History of Stained Glass

The history of stained glass began in the 11’Th and 12’Th century. After the dark ages, a religious fervor swept the European countryside. In every major town, a cathedral was planned, to be the most beautiful building in that city. There was competition between cities to see who could build the most magnificent structure, in the name of God.

Back in the medieval times, you didn't have suppliers of the materials needed to work in stained glass. You had to find an alchemist to formulate the glass, a chemist to figure out the colors, a metallurgist to mine and cast the lead and an artist to design the windows.

The most important aspect of stained glass is the glass itself. Glass is composed mainly of sand, silica. It is heated to a temperature of 2,000 degrees, until it is the consistency of taffy. The colors are caused by the addition of metallic oxides. The glass does not have a pigment in it like oil paints. White light is a combination of all the colors of the rainbow. The metals in the glass cause the glass to act as a "filter", to remove the entire light spectrum, but the color you see. To get green, you add iron to the sand mixture, causing the entire color spectrum to be absorbed by the glass, but green. To get pink color in glass, you must add pure gold to the mixture and so on. Because there is no pigments in glass, there is nothing to fade like oil paints. The color of glass will be as brilliant 700 years from now as it is today. Once you clean 700 years of contamination and build up of dirt and dust.

Stained glass windows are made up of hundreds of pieces of different colored glass, held together with lead. Lead is chosen for its flexibility and corrosion resistance. Windows, made in the medieval period, lasted hundreds of years before needing to be taken apart and releaded. Windows made in the last 100 years only lasted 100 years. We originally thought that pollution had a lot to do with that. We just recently found out that the old lead, used in the medieval time, had a lot of impurities. In recent times, we learned how to extract the more valuable metals in lead and save the "pure" lead to work with. Not only is the pure lead much more susceptible to corrosion, but the lead is very soft and lends very little support to the window. We now pay extra to have these "trace" metals put back in the lead. A small amount of silver, copper and antimony make the lead much stronger and much more resistant to corrosion. So the "New and Improved" is not necessarily better!

Here's some of our stained glass work.

We'll be adding more pictures of the glass work soon, so please keep checking back.

Thanks for visiting our Stained Glass business page. You are visitor #

For information on any of these great Fractals, or if you have any questions or comments about this website, send mail to gereray@runestone.net .
Last modified: April 15, 2001