The French town of Troyes celebrates having become the city of stained glass thanks to an interesting space inaugurated on Saturday, December 17, a space that responds, in the opinion of its current manager, Anne-Claire Garbe, to the question in vogue in recent times : what do art museums want? Although to tell the truth, La Cité du Vitrail is not exactly a museum, but rather a laboratory for working on the heritage fund existing in the Aube department, of which the city itself is an essential part. And for that reason it contains a remarkable library and a good archive.
We are therefore facing a multipurpose space that goes from the stained glass windows of the more than two hundred churches in the territory to the stained glass windows of the houses of the urban patriciate and that responds to the current museum trend of seeing art, in this case stained glass art, to learn about the culture of which it is a part: moving from art as an end to art as a means. When contemplating the stained glass windows of the Palace of the Hotel Dieu le Comte, the medieval hospital redone in the 18th century and restored in 2021, we discover the proposed exhibition model: to demonstrate to the visitor that the stained glass window is born from the theological vision of Suger de Saint Denis in the twelfth century by affirming that God is light. It is therefore a new procedure to appreciate one of the great legacies of old Europe.
Garbe highlights the instructive nature of the institution, since it expects to receive thousands of visitors in the next five years (the figure considered is 170,000), for which a ritual of passage will be proposed, understanding the world of stained glass as one more sector of visual culture. Thus the visitor will discover the reasons for the existence of so many Made in Champagne stained glass windows, thanks to the development of its craftsmanship. To achieve these objectives, La Cité du Vitrail has been organized into five levels, which can be visited from top to bottom through a staircase decorated with glass lamps made for the occasion.
Thus, it begins at level 5, where the creation of stained glass windows, their techniques and their evolution together with the work of the masters of yesterday and today are explained. The visitor comes into contact with works distant from each other by five hundred years, the stained glass windows of the Cathedral of Sens in Burgundy, built in 1500, and those of Notre Dame de Strasbourg, dated in 2015.
It is in this space where it is also invited to understand what the work itself is, the object, as if it were an issuer of cultural meanings. And so they are shown in their various chronological foci, from the first samples in Merovingian churches, through medieval and Renaissance examples, to their recreations and restorations of the 19th century, through facsimiles, films, photographs or graphic documents. Then, on the 4th floor, the course of history is followed from its beginnings in the distant 9th century with the introduction of grisaille to stained glass. A technique that created details that were impossible to obtain simply by cutting glass. That grisaille allowed the faces to acquire expression, the gestures to appear almost real, the animals, the flowers, the details of the backgrounds, the folds of the dresses to seem like a painting, a painting on glass.
In the fourteenth century, silver yellow was discovered. This alloy of silver and ocher salts allows the color to be fixed to the glass without the need for fluxes and offers extraordinary luminosity. That revolution made it possible to introduce grisaille colors that were impossible to obtain until then: yellow, green, blue, or blood red, that reddish color that represents human skin. Thus, the representations became more detailed, where wrinkles, gestures, looks and dresses were well defined. Painting on glass acquires importance over the technique of building stained glass windows.
In room 3 is the stained glass gallery, where you can see a forest of light and color. We observe at eye level twenty-six works ranging from small to large format (more than five meters), where richness and creativity merge, and which gives us a lesson on how a work of art can be permanently reinterpreted and reinvented. during centuries. Many are the examples that are shown to us, from beautiful medieval works to a History of ceramics, made for the Universal Exposition of 1887, lost in the 1930s and rediscovered in 1997 so eclectic that it allows an analysis of all the trends of the moment. from orientalism to modernism.
And, in that modernity, why not mention Saint Amelie, by Kehinde Wiley made in 2014 and inspired by the glass artists of the Pre-Raphaelite period or by Ingres himself. But as total modernity, La Vitesse by Jacques Simon is beautiful, from the Simon Marq workshops (built in 1640 in Reims) from 1928; pure futurism between glass and iron. Then on the 2nd floor, there is the Treasury Room, where the jewel in the crown is displayed, a transfiguration from the end of the 12th century (c. 1170-1180) carried out in Troyes at the behest of Henry I The Liberal, Count of Champagne. (and founder of the Hotel Dieu) which, having disappeared at the beginning of the 20th century, reappeared at a public auction and was acquired by the Aube department in 2018. Restored, it is shown for the first time in all its beauty and detail.
On level 1 is the sacristy, full of liturgical furniture, and, in the background, the Chapel, magnificent, with a wonderful medieval stained glass window in the center, and with six large windows that accommodate monumental stained glass windows in natural light, among others, two panels by Jacques Lechevallier representing Saint Marcel and Saint Genevieve, created in 1937 and intended for the windows of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. Crowning the chapel, and as an all-seeing eye, an oculus, an original work by Fabienne Verdier from 2021, which pays homage to the stained glass windows in grisaille and silver yellow, leaving latency in the memory of light.
The Cité du Vitrail is a successful bet. All kinds of activities have begun to be woven around it, always related to the art of stained glass, which have made it not only a place of memory in France.
https://cite-vitrail.fr
