Stained glass is a monumental art, a corporate enterprise dependent on a patron with whom artists blend their voices. Combining the fields now labeled decorative arts, architecture, and painting, the window transforms our experience of space. Windows of colored glass were essential features of medieval and Renaissance buildings. They provided not only light to illuminate the interior but also specific and permanent imagery that proclaimed the importance of place. Commissioned by monks, nuns, bishops, and kings, as well as by merchants, prosperous farmers, and a host of anonymous patrons, these windows vividly reflect the social, religious, civic, and aesthetic values of their eras. Beautifully illustrated with reproductions from the remarkable stained glass collection at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Stained Glass addresses the making of a stained glass window, its iconography and architectural context, the patrons and collectors, and the challenges of restoration and display. The selected works include examples from Austria, Belgium, England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Subject matter ranges from monumental religious scenes for Gothic churches to lively heraldic panels made for houses and other secular settings. Integrating comparisons to works of art in other media, such as manuscripts, drawings, and panel paintings, this book encourages the general reader to see stained glass as an element of a broad artistic production.

With many excellent books on medieval stained glass available, the reader of this anthology may well ask: “what is the contribution of this collection?” In this book, we have chosen to step away from national, chronological, and regional models. Instead, we started with scholars doing interesting work in stained glass, and called upon colleagues to contribute studies that represent the diversity of approaches to the medium, as well as up-to-date bibliographies for work in the field. Contributors are: Wojciech Balus, Karine Boulanger, Sarah Brown, Elizabeth Carson Pastan, Madeline H. Caviness, Michael W. Cothren, Francesca Dell’Acqua, Uwe Gast, Françoise Gatouillat, Anne Granboulan, Anne F. Harris, Christine Hediger, Michel Hérold, Timothy B. Husband, Alyce A. Jordan, Herbert L. Kessler, David King, Brigitte Kurmann-Schwarz, Claudine Lautier, Ashley J. Laverock, Meredith P. Lillich, Isabelle Pallot-Frossard, Hartmut Scholz, Mary B. Shepard, Ellen M. Shortell, Nancy M. Thompson.

The present volume catalogues and illustrates all the stained glass produced before 1700 in the collections of Upstate New York. It includes the glass in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, in the Hyde Collection at Glen Falls, in Ithaca College, and predominantly in Corning, where the Corning Glass Museum is well known for its exceptional collection and where also Christ Episcopal Church houses two interesting fifteenth-century windows. The catalogue covers a wide range of panels of French and English glass from the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the collections are particularly strong in their holdings of later heraldic panels from the Lowlands and Switzerland. In addition to a detailed examination of the glass, Professor Lillich presents exhaustively researched histories of the individual panels, and sheds much light on the formation of the different collections and the personalities who created them. Every work catalogued is also illustrated, accompanied by clearly presented restoration charts and many comparative illustrations.

This collection of essays, which derive from a symposium held at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005, tells the story of how medieval art was collected by both individuals and institutions in the American Midwest. This book will appeal to both medievalists and scholars of nineteenth- and twentieth century American history. In addition, it will also appeal to scholars who are interested in museum studies and the history of collecting. The essays in the first section, “Collecting and Displaying Medieval Art,” consider the formation of medieval art collections at influential cultural institutions in three of the most important centers of industry and culture in the Midwest: Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland. The second section, “Medieval Art as Inspiration and Education,” examines the motives of both private donors and museum professionals in forming collections and establishing period rooms and cloistered spaces at museums in Toledo, Kansas City, and St. Louis, among others. At the opposite end of the spectrum was a new trend in curatorial practice, beginning in the 1930s, that favored the dismantling of period rooms and espoused displaying historical works of art in more distinctly modern settings, a theme that pervades section three, “Medieval Art and Modernism.” An essay on medieval art in Midwestern university art museums and another one that considers the impact of works from medieval collections in special exhibitions serve as a remarkable coda to the rest of the volume. Two appendices follow this, one that provides an overview of medieval art collections in Midwestern university museums and another which provides a biographical sketch of prominent dealers of medieval art from 1900-1950.

Borrowing its title from Madeline Harrison Caviness's influential work on the modes of seeing articulated by the twelfth-century cleric Richard of Saint Victor, this interdisciplinary collection brings together the work of thirty scholars from England, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and the United States. Each author has contributed an original article that engages with ideas formulated in Caviness's wide-ranging scholarship. The historiographic introduction discusses themes in Caviness's publications and their importance for art historical and medieval studies today. The book's thematic matrix groups together essays concerned with: The Material Object, Documentary Reconstruction, Post-Disciplinary Approaches, Multiple Readings, Gender and Reception, Performativity, Text and Image, Collecting and Consumption, and Politics and Ideology. The contributors include curators, art historians, historians, and literary scholars. Their subjects range from medieval stained glass to the nineteenth-century Gothic Revival, the Sachsenspiegel, and Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. Many foreground issues of gender, reception, and textuality, which have permeated Caviness's scholarship. Some also present approaches to sites that have been the subject of important studies by Caviness, including Canterbury, Chartres, Reims, Saint-Denis, Sens, and Troyes. The volume offers a broad range of methodological approaches to key topics in the study of medieval imagery and thus highlights the vitality of the field today.