Stained Glass Trivia
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50 free Stained Glass trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This stained glass trivia quiz covers the medieval art of controlling light that survives in cathedrals, chapels, pubs and Tiffany lamps. The easy questions cover what stained glass is, the metal strips that hold it together, the round windows of Gothic churches and the American whose name is on the most famous lamps. From there the quiz moves into the craft: the metallic oxides that give each colour, why red glass has to be flashed, crown and cylinder glass, silver stain, grisaille paint, the vidimus and the cartoon, and the iron ferramenta that keep huge windows standing. The hard end covers Benedict Biscop's glaziers at Monkwearmouth, the Lycurgus Cup, Chartres and its cobalt blue, Louis IX's Sainte-Chapelle, Ghiberti's oculi in Florence, the Reformation's smashed windows, Gouda's surviving scheme, the Gothic Revival firms, Morris and Burne-Jones, La Farge's opalescent patent, Tiffany's copper foil, dalle de verre, gemmail, the post-war German school and Marc Chagall. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on stained glass, Chartres Cathedral, Sainte-Chapelle, rose windows and Louis Comfort Tiffany before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our art history and cathedrals quizzes are natural next stops.
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Q 01What is glass traditionally coloured with to make stained glass?
Metallic salts added during manufacture
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.
Q 02What are the metal strips that traditionally hold stained-glass pieces together called?
Cames
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.
Q 03Which metal is used to make the strips that join the glass in a traditional window?
Lead
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.
Q 04Which metallic oxide produces the deep blue of medieval glass, famous at one great French cathedral?
Cobalt
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.
Q 05Which precious metal, in tiny concentrations, produces rich ruby-red glass?
Gold
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.
Q 06Which additive gives glass an amethyst or purple colour and has been used since ancient Egypt?
Manganese
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.
Q 07What is 'silver stain', introduced soon after 1300, used to produce?
Yellow to orange colours
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.
Q 08The Space Window at Washington National Cathedral has what sealed into the centre of its glass?
A piece of Moon rock
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.
Q 09Why is red glass 'flashed', a thin red skin on clear glass?
Solid red at window thickness looks black
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.
Q 10Despite its name, what is 'pot metal' in a stained-glass workshop?
Glass coloured right through while molten
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.
Q 11How is 'crown glass' made?
By spinning a blown bubble until it flattens
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.
Q 12What is the thick lump at the centre of a piece of spun crown glass called?
Bull's-eye
It is thicker because the centre experiences less acceleration during spinning, and it also carries the pontil mark.
Q 13What is the alternative name for the mouth-blown cylinder method?
Muff
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.
Q 21Which Roman glass cup in the British Museum glows purple-red when backlit and green otherwise?
The Lycurgus Cup
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.
Q 22Instead of stained glass, Los Angeles's 2002 cathedral revived an early-church idea: windows made of thin sheets of which stone?
Alabaster
Alabaster turns chalky and opaque if it gets too hot, so the Los Angeles cathedral needs special cooling to keep its stone panes glowing.
Q 23Which French cathedral keeps most of its medieval glass, including a blue so admired it bears the cathedral's name?
Chartres
Q 14What is the black vitreous pigment for lines and shading, fired to fuse it to glass, called?
Grisaille
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.
Q 15What is the small preliminary design shown to a patron called, from the Latin for 'we have seen'?
Vidimus
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.
Q 16Before diamond cutters, medieval glaziers split sheets of glass with what?
A hot iron
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.
Q 17What are the heavy metal frames that divide very large early Gothic windows called?
Ferramenta
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.
Q 18What is the circular opening with radiating tracery typical of Gothic cathedrals called?
Rose
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.
Q 19Some Gothic windows are called 'Catherine windows' after a saint sentenced to die on what?
A spiked breaking wheel
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.
Q 20Glaziers shipped over from France made the windows of the 7th-century monastery that raised which famous monk-historian?
Bede
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.
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.
Q 24In a favourite medieval window design, Christ's family tree sprouts from the sleeping body of which biblical figure, King David's father?
Jesse
Jesse is there because Isaiah foretold a shoot springing from the stump of Jesse, and medieval artists drew the prophecy literally.
Q 25Which French king commissioned the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris to house the Crown of Thorns?
Louis IX
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.
Q 26In 1803 the Sainte-Chapelle became what?
An archive
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.
Q 27Which sculptor won the contest to make Florence's Baptistery doors, then designed stained-glass windows for the cathedral opposite?
Lorenzo Ghiberti
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.
Q 28Winchester Cathedral's west window is a jumbled mosaic of medieval fragments, reset after the glass was smashed in which conflict?
English Civil War
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.
Q 29Which Dutch cheese town's main church kept its great 16th-century windows through the Reformation, when altars and statues were stripped out?
Gouda
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.
Q 30The 'Pink Mosque' of Shiraz, famous for its morning stained-glass light, stands in which country?
Iran
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.