50 Fun Facts About Stained Glass

What is glass traditionally coloured with to make stained glass?

Different metal oxides give the different colours, from greens and blues to wine red.

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

They have an H-shaped section; modern makers sometimes use a thin metal foil instead.

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

Joints are soldered, and a soft oily cement is forced between glass and metal to weatherproof the panel.

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

Concentrations of only 0.025 to 0.1 percent in soda-lime glass are enough for that brilliant blue.

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

Around 0.001 percent does it; even less gives the paler pink sold as cranberry glass.

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

It is one of the oldest glass additives of all.

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

It is the 'stain' in stained glass; applied to blue glass it makes green.

The yellow stain introduced around 1300 was made using which compound?

It was usually painted on the outside face of the glass and fired, and was cheaper than coloured pot-metal glass by the 15th century.

Why must red glass be 'flashed', a thin red layer laminated onto clear glass?

Once discovered for red, the technique spread to other colours and lets artists engrave through the layer.

What is material coloured while still molten in the furnace pot called?

Flashed glass, by contrast, fuses a thin coloured layer to a thicker colourless one.

How is 'crown glass' made?

The thick centre where the pontil rod held it is still seen in old windows.

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?

The cylinder is slit, reheated and flattened, then annealed to cool slowly.

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

It mixes powdered glass with iron filings, clay, a liquid and gum arabic, then is fired to fuse it.

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

A full-size cartoon is then drawn for every light of the window.

What is the tool-assisted nibbling of glass edges to make an exact fit called?

Faces, hair and hands are then painted with a paint whose medium was traditionally wine, vinegar or urine.

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

Smaller windows were simply tied to iron rods running across the opening.

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

Simpler ones with plain spokes are wheel windows; the term rose was not used before the 17th century.

Round tracery windows are also called 'Catherine windows' after a saint sentenced to die on what?

A plain round window without tracery, as in many Italian churches, is an oculus.

In 675 AD, Benedict Biscop imported glaziers from France to glaze which English monastery?

Hundreds of pieces of 7th-century coloured glass and metal have been found there and at Jarrow.

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

The Portland Vase is the museum's other great Roman glass, midnight blue with a carved white overlay.

What did 4th- and 5th-century churches set in windows for a stained-glass-like effect?

The translucent stone was set into wooden frames in ornate patterns.

Which French cathedral, built mostly 1194–1220, was the medieval centre of glass-making?

Most of its original glass survives intact, and its blue became a byword.

How many stained-glass windows does the cathedral 80 km south-west of Paris, famed for its blue, have?

UNESCO listed the cathedral in 1979 as 'the high point of French Gothic art'.

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

Consecrated in the 1240s, it holds one of the world's most extensive 13th-century glass collections.

In which year was the Sainte-Chapelle consecrated?

It is considered among the highest achievements of the Rayonnant Gothic style.

Which Renaissance sculptor devised Florence Cathedral's stained-glass scheme, with Donatello among the designers?

Each large ocular window shows a single scene from the life of Christ or the Virgin.

Whose injunctions against 'abused images' led to the smashing of English church windows?

The craft died out in England and was not rediscovered until the early 19th century.

In which Dutch town does a rare 16th-century glass scheme survive, with windows up to 18 m high?

The earliest windows in the Grote Sint-Jan church are by Dirck Crabeth and his brother.

How many 16th-century windows survive in the French department of Aube alone?

Normandy and Champagne kept lively ateliers until the early 17th century.

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

John Ruskin called Gothic 'the true Catholic style'.

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

Christopher Whall carried the movement on, insisting designers should make their own windows.

Which French porcelain factory began producing stained glass in 1824?

Early 19th-century French glass often copied oil paintings onto large painted panes.

Which American received the first patent for opalescent glass in February 1880?

Tiffany patented variations of the same process nine months later.

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

Sanford Bray of Boston patented the method in stained glass in 1886.

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

He was also the first design director at Tiffany & Co., the firm his father founded.

What was the first major decorative arts studio in the United States, founded in New York in 1857?

It was for many years a major producer of church glass.

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.

What is 'gemmail', developed by Jean Crotti in 1936?

Many Picasso works have been reproduced in the technique.

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.

Post-war artists in which country produced 'the first authentic school of stained glass since the Middle Ages'?

Meistermann, Klos, Schreiter and Schaffrath abandoned figures for geometric abstraction and calligraphic leads.

What was the Dublin stained-glass cooperative run by Sarah Purser, which included Harry Clarke, called?

Its name means The Tower of Glass; London's equivalent, the Glass House, was set up by Mary Lowndes and Alfred Drury.

In what year was the British Society of Master Glass Painters founded?

It has published The Journal of Stained Glass since 1924.

What is the red iron-based paint introduced around 1500 to highlight flesh tones called?

Copper stain, similar to silver stain, gave reds mainly in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Since their purpose is to control light rather than admit it, how have stained-glass windows been described?

Together with illuminated manuscripts, they are the main surviving form of medieval visual art in Western Europe.

The 200-foot 'Roots of Knowledge' stained-glass installation is at a university in which US state?

The Utah Valley University work in Orem has been compared with the glass of Cologne Cathedral, Sainte-Chapelle and York Minster.

Which Benedictine monk of Buckfast Abbey was a prolific artist in the slab-glass-in-concrete technique?

The method, known as dalle de verre, sets thick chunks of glass into concrete or resin rather than lead.

Which Birmingham firm's nephew exhibited glass at the 1876 Philadelphia Exhibition, influencing US work?

John Hardman Powell had a commercial eye; the Hardman firm also glazed St Andrew's Cathedral in Sydney.

Which glass painter was active in Troyes until 1642, at the tail end of France's Renaissance glass boom?

France still holds the largest set of Renaissance stained glass, especially in Normandy and Champagne.

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

The windows depict natural motifs inspired by the American prairie landscape.