The Work of the Glaziers
Gothic was, above all, an architecture of light, yet we know very little about the circumstances of the production of the thousands of square feet of colored translucent membrane filling the windows of the great cathedrals of Notre-Dame of Paris, Laon, Chartres, Reims, Soissons and Amiens, transforming the earthly into a heavenly realm. Workshops would be established on each cathedral site where glass could be smelted, the lead "H"-section binding pieces molded and the iron bars of the armature forged. Most of the medieval glass from Amiens Cathedral has been lost--the results of storms, explosions and the 18th-century taste for clear, translucent glass. The surviving glass can be categorized into five distinct phases: