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THE ORIGINS OF STAINED GLASS

Stained Glass is purely a Western phenomenon which reached the status of a fine art in the 12th and 13th centuries, when it was combined with gothic architecture to create brilliant and moving effects. The effect of a stained glass window is created not by the coloured glass itself but by light passing through the glass and by the setting in which that light is perceived. Light is constantly changing with the time of the day, the seasons and the weather - so the effect of stained glass varies almost from moment to moment.

The earliest existing pictorial windows are those at the Cathedral of Augsburg in Germany. The finest remaining 13th-century glass in England is to be found in Canterbury Cathedral.

After the 13th-century, stained glass began to decline as an art form when the stained glass artists began to seek the realistic effects sought by painters during the Renaissance, effects for which the technique was less suited and that diverted the artists from exploiting its intense light-refracting quality. In the 20th century, brilliant modern glass has been executed to designs by such painters as Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall and Fernand Léger.