50 Fun Facts About Stained Glass

What is glass traditionally coloured with to make stained glass?

Metallic salts added during manufacture colour the glass itself, so the picture is a jigsaw of cut pieces and the painter's dark paint adds the outlines and shadow.

What are the metal strips that traditionally hold stained-glass pieces together called?

Cames are H-shaped in section, so each strip grips the edges of two neighbouring pieces at once, and their dark lines end up as part of the drawing.

Which metal is used to make the strips that join the glass in a traditional window?

Lead is soft enough to bend round every curve of the cut glass, and that softness has a price: a big panel sags unless it is tied to iron bars set across the opening.

Which metallic oxide produces the deep blue of medieval glass, famous at one great French cathedral?

Cobalt is thought to be named after the kobold, a goblin German miners blamed for ore that looked promising but proved poisonous and gave them no silver.

Which precious metal, in tiny concentrations, produces rich ruby-red glass?

Gold tints glass not as a dye but as a haze of metal particles far too small to see, so a mere trace is enough; a weaker dose gives the pink sold as cranberry glass.

Which additive gives glass an amethyst or purple colour and has been used since ancient Egypt?

Manganese was nicknamed 'glassmakers' soap': a pinch scrubs the green tint of iron out of clear glass, while a heavier dose turns the same glass purple.

What is 'silver stain', introduced soon after 1300, used to produce?

Yellow to orange colours from silver are the 'stain' that gave stained glass its English name: brushed on the back and fired, it sinks into the glass instead of sitting on top.

The Space Window at Washington National Cathedral has what sealed into the centre of its glass?

A piece of Moon rock was carried up the aisle by Neil Armstrong himself, flanked by his Apollo 11 crewmates, five years after they brought it back to Earth.

Why is red glass 'flashed', a thin red skin on clear glass?

Solid red at window thickness looks black because the colour is so intense, and the cure brought a bonus: artists could grind through the red skin to draw in clear light.

Despite its name, what is 'pot metal' in a stained-glass workshop?

Glass coloured right through while molten is named for the clay pot in the furnace where the colour went in, and it stayed the dearer choice once painters learned to stain clear glass.

How is 'crown glass' made?

By spinning a blown bubble until it flattens, the maker lets centrifugal force do the work: the glass flares open into a round disc that is thinnest out at the rim.

What is the thick lump at the centre of a piece of spun crown glass called?

It is thicker because the centre experiences less acceleration during spinning, and it also carries the pontil mark.

What is the alternative name for the mouth-blown cylinder method?

Muff glass starts as a bubble worked into a long cylinder, which is then cut open down its length, reheated and pressed flat into a sheet.

What is the black vitreous pigment for lines and shading, fired to fuse it to glass, called?

Grisaille can be worked in reverse: painters lay a wash, then scratch highlights back out of it with a needle or a stick to let more light through.

What is the small preliminary design shown to a patron called, from the Latin for 'we have seen'?

Vidimus marked the patron's approval: the sketch was then drawn out full size on a whitewashed table, and the window was cut and pieced together right on top of the drawing.

Before diamond cutters, medieval glaziers split sheets of glass with what?

A hot iron cracked the sheet so roughly that every piece then had to be nibbled to shape with a hooked tool called a grozing iron.

What are the heavy metal frames that divide very large early Gothic windows called?

Ferramenta is the ironwork set into the window opening to carry the weight of the glass; smaller windows got by with a few rods run straight across.

What is the circular opening with radiating tracery typical of Gothic cathedrals called?

Rose windows can be tougher than they look: all three of Notre-Dame's 13th-century roses came through the 2019 fire that brought down the roof and spire.

Some Gothic windows are called 'Catherine windows' after a saint sentenced to die on what?

A spiked breaking wheel was the sentence, but legend says it shattered at Catherine's touch and she was beheaded instead; spoked round windows took her name from it.

Glaziers shipped over from France made the windows of the 7th-century monastery that raised which famous monk-historian?

Bede, handed to Monkwearmouth at the age of seven, is the one who recorded that its founder shipped builders and glass-workers over from France to raise it in stone.

Which Roman glass cup in the British Museum glows purple-red when backlit and green otherwise?

The Lycurgus Cup is named for the mythical king carved around it, caught fast in a vine as punishment for attacking the wine god Dionysus and one of his followers.

Instead of stained glass, Los Angeles's 2002 cathedral revived an early-church idea: windows made of thin sheets of which stone?

Alabaster turns chalky and opaque if it gets too hot, so the Los Angeles cathedral needs special cooling to keep its stone panes glowing.

Which French cathedral keeps most of its medieval glass, including a blue so admired it bears the cathedral's name?

Chartres owes part of that survival to a huge wartime effort: its windows were taken out and put into storage during the Second World War, then set back in place after it ended.

In a favourite medieval window design, Christ's family tree sprouts from the sleeping body of which biblical figure, King David's father?

Jesse is there because Isaiah foretold a shoot springing from the stump of Jesse, and medieval artists drew the prophecy literally.

Which French king commissioned the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris to house the Crown of Thorns?

Louis IX paid 135,000 livres for the crown and other relics, by one reckoning half his kingdom's yearly income, and then built the chapel to hold them.

In 1803 the Sainte-Chapelle became what?

An archive for the law courts filled the chapel from 1803 for over thirty years; panels of glass were taken down and sold, and some ended up in England.

Which sculptor won the contest to make Florence's Baptistery doors, then designed stained-glass windows for the cathedral opposite?

Lorenzo Ghiberti beat Filippo Brunelleschi in that contest, and the loser found his answer across the square: he went on to raise the cathedral's vast dome.

Winchester Cathedral's west window is a jumbled mosaic of medieval fragments, reset after the glass was smashed in which conflict?

English Civil War troops on Parliament's side marched up the nave smashing glass as they went; after 1660 the surviving fragments were reset as a patchwork instead of pictures.

Which Dutch cheese town's main church kept its great 16th-century windows through the Reformation, when altars and statues were stripped out?

Gouda kept adding windows after it changed sides: Philip II of Spain looks out from the giant window he gave, and his enemy William of Orange appears in a later one across the church.

The 'Pink Mosque' of Shiraz, famous for its morning stained-glass light, stands in which country?

Iran's Nasir al-Mulk Mosque takes its nickname from its pink tiles, not the glass, and the light show is best caught early, at sunrise.

Which architect led England's Gothic Revival, creating huge new demand for stained glass?

Augustus Welby Pugin's last drawing, made for Charles Barry months before he died at forty, became his most famous work: the clock tower of Parliament that houses Big Ben.

Which two Pre-Raphaelites' glass heralded the Arts and Crafts Movement?

William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones met at Oxford as students bound for the Church, until a tour of northern France's great churches convinced them both that art mattered more.

Which French porcelain factory also made stained-glass windows in the 19th century?

Sevres went on to make the windows of King Louis Philippe's family burial chapel at Dreux, some of them from designs by the painter Ingres.

Rivals John La Farge and Louis Comfort Tiffany each patented which milky, streaky glass that set American windows apart?

Opalescent glass was patented first by La Farge, a painter, in 1880, with Tiffany close behind; its built-in streaks and clouds did the shading that glaziers had always painted on.

What did Louis Comfort Tiffany use instead of the traditional metal in some of his windows and lamps?

Copper foil wrapped round the edge of each small piece could be soldered over a curved wooden mould, which is how Tiffany's famous lampshades got their domed shapes.

What was the name of Louis Comfort Tiffany's trademark iridescent art glass?

Favrile carried Tiffany's name, but the formula came from Arthur Nash, the English glassmaker he hired to run his furnaces.

What proved, a century late, that Clara Driscoll rather than Louis Comfort Tiffany designed the famous Dragonfly and Wisteria lamps?

Family letters that surfaced in 2005 show Driscoll, head of Tiffany's Women's Glass Cutting Department, describing her own designs; the studio employed no married women, so her wedding ended her career there.

What is the 20th-century technique of setting slab glass in concrete or resin called?

Credited to Jean Gaudin, it was brought to Britain by Pierre Fourmaintraux; the monk Dom Charles Norris of Buckfast Abbey used it prolifically.

Old window glass is often thicker at the bottom, and guides say it flowed; what is the accepted explanation?

It was made uneven: hand-made sheets never came out flat, and glaziers tended to set the heavy edge downward. By one calculation, visible flow would take longer than the universe has existed.

Which Expressionist painter designed many vivid stained-glass windows in the 1960s and 1970s?

Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg had earlier experimented with glass as abstract art.

What decided where most of the coloured squares went in Gerhard Richter's 2007 window for Cologne Cathedral?

A random number generator placed most of the 11,263 squares, though Richter first narrowed the palette to 72 colours taken from the cathedral's older windows.

Why did Ireland's government never send Harry Clarke's Geneva Window, its commissioned gift to the League of Nations?

It was judged offensive, chiefly over panels drawn from modern Irish writers, one showing a veiled nude dancer; in 1933 the state sold the window to Clarke's widow, and it now hangs in a Florida museum.

The stained-glass knight in Young Sherlock Holmes, billed as film's first computer-generated character, came from the group that became which studio?

Pixar was then still Lucasfilm's computer graphics group; its animator John Lasseter made the knight step out of a church window, a decade before he directed Toy Story.

Which painter designed a Riviera chapel, stained glass and all, for a nun who had once been his nurse?

Henri Matisse hired her as a nurse in 1941 after surgery and she modelled for him; once she had become a Dominican nun in Vence, he gave four years to the chapel and called it his masterpiece.

Which British artist designed Westminster Abbey's 2018 Queen's Window on an iPad, despite never having worked in stained glass?

David Hockney thought the iPad the natural tool because, like a window, its screen is lit from behind; his design shows hawthorn blossom in his native Yorkshire.

John Piper's abstract baptistery window, a blaze of colour in 198 panes, belongs to which English cathedral rebuilt beside its bombed ruins?

Coventry lost its medieval cathedral to an air raid on 14 November 1940 and resolved the next morning to rebuild; Piper and the glassmaker Patrick Reyntiens gave the new baptistery its wall of abstract colour.

York Minster's Great East Window, Britain's largest expanse of medieval stained glass, is often said to be the size of what?

A tennis court is the minster's own comparison for the window, finished in 1408 by the glazier John Thornton; conservators removed all 311 panels and spent a decade restoring them, finishing in 2018.

In 2023 Washington National Cathedral unveiled Kerry James Marshall's racial-justice windows in place of glass that had honoured whom?

Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson had their windows taken out in 2017 after a two-year review, and the Lee window was later lent to the Smithsonian for an exhibition on Reconstruction.

Narcissus Quagliata's Dome of Light, a vast circular stained-glass ceiling, was built over what in Kaohsiung, Taiwan?

A metro station, Formosa Boulevard, sits beneath it where the city's red and orange lines cross; the glass was made in Germany, and the dome now doubles as a wedding backdrop.

The houses of which architect are the most famous examples of Prairie School stained glass?

Frank Lloyd Wright lined rooms such as the Robie House's with bands of art glass in flat geometric patterns that hint at plants, so that the walls seem to open to the outdoors.