Lumen — Stained-Glass Cartoon Abstract Character, Cathedral Close, Cologne

The foundation maintains the cathedral’s stained glass and trains glaziers, and they have spent thirty years explaining to visitors that a window is not a painting made of coloured glass.

Why they commissioned a cartoon

Because the demonstration is easier to accept in an object people do not already have opinions about. They asked for a character at about 2.8 m, no identity, whose whole surface would be built the way a window is built: separate flat pieces of colour, held by lead, with nothing overlapping and nothing blended.

Building it as a glazier would

Nine hundred and forty panes. Each one a single flat colour from the foundation’s own five-colour reference: deep cobalt, ruby, emerald, amber and pale gold. No two adjacent panes share a colour, and the distribution was done as a glazier would do it, by weighing the palette as the area progresses so no colour dominates a region.

The lead is real relief. Every line between panes is a raised rounded ridge about 7 mm wide, and every pane sits in a shallow dished field, so the surface has genuine shadow and genuine depth. That is the thing most people get wrong about stained glass: the lead is in front of the glass, not behind it.

The character, in forty pieces of lead

A shape this busy will swallow a face, so the two eyes are the only panes on the piece small enough to read as a single form, and they are the only ones given a deeper recess. The result is that the eyes sit a few millimetres behind everything else, which none of us planned and all of us kept.

The forward lean of the body is what makes it a character instead of a column. Five degrees, no more.

In the close

It stands on the flagstones at 2.8 m, off the main processional route so that it is arrived at rather than passed. The foundation now uses it in a teaching session on lead cames, and reports that the master glazier inspects it whenever he walks past, which is the closest thing to praise that is available from him.