Beauty: A Riot of Color in a Dreary Gray World

• The windows reinforced the reality that within a cathedral heaven and earth meet during the Mass.
• Often, there was a very specific order and placement of the windows which served to underscore their depictions. For example, most churches face east in anticipation of the rising sun and the Second Coming of Christ. The windows on the eastern wall would then portray scenes from the Resurrection and heaven itself. Along the north wall stood scenes from the Old Testament, which was associated with cold and darkness, the time before Christ. The south wall held the New Testament scenes. The west wall would have displayed scenes from the Last Judgment or the Fall in the Garden, scenes which reminded people they were passing from this earthly reality into a new, heavenly one.

• The windows let in light, but a filtered, colored and somewhat dimmer light. This is no accident. As architecture progressed, one of the focuses was to find a way to have bigger, more impressive open spaces for windows. The larger the window, the grander the glass but interestingly, not necessarily an increase in bright light:

Although Gothic windows opened up walls of light within the cathedral, the effect was not as much to illuminate the interior as to create an atmosphere of physical and spiritual beauty: “stained glass prevents much of the natural light from entering [providing instead] colored and changing light in the windows themselves and flickering light over the stone interior. (Carol Ann Jones on SacredArchitecture.org)