Hall, Sarah

The Color of Light: Commissioning Stained Glass for a Church

This is not the sort of book usually reviewed in this journal, but it seems to me to be noteworthy for VAN readers both it its own right and also for a number of issues that it raises. Published by the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago's Liturgy Training series, it is ecumenical in scope and spirit, and is intended primarily for church committees interested in commissioning stained glass for their houses of worship. As such, it does an excellent job in conveying from an artist's perspective the information that is necessary to make an informed decision.

Hall, a prominent Canadian stained-glass artist, systematically provides the reader with many of the verbal and conceptual tools to get beyond the "I like or don't like this" approach to artistic commissioning; which besets many such committees charged with choosing an architect or artist. The author further makes readers aware of the multifaceted character of responsible decision making. Like any good teacher, she assumes very little and begins with basics, building up new levels of information and concepts upon those already established. Starting with the definition of stained glass, Hall takes the reader through issues of the materials and processes utilized in making stained glass, the varieties of glass available along with their potentials and disadvantages, and the various ways of creating artistic effects in glass, such an enameling, etching, painting, and sand-blasting. After providing this careful introduction to the materials and praxis of glass making, she provides a brief but solid and well- illustrated historical survey of stained glass, emphasizing its use in churches rather than in secular settings. She then discusses the design process itself, and provides detailed, step- by-step suggestions as to how a committee should go about selecting an artist and working with him or her in commissioning windows that will work optimally in a particular physical setting and liturgical tradition. A glossary and guide to web sites and periodicals are provided at the end, although not, unfortunately, a bibliography.

The highlight of the book for any reader, however, is the numerous color illustrations, many of them photographs taken by the author. These dazzling examples of historical and contemporary stained glass chosen from a variety of sites in North America and Europe illustrate dramatically the scope of religious stained-glass artistry, present and past, mediocre as well as brilliant. The range of contemporary work in Europe and North America sampled here-which includes significant work by the author-is something which this book accomplishes even for those who are not in a position to commission new work or even who have no connection with a religious community.

The broader issue, which this book illustrates, is the long- standing gulf in the twentieth-century West between religious

and secular art, especially in the area of decorative arts. A first level of separation took place with the Protestant reformation, especially in the Reformed (Calvinist) tradition. As Hall notes, irreparable damage was done to extant religious art by the likes of Oliver Cromwell and his minions, and a vital medieval crafts tradition came to an end in much of Europe.

John Ruskin was particularly instrumental during the 191h century in rehabilitating the arts for Protestants, and stained glass was among those thus resuscitated. The ecclesiastical context of such glass making - as practiced by such varied artisans as Connick, LaFarge, and Tiffany-has unfortunately not been studied with the care it deserves as part of the broader story of the problematic relationship between religion and the arts in post-Civil War America or the Euro-American world more broadly. A good example of the kind of study that can illuminate such a relationship is Gregory Wolfe's The Art of William Schickel (University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), which explores the multifaceted work of a post-Vatican II Cincinnati designer that has had wide influence especially in the Catholic liturgical world. (Colleen McDannell's assessment of pre-Vatican II Catholic art in her Material Christianity [Yale University Press, 1995] provides an illuminating contrast.) Such issues in American Protestantism have only begun to be probed. My point is that our understanding of the fullness of architectural and other material expression during the past century and a half has suffered from a neglect, deliberate or otherwise, of the world of religious design.

Perhaps the next generation of scholars can do something about this.