When entering in a church, our gaze is often caught in the colorful light of the stained glass. We look at them without really knowing thier history, sometimes even their meaning, and yet we are amazed by the atmosphere they create.
The stained glass, as we know it, with beautiful colors of the mouth-blown glass, originated with gothic architecture, where the architetural spaces between the stone decorations had to filter the light.
Mouth-blown glass could not be made of that dimentions so, at the beginning, glass pieces were cut and bound together with a lead weave that held the glass pieces.
The first stained glass windows, not the ones of the big cathedrals but rather the ones of small churches o some houses had to be this way: without much color, sometimes made with transparent glass o roundels that required very little cutting.
But for big cathedrals and churches, especially gothic ones where there was little space to paint frescoes, the window had to “speak”, they had to represent scenes from the Bible in the same way that the frescoes did.
For this reason, the stained glass became artistic, they were painted with grisaille, a special glass paint that once is fired in the kiln with the glass becomes inseparable and long-lasting. The lead binding defines the geometries, the lines, the figures, and decorations creating an intricate weave that makes the light more colorful, vibrant and alive.
Stained glass became like jewes embedded in the architecture, unique artworks that since the middle age, create melodies with light, that transform, with their colors, a place into a sacred place, or a setting into a welcoming space.