Treasure Rediscovered

Above: The author, shown here with her sons Russell '04 and Henry '02, is Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Top right: A detail of one of the windows showing Mary Magdalene drying the feet of Christ with her hair.

Every day our boys attend Chapel where they gaze upon elaborate stained-glass windows. Yet this fall the boys noticed that the windows had been replaced by stained plywood. The windows had been carefully removed so that they could be restored. The current project involves not only the conservation of the windows, but also serious research to learn everything possible about their technique, origin, and history. At the completion of the restoration, the windows will be reinstalled in such a way as to assure their preservation for future generations of Saint David's boys.

The history of the stained-glass windows at Saint David's dates back to the fall of 1958, when Headmaster David Hume was invited to the Bronx warehouse of the family of William Randolph Hearst to select windows for the Chapel. Hearst had been well known for amassing a sizeable collection of European works of art. In a recent interview that took place in the Chapel in early October, Mr. Hume explained that he deemed the windows Mrs. Hearst had originally selected for Saint David's inappropriate for a boys school because they contained unclothed women figures. With that, he was given virtually free rein to select something else, at which time he discovered the current windows. He then enlisted the services of Rambusch Studios of New York to make the necessary alterations for installation in the south windows of the school's Chapel. Forty-three years later, their condition a critical issue, conservation was undertaken.

Late this past summer, scaffolding was installed in the Chapel, and parts of the windows were carefully removed, packed, and transported to Brooklyn, to the St. Ann Center for Restoration and the Arts' Stained Glass Studio, operated by stained-glass conservator David Fraser. David and the St. Ann Center have been undertaking the conservation of the mid-nineteenth century American windows by William Jay and John Bolton for St. Ann's and the Holy Trinity Church at Montague and Clinton Streets in Brooklyn. David has been working on the St. Ann's windows for the past ten years and has been involved in teaching students and training conservators of stained glass during that period.

In addition to his work on the Jay and Bolton windows, David has participated in the restoration of windows by other makers, notably work by John Oliver La Farge and Louis Comfort Tiffany. David has been assisted on the current project by Muriel Stallworth, an Andrew W. Mellon intern. The conservation of the windows is made possible through the Florence Gould Foundation, funds that have been matched by private donations from the Saint David's family, for which we are enormously grateful.

The process of conservation is methodical and painstaking. After the windows have been removed and brought to the studio, the first task is to thoroughly document them in their preconservation state. Such documentation is of vital importance because as new knowledge comes to light, complete records will exist. The documentation first takes the form of extensive digital photography of the windows. In addition, a rubbing is taken of the entire window. This time-consuming process involves placing a large sheet of paper over the entire face of the window and then, with a soft pencil, literally rubbing it so that the parts in relief will appear in graphite and the other areas will recede. This is much the same manner used to execute gravestone rubbings. The rubbings will be preserved in the Saint David's archives. The leading throughout the windows was old and weak, necessitating replacement. Before completely unleading the panels, on one of the bottom heraldic panels, the leading was “skimmed,” or literally cut off in its entirety, leaving a kind of skeleton of leading. It appeared that an overall black coating covered the front of the windows, which when removed, revealed much brighter and clearer images. One of the exciting discoveries is that some of the leading on the lower panels is actually original to medieval times, a rarity in stained-glass history.

One of the important concepts to bear in mind when considering the windows' conservation is that, in line with current professional conservation practices, all of the processes used are reversible. This is important because, if in the future an improved technique is developed, the present restoration can be removed and the new method applied—but only if that method, too, is reversible. Therefore, the type of glue used to fix two pieces of broken glass could be softened, and the pieces could be taken apart and reglued.

Although there were some rare remnants of the original thin medieval cast leading still surviving, most of the leading had been replaced, probably during the nineteenth century. The replacement leads were wider than the original and, as such, obscured much of the original glass and painting. For their conservation, a lead that was closer to the original profile was used, giving the windows greater clarity. The inscriptions that occur on the windows have also become far more legible, and the Old French has been translated more fully.

Above: Restorers from the Stained Glass Conservation Studio at the St. Ann Center for Restoration and the Arts at work on Saint David's windows.

The windows contained hundreds of years of accumulated soot and grime, as well as a layer of overpainting, which seriously obscured them. This was all cautiously and painstakingly cleaned, little by little revealing the glories of the original colored glass painting beneath and, at the same time, greatly improving its legibility. Finally, it has become clear that there has been much previous restoration, and indeed alteration, during the course of the windows' five-hundred-year history, not surprising in windows of this age. In some places, fragments of the windows had been moved from one place to another, obscuring the windows' clarity.

The careful examination of the Saint David's windows at this time shed new light on the windows as they may have been originally conceived. The bottom panels provided the most intriguing clue to this rearrangement. It appears that two of the bottom panels are actually complete fabrications, based on the originals. They feature heraldic devices within a heart-shaped reserve. In their current installation, the windows are a pair of double windows, each composed of two long rectangular panels of four narrative scenes, two over two, with the upper square panels devoted to scrolls and inscriptions, and the lower panels depicting heraldic devices. After study, however, it appeared that the windows were not the two pairs side by side, as they are now, but rather were originally displayed as two tall, narrow, vertical compositions. Further research determined that two more panels were missing and had been sold in the famous “Sale of the Century,” when the Hearst collection was sold through Gimbel's of New York in 1941. Taking the photographs published at the time of the sale, and incorporating them into a montage of photos of the individual Saint David's panels, the windows could be reconfigured as they would have been installed originally, twenty feet high and two feet wide. It is hoped that the missing panels may someday be rediscovered. There are still many questions remaining about these windows. Who commissioned them? Where exactly were they made? What was the original church for which they were made?

The narrative of the windows centers on a story in the Golden Legend, a thirteenth-century book about the lives of the saints. Here it chronicles the legend of Mary Magdalene who, with Christian followers, set out to sail on a rudderless and sailless ship, which, rather than sinking, miraculously lands at Marseilles. There followed several miracles, which fostered the growth of Christianity in southern France. Muriel Stallworth not only assisted David Fraser with the actual hands-on restoration work, but also conducted most of the research on the windows. She suggests that the heraldic references of the white cross on a red ground with white feathers or sheaves of wheat in the four quadrants were made for the Order of the Knights Hospitalers, later known as the Knights of Malta.

The windows, a Renaissance treasure hidden at Saint David's School, were made public in an exhibition at the World Monuments Fund headquarters on Madison Avenue and were featured in an extensive article—“Stained Glass Buffed up to Its 600-Year-Old Glory”—in the New York Times (April 14, 2002). Although they have not been in the school for the past year, they have lived in various aspects of the school's curriculum, from appearing in the opera written and performed by the Sixth Grade to serving as an integral part of the Eighth Grade Humanities class. Finally, the entire Saint David's community eagerly awaits their reinstallation and unveiling in the school Chapel where generations of boys will worship and be inspired by their legend, their history, their craftsmanship, and their beauty.

Left: Debbie Zizza, Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, David Fraser, and David Hume observe the restoration process.