books. That’s one of the points of the road trip - to stand in front of your favourite artworks, an experience that is completely different from looking at them in a book or on a screen.