“The Dark and Middle Ages! The Nineteenth Century had an impudent way with its labels. For there, under the window in Arthur’s Gramarye, the sun’s rays flamed from a hundred jewels of stained glass in monasteries and convents, or danced from the pinnacles of cathedrals and castles, which their builders had actually loved. Architecture, in those dark ages of theirs, was such a light-giving passion of the heart that men gave love-names to their fortresses. Lancelot’s Joyous Gard was not a singularity in an age which has left us Beaute, Plaisance, or Malvoisin—the bad neighbour to its enemies—an age in which even an oaf like the imaginary Richard Coeur de Lion, who suffered from boils, could call his castle “Gaillard,” and speak of it as “my beautiful one-year-old daughter.” Even that legendary scoundrel William the Conqueror had a second nickname: “the Great Builder.” Think of the glass itself, with its five grand colours stained right through. It was rougher than ours, thicker, fitted in smaller pieces. They loved it with the same fury as they gave to their castles, and Villars de Honnecourt, struck by a particularly beautiful specimen, stopped to draw it on his journeys, with the explanation that “I was on my way to obey a call to the land of Hungary when I drew this window because it pleased me best of all windows.” Picture the insides of those ancient churches—not the grey and gutted interiors to which we are accustomed—but insides blazing with colour, plastered with frescoes in which all the figures stood on tip-toe, fluttering with tapestry or with brocades from Bagdad. Picture also the interiors of such castles as were visible from Guenever’s window. These were no longer the grim keeps of Arthur’s accession. Now they were filling with furniture made by the joiner, instead of the carpenter; now their walls rippled doorless with the flexible gaieties of Arras, tapestries like that of the Jousts of St. Denis which, although covering more than four hundred square yards, had been woven in less than three years, such was the ardour of its creation. If you look closely in a ruined castle even nowadays, you can sometimes find the hooks from which these flashing tapestries were hung. Remember, too, the goldsmiths of Lorraine, who made shrines in the shape of little churches, with aisles, statues, transepts and all, like dolls’ houses: remember the enamellers of Limoges, and the champlevé work, and the German ivory carvers, and the garnets set in Irish metal.”
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germansingergirl
