Since medieval times, glorious decorative windows have been made by joining small pieces of coloured and painted glass together with lead strips. The lead is soft and easy to bend but strong enough to hold the glass.
The creation of beautiful stained glass windows requires artistic vision and great skill in working with glass and metal. It’s an art form that requires tremendous dedication and many years of training. So how did stained glass artists create these works of art so many years ago?
Stained glass windows began with a design. An artist would first develop full-size sketches (called “cartoons”) that portrayed the overall composition of the windows, including the shapes of individual pieces of glass, the colors of glass to be used, and the details to be painted onto the glass pieces.
Once the design was complete, individual pieces of glass could be cut from larger pieces of colored glass. Special tools, such as dividing irons and grazing irons, were used to cut and shape pieces of colored glass to fit the shapes called for in the design.
With pieces of colored glass cut and shaped, artists would then paint the individual pieces of glass to achieve the exact colors with the precise details they desired. Stained glass artisans used vitreous paints, which contained powdered glass particles suspended in liquid.
After they were painted, the individual pieces of glass would be fired in a wood-fired oven known as a kiln. The powdered glass particles in the vitreous paint would melt, causing the paint to fuse with the glass permanently.
To assemble the individual glass pieces into a completed panel, the pieces would be held together with narrow, flexible strips of lead, which would be joined together by a lead and tin alloy called solder. Finally, semi-liquid cement was applied to secure the glass pieces within the lead strips and make the finished window waterproof.
While this might sound like a simple, easy process, it was not! There were many variations to the process, and talented artists could spend thousands of hours working on creating large stained glass windows for mosques and cathedrals.
Picture Credit : Google