Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume VIII.djvu/33

 GLASSITES ng called stereochromy, for fixing the colors see FBESCO PAINTING); and it was used not mly upon plastered walls, but with success >y Echter directly upon the sandstone of the Strasburg minster. Fuchs proposed to render wood fire-proof, and even linen also, by means >f it ; to protect surfaces from the action of he weather; to prepare with it artificial stone; and to use it as a cement for glass and porce- lain. But it appears to have been most suc- cessfully applied by Prof. Kuhlmann at Lille, who employed it to prevent the decay of walls and edifices, even when built of very inferior stone, and in print works and tapestry facto- ries for fixing colors upon cotton and paper. In England it is employed in the fabrication of the celebrated Kansome artificial stone, de- scribed in the article CONCRETE and in Dr. F. A. P. Barnard's report of the Paris univer- sal exposition of 1867. Soluble glass is also employed by Baerle and co. of Worms for washing wool. Forty parts of water are mixed with one of soluble glass at a temperature of from 122 to 135 F., and the wool is stirred in the mixture for a few minutes. It is then rinsed in tepid water, when it is found perfectly clean, white, and odorless, without having lost any of its softness or other valuable qualities. GLASSITES. See SANDEMANIANS. GLASS PAINTING. The art of painting upon glass is supposed to be of Byzantine origin, and to have arisen since the beginning of the Christian era. The first authentic account of the subject is given in the Diversarum Artium Schedula, a work written by Theophilus, prob- ably in the 12th century, though by some au- thorities its date is assigned to the 10th. The complete description given in this treatise of the process of painting on glass justifies the conclusion that the art itself must have been invented at a much earlier period ; but the oldest specimens now existing do not date further back than the 'beginning of the llth century. Indeed, the oldest existing specimens to which a date can with certainty be assigned has been considered by M. de Lasteyrie and other French antiquaries to be the windows in the cathedrals at Angers and St. Denis, which were painted about the middle of the 12th century. The skill of the French painters on glass was extolled by Theophilus, and to the present time France has continued to be the richest storehouse of painted glass of the earliest style. The process described by The- ophilus continued to be practised until about the middle of the 16th century, when the art reached its zenith. The most eminent painters practised it, as Albert Dtirer, Bernard Palissy, and others, and their works are still admired in the churches of that period, as the Cologne cathedral, York minster, and many others. But in the next century the art had entirely declined, for the reason, as Labarte suggests in his "Illustrated Handbook," that its intention was perverted in the transformation of an art of purely monumental decoration into an art GLASS PAINTING 25 of expression. For this oil painting possessed greater resources, and glass painting necessarily fell into neglect. In some modern attempts it is remarked that the primary object of the glass in transmitting light appears to be over- looked and sacrificed in the opaque shadows introduced. In the ancient glass pictures the figures were formed of pieces of stained glass, and the shadows were laid on with dark colors and fixed in the fire. Intense colors were exclusively employed, the ruby and blue always predominant. The ground was mosaic in circles, squares, and lozenges, of massive forms, and filled with foliated ornaments in the Roman style. Over this were medallions rep- resenting historical and biographical subjects from the lives of the saints. When figures came to be introduced, they were generally grotesque and distorted ; but the costumes were remarkably correct. The designs always harmonized with the style of architecture, stately and magnificent in the Norman struc- tures, and light and elegant in those of the early English models in the 13th century. In these the brilliant positive colors were made more subsidiary, appearing in borders, geo- metric bands, and central points, while the ground was of a neutral gray produced by lines crossing each other at right angles. The designs were also more correctly drawn, and shaded with greater delicacy. For the violet tint always before used for the faces of the figures was substituted a gray or brown upon colorless glass. The pieces of glass were of larger size, and a single figure was often made to occupy a whole window, standing beneath an elaborate blue or red canopy. In the back- ground, among the architectural fragmentary designs, still appeared the old Roman foliated ornaments, but intermixed with original stud- ies from nature, a style of the art which was af- terward carried to great perfection. Not only leaves, plants, and trees, but even landscapes and buildings in perspective, appeared in the latter half of the 15th century. The Scripture pieces were often explained by legends painted upon the phylacteries, and in the background were represented rich blue or red hangings of damask. After a long decline, the 1 9th century has witnessed a revival in the art of painting on glass, which is now extensively practised in France, Germany, and England, the finest speci- mens being produced at Munich. In earlier periods it was devoted chiefly to ornamenting cathedral windows with sacred illustrations, but it is now used for general purposes of orna- mentation, embracing a wide range of secular subjects. The belief in the superiority of an- cient glass painting, which was even regarded by some as one of the lost arts, has been super- seded by the opinion held by the highest au- thorities that painted glass can now be manu- factured superior to the best specimens of the middle ages. Indeed, the processes then in use have been brought to light by modern research. In 1850 a series of chemical analyses was in-