apparatus; and it is to that part of Germany, Lorraine, Alsace, and neighbouring Rhine provinces that we may 'look... for the earliest developement of that form of it which was developed in the middle ages.' 'At Neuviller, on the lower Rhine, is a relic of perhaps the oldest existing 'painted window,' which is described as being of extreme Byzantine style.' At the Benedictine Abbey of Tegernsee, in Bavaria, glass-works were established A.D. 1003, in memory of Theophania, a Greek princess, married to Otho II. As time went on, the art of glass painting was extended from Germany to France and England. The Abbot Suger, A.D. 1147, sent for artists in enamel to decorate the cathedral of St. Denis, near Paris. Artificial gems seem to have been employed, rubies and sapphires being imitated. But the splendour of the abbey brought upon the abbot the wrath of St. Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux, who attacked his brother, like a John Knox of the twelfth century. In spite of this, the strict rule of the Cistercians against the use of coloured glass for church windows was relaxed; and the figure of St. Bernard was painted on panels representing the chief incidents of his life. Mr. Gambier Parry, commenting on the change, says: The experience of life and human in'firmity appears to have taught them, as it has taught others, that fine art, inspired by sacred motive, is most useful, not only to teach the ignorant, but to fill the void of vacant ' minds.'

The early windows were marked by simplicity in design. and brilliancy of colour. In the thirteenth century an improvement in design took place; the architect apparently supplying the figures, if we may judge from the works of Wilars de Honecort, who has left among his drawings scores of studies of figures, draperies, and proportion.' In those days there was less subdivision of the arts than is the case now, and so

the glass painter often embraced in his work the whole art of his profession, from the first preparation of the glass to the painting of the finished window; as in the case of the Alsatian glass painter, Jean de Kirkheim, who executed great works in Strasburg Cathedral (about A.D. 1310), where he is described as Vitreator factor vitrorum, glasseator, Pictor.'

In England much destruction of works of art and of records took place. Occasionally, however, they were ingeniously preserved; as, for instance, the records of Newstead Abbey, which lay for centuries unsuspected in the brass ball of its 'lectern, now standing in the choir of Southwell Minster.'

Much of the glass was foreign, as, e.g., the windows for Rivaulx Abbey, which were sent from France in 1140. In 1303 we come upon the name of an English glass painter, which is preserved in the history of Exeter Cathedral, where for 140 feet of painted glass, and other such work, 'Walter 'the Glazier was paid various sums. A few years after 'Walter of Exeter,' the name of Robert of York is preserved, as having been paid in 1338 at the rate of twelve'pence per foot for his painted glass.' He painted the great west window of York Cathedral. Another name occurs in the records of Exeter Cathedral, that of Robert Lyen (A.D. 1391). Men of his craft were held in high estimation in former times, being relieved from imposts under the Emperors Constantine, Theodosius, and Valentinian; and at Venice, the master glaziers of Murano were honoured by high social privileges, admitting them to intermarriage ' with the Venetian nobility, and to the rank of nobles, with " their titles inscribed in their libro d' oro.

The destruction of painted glass was in no country greater than in Italy, where this branch of art was little appreciated. Indeed, with walls adorned with mosaics and frescoes, there is more need of pure sunlight than variously coloured light shining through glass windows. There was a school of art in Florence, at the convent outside the Porta a Pinti, where monks established themselves in 1383, and where, until the siege in 1529, when it was entirely ruined, they employed themselves in the practice of various arts, and pre-eminently in glass painting. Their prior prepared with his own hands the ultramarine for Pietro Perugino for the frescoes which 'he painted on the walls of the convent; and for Michel 'Angelo, upon his undertaking the frescoes on the vaulting ' of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican.' Before the end of the fourteenth century this art had attained to eminence in northern and central Italy, but it rarely penetrated the south. Instances are given of glass painters of Siena and Pisa, among whom two, about the year 1460, filled with their painted glass the arcade on the two sides of the Campo Santo, for the preservation of the frescoes there from the action of sea-breezes B. da Scarperia and Leonardo, a Florentine.' In the fifteenth century a young German artist, son of a merchant at Ulm, visited Rome in 1432, and being seized with a strong religious longing, 'he ' entered the order of the Frati Predicatori of the convent of 'S. Domenico at Bologna, and there he spent a devoted life, ́ succeeding, as, his biographer says, some other saintly men

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have done, in making the pursuit of art a means toward the perfection of religious life.' The best known of his works are the great windows in the church of S. Petronio, 'executed with assistance of his pupils, Frati Ambrogino and Anastasio, in his adopted city Bologna,' where he was known by the name of Fra Beato Giacomo d' Ulma. A very different man was the Frenchman from Verdun, whose story has been told by Vasari under the name of Gulielmo ' di Marsilla.' He came to Italy, to assist a friend and fellow-countryman, named Claude, in decorating the Vatican for Pope Julius II. with painted glass, after designs by Raphael. He entered the Dominican Order to escape from the secular courts of justice, to which he had become amenable; but as soon as he felt assured of his safety, he threw up his conventual obligations and went to Rome, where he attained to the highest reputation as a glass painter. It is much to be regretted that the glass windows in the Vatican were destroyed at the siege of Rome in 1527 by the Constable de Bourbon. Mr. Gambier Parry traces the progress of the art both north and south of the Alps

the character of the advance from the thirteenth to the fourteenth century having been from exclusive conventionalism to Nature, from the fourteenth to the fifteenth that of improvement in the higher qualities of design, and in the following century by the introduction of the use of coloured glass enamels, affording to the glass painter as varied a palette as the painter in oil.'

This system was adopted by Gulielmo so completely that Vasari says of his works at Cortona and Arezzo that one 'would say that they were composed of living figures, and 'not of coloured and transparent glass, but in truth marvellous pictures.' In spite of this success, Gulielmo abandoned glass painting and took to fresco, probably anticipating the destruction of works in so perishable a material as glass.

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The art owed much of its success in Italy to northern influence. The best materials were imported; for, as Vasari says, the best glass came from Germany, France, and England, and the best smalti-i.e. coloured enamels-were German, and with few exceptions the best glass painters were foreign, or the Italian pupils of foreign masters.

Spain also availed itself of the genius of the North. Toledo was famous for its painted glass as early as the thirteenth century, and from the records there appears to have been a continual succession of native and Flemish glass painters from the beginning of the fifteenth to that of

the eighteenth century. Specimens of the art in France, Germany, Holland, and Belgium Mr. Gambier Parry passes over as too numerous to be recorded, and in the case of France 'too well known to need further reference.' The causes of decline are traced in these countries to the abandonment of the brilliant old-fashioned colours, and to the use of white glass to be painted upon with enamels, as in oil or water'colour.' Other technicalities were introduced from the beginning of the sixteenth century, till glass painting 6 changed its function, and produced cabinet pictures, landscape transparencies, miniatures and copies of the works of the great masters in oil and fresco, as when Bernard • Palissy painted on glass copies of Raphael's history of Cupid and Psyche for the family of Montmorency at 'Ecouen.'

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In the Netherlands a school of glass painting adopted the supposed improvements of the sixteenth century, the greatest works thus executed being those in the cathedral of St. Gudule at Brussels, by Jan Haeck and Bernard von Orley,' which were more artistic, but less brilliant in colour, than earlier windows.

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In Germany Albert Dürer is described as the founder of < an improved school of more correct perspective and architecture, and for sacred subjects, particularly for painted 'glass; and we know that glass painters were among his intimate friends. Whether any glass paintings by him still exist is uncertain; if any, those in the cathedral at Cologne, on the north side of the nave, have the best claim.

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influence of his school is noticeable far and wide. Not only his genius can be plainly traced, but that of the Van Eycks and Hemling left their impress on the glass painting of the age. It is difficult to suppose that the decay of the art can be in any way attributable to them. But Adrian de Vriee and the brothers Crabeth at Gouda despised the conventionalities of glass painting, and contributed by their freedom of treatment to its downfall.

One main cause of the decay of glass painting is the destructibility of windows. They are liable to be broken by any accident, and cannot, as a rule, be repaired. Mr. Gambier Parry shows the great loss not only to art, but also to historic knowledge, thereby sustained. He also points out the architectural objection to large windows.

The windows of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries increased in height and breadth; and in the fourteenth and fifteenth, so universally did this fashion prevail, that the constructive principles of

buildings were affected by it, and all the weight of the groined roof and the arcades within, and of the spires and towers without, was left to rest on slender piers and flying buttresses, which alone remained for their support, the solid walls having given place to sheets of pictured glass.'

The earliest form of this developement was in the great 'wheel windows, . . . among the earliest of which was the circular window of the north transept of Lincoln Cathedral,' date about 1200. Gothic architects adopted this form of window, which was probably the origin of the develope'ment of ordinary window-heads to the entire space under the groining.' Instances of this are given from the Ste. Chapelle at Paris, completed 1248, most of the windows of which contain the original glass, and from the east window of Gloucester Cathedral, where the walls of the most eastern bay are sloped outwards to obtain an extra space for the mouldings of the window frame, and thus to secure the entire width of the choir for the glass. This great 'window still retains its original glass, dating from about '1370 A.D.'

Mr. Gambier Parry proceeds to show, with great force, how greater pictorial freedom and naturalism became the ruin of the art of glass painting :

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It happily took centuries before that degradation brought it to its close. It had been by that thoroughly architectonic sense which prevailed in its earlier phases, and till the closing years of the fifteenth century, that this noble art, with all the dignified reserve of selfrespect, had held its right place among its compeers; but as time advanced it happened with it, as with other things, that the idea of developement became confounded with that of progress, and a system was introduced which delighted the unthinking popular sense with much that was admirable in the strictest sense of art, and glorious in effect, but with it also a loss of principle and a flattery of ambition that brought it to a lingering but certain fall.'

This is followed by the assertion of the sound principle that every art should recognise its own limits. Architecture has its laws, so has picture-painting. How can glass painting claim to be free from laws which bind all other branches of art? As a matter of fact, glass painters erred by aiming at effects beyond their art, by disregarding the bounds of space, by attempting pictorial effects of atmosphere, and by excessive finish. A perfect work of art must be thought out in its own language.'

Those who have not painted on glass or canvas themselves, and have not thought out the different conditions of