The armor of light

the long version

Meredith Parsons Lillich's study is the first to look closely at the Gothic stained glass of western France during the late Capetian era. Generously illustrated with a wealth of color and black-and-white images never before published - including many from French churches now closed to the public - The Armor of Light is a landmark publication in the study of stained glass. The book begins in 1250, as the knights of western France returned from crusade to their troubled provincial borderlands - to the Aquitaine formerly of Eleanor and the Plantagenet kings - far from Paris and court fashions. It ends in the year 1325, with the onset of economic uncertainty and unrest preceding the Hundred Years' War. The seventy-five-year span has been considered transitional in the art of stained glass, a passage from the color-saturated gloom of thirteenth-century Chartres and Bourges to the delicate, light-washed court style of the next century. Lillich asserts that the western stained-glass style in France of 1250-1325 is neither transitional nor provincial but a major style with its own developmental evolution, impetus, and character. She explains that it is a vigorous and uniquely western art supported not only by provincial patrons but also by the brothers, son, and intimates of the French monarch. Forceful and uninhibited, loose and exaggerated, dramatic and dazzling, it is an art whose spirit is imbued with what we now term "expressionism.". Western expressionism in France first appears in the final works at Chartres - the great south rose lancets - and includes windows in the cathedrals of Le Mans, Sees, and Dol, the pilgrimage center of Sainte-Radegonde at Poitiers, and the great Benedictine abbeys of La Trinite at Vendome, Evron, and Saint-Pere de Chartres. Using evidence in primary documentary sources and in the windows themselves, Lillich tracks western expressionism in these monuments, identifying painters, glazing shops, working methods, model sources, shared patternsheets, cooperation in production, and influences among various campaigns and workshops. Lillich's study conveys the values, messages, and responses of the men and women who commissioned these windows and who considered them a fitting commemoration of events of their lives and their society.