Visual ArtsOne of the wonders of the Gothic age, rose windows are dazzling embodiments of the art of stonemasons and glaziers, and Painton Cowen has been fascinated by them for 30 years or more.
26 years ago he published Rose Windows, and the present volume is a lavish and comprehensive sequel. Not the least of its virtues is that, as he himself notes, he is less preoccupied now with trying to pin down precise iconographic meanings, and more open to approaching rose windows on their own terms, detailing their character and chronology. The result is a treasure trove of a book, a testament to human skill and creativity in which his excellent photographs are every bit as important as his consistently informative text. He also includes a useful country-by-country Gazetteer.
The most famous windows, including those at Notre-Dame, Chartres, Reims and Strasbourg, still rate as prime tourist attractions, and still elicit awe in those who make the effort to see them in the flesh. They are stunning achievements, but Cowen demonstrates that these extreme examples should not eclipse a host of equally impressive if more subtle roses, including those in smaller, regional churches.
What is a rose window? Definitions vary a little, but obviously it must be round and its stone tracery must radiate from the centre in a symmetrical pattern. A formidable, often monumental masonry circle frames the carved tracery. The word itself may well derive from roue or roe, old French not for rose but for wheel, which makes a great deal of sense when you look at the windows with their radial spokes. They have their origins in the simple circular opening, the oculus (a staple of Cistercian architecture), and they stem originally from Spain, or perhaps Syria. Although the golden age for roses coincides with the Gothic, several historians have pointed out that the rose - a balanced, self-contained, static form - is at heart uncharacteristic of the tall, soaring architectural vocabulary of the Gothic.
Every rose has an obvious duality: an outside and an inside. Apparently people tend to rush to view them from the inside, in terms of their radiant, chromatic brilliance, and indeed many French roses were designed to be most spectacular when so encountered. One can appreciate the clerical interest in impressing the congregation. But it's worth remembering that the glass we see now is hardly ever original. For the most part, time, vandalism, war and fashion mean that it has been replaced. Some of the more forthrightly modern designs are very convincing, far better than pastiche versions of what might have been.
Apart altogether from the glass, in any case, the masonry is very beautiful. It also reflects startling levels of productivity and virtuosity. The generosity of the illustrations means that we can zero in on the richness of the architectural detail and, incidentally, observe how the quality of light on stone varies greatly from Northern Europe to the Mediterranean. It's impossible not to notice, as well, that sunlight and cut stone are made for each other. Italian roses, basking in warm light, were in general made to be viewed from without.
The window in the Visigothic church of San Miguel de Lillo, near Oviedo in north-west Spain, may qualify as the first surviving rose. It was begun around the year 848. Thereafter we jump a few hundred years forwards to St Etienne, at Beauvais in France, and the subsequent, dramatic development of the form, as highly talented and highly valued masons devised and executed geometrical patterns of mind-boggling complication. Fascinatingly, Cowen shows us windows that went askew. When materials were being employed at the limits of their potential, it is hardly surprising that some roses simply collapsed and had to be reinforced or abandoned. Sometimes the geometry didn't quite come together properly and the design is slightly off, something that is oddly disturbing to the eye. One can see why master masons, such as Martin Chambizes, supremus artifex, who was born in Paris in 1460, were so highly prized.
Cowen deals judiciously with the question of meaning. An author with an eye on Dan Brown's sales figures might have seen the iconographic complications and ambiguity of the windows as an opportunity to frame a theory that they harbour heretical or apocalyptic secrets. The scope is certainly there in the myriad variations they offer on the standard biblical themes, from the creation to the Tree of Jesse, plus several non-biblical ones, from the wheel of fortune to the zodiac. But Cowen sticks scrupulously to the facts. He points to the association of light and geometry with divinity and the fundamental symbolic importance of the circle to humankind. Renaissance humanism eroded the divine link with geometry, and the advent of the Renaissance marked the end of the reign of the rose. There was, though, a resurgence with the 19th-century Gothic Revival; and, indeed, creditable roses are still created today.
Aidan Dunne is Art Critic of The Irish Times
The Rose Window: Splendour and Symbol By Painton Cowen Thames & Hudson, 276pp (381 illustrations). £39.95
