INTRODUCTION lxv

for the central light, Ruskin perceiving-as explained in Præterita (ii. ch. viii. § 153)-that his own “figures adopted from Michael Angelo” were “not exactly adapted to thirteenth-century practice.” The window-head was liked, and it was decided to fill the five vertical lights in the same manner. These, however, Ruskin left entirely to Oldfield, who attained, he says, “a delicate brilliancy, purer than anything I had before seen in modern glass.” The letters given in this volume (pp. 435-447) show Ruskin absorbed in studying the old glass of Rouen and Chartres, with a view to the window which he and his friend were to design for Camberwell. Like those to a College Friend (in Vol. I.) they are written in the lighter vein of familiar correspondence; the date of them is 1844. The illustration of the window here given (p. 440) will enable the reader to follow many of Ruskin’s allusions.

The letters show once more the zeal with which Ruskin threw himself into a new and congenial study. It is interesting also to learn from them that the remarks on painted glass, which occur in various places in his books, were founded on studies thus commenced in 1844. The most important of those passages are, first, Appendix 12 in Stones of Venice, vol. ii. (Vol. X. pp. 456-457), where he shows how the essential qualities of the material-its transparency and susceptibility of the most brilliant colours-forbid “the attempt to turn painted windows into pretty pictures”; the standards of perfection in this art, he adds, are the French windows of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. So, again, secondly, in The Two Paths, he says that “no man who knows what painting means, can endure a painted glass window which emulates painters’ work,” and refers, in illustration, to Reynolds’ disappointment at the result of his designs for the window in the ante-chapel of New College, Oxford.¹

The next Appendix contains a series of Notes on the Louvre. Of all the foreign galleries, the Louvre was at this period the best known to Ruskin, and it is to pictures there that in his earlier writings he refers most often (after perhaps the Dulwich Gallery, which was almost at his own door). “To enter a room in the Louvre,” he says elsewhere, “is an education in itself.”² It has been thought well to print, here for the first time, some of the notes and impressions he recorded in the

¹ Two Paths, § 78 and Appendix ii.; see also §§ 82, 161. Among minor references to the subject, the more interesting are: Seven Lamps (Vol. VIII. p. 180), good figure-drawing impossible in a good painted window, with which passage compare Stones of Venice, App. 17 (Vol. IX. p. 455); Stones of Venice, vol. ii. (Vol. X. pp. iii., 174); Giotto and his Works in Padua, § 11; Modern Painters, vol. iv. ch. xx. § 23; Eagle’s Nest, § 226; and in this volume, Review of Lord Lindsay, § 22, p. 192.

² A letter reprinted from the Art Journal in On the Old Road, 1899, vol. ii. § 195.

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