Metroland Arts, Volume 24, Number 49 - Dec. 6 - 12, 2001

ART MURMUR

Window Pain - by Ann Morrow
Photo by Leif Zurmuhlen

A stained-glass window is a thing of beauty forever. Or so you would think.

Last week at the Cathedral of All Saints in downtown Albany, visitors were met by a bizarre sight: a giant stone cutout where the cathedral’s stained-glass rose window used to be. Instead of jewel-tone visions in the form of apostles, angels and saints, only a harsh, gray light filtered in above the high altar. As far as desecrations go, this one could strike at the heart of an atheist. But the window wasn’t stolen by art thieves, nor was it smashed to bits by puritanical zealots. All Saints’ cinquefoil “Great East Window” was taken to the shop for an overhaul.

That’s a very simple way of describing a very complicated process. For decorative objects meant to last the millennia, stained-glass windows are high-maintenance propositions. Their colors grow dull over time. Like certain parts of human anatomy, they tend to sag and billow with age. And the lead strips that hold a window’s thousands of individual panes in place grow brittle, just like old bones.

According to Bill Cummings, a leading expert in stained-glass preservation, glass leading needs to be replaced rather frequently—every 120 years or so. “That’s not very long in the life of a window,” he says. The All Saints window was taken to Cummings’ renowned stained-glass studio in North Adams, Mass., where it will be disassembled, cleaned, repaired and re-leaded. The restoration will take approximately three years of effort by five or six specialists. But first, the window had to be removed—piece by piece by skilled workers. Since All Saints is the fifth-largest cathedral in America, and its 64-foot-high east window is one of the largest stained-glass windows in the country, a whole lot of scaffolding was required. The scaffolding alone cost $1,000 a week. The dismantling took several weeks.

The damage to the East window, which was designed by John Richard Clayton, goes beyond normal wear and aging. “It’s more like a war injury,” says restoration-board member Dr. Edward Doucet. “You have trauma to the stone work that is causing tremendous stress on the glass.” Or as Cummings puts it: “The building is tearing the window apart.”

About a year ago, Doucet noticed a hairline fracture “running along the edge of Christ’s tomb.” The cathedral was hoping to delay the window’s restoration until it could raise the money to pay for it. But a couple of months ago, small cracks began to appear at an alarming rate. “The window destabilized rapidly,” says Doucet in a doctorly tone. Cummings was called in for a diagnosis, and close observation revealed that the cathedral’s brownstone masonry has been moving, disrupting the centripetal force that holds the window in place. Doucet theorizes that the movement is caused by a wind tunnel produced by the block-long State Education building only a few feet away. But no one knows for sure. “Windows of this size have simply not been studied,” he says. The window’s medieval-style stone frame now sports high-tech motion sensors.

So how can the window be placed back in its cutout if the whole wall is drifting? “We’ll have to do some restructuring,” says Cummings understatedly. The total cost of the window’s restoration, including the stone work necessary for reinstallation, seems to be too staggering a figure for anyone to even want to think about. Is the 1891 five-petaled window worth it?

“It’s a beautiful window,” says Cummings. “It’s exceedingly well-painted, and each piece was well-selected. The design is quite elegant.”

“It’s the chief jewel of the cathedral’s crown,” says Doucet. “It’s our most visible and important interior object—it draws the eye to the altar. This is not just a decorative window by any means. It is a visible parable of Christ’s life.”

For those of a more prosaic bent, there is another reason for restoring the Great East Window. Asked how much it would cost to replace it with a comparable work of stained glass, Cummings’ unhesitating answer is “millions.”

“It points up the issue that we’re dealing with in Albany anyway,” says Doucet. “What do you do when you have major works of art—St. Joseph’s church is another case in point—and you can’t afford to preserve them? The families that donated them are gone, there’s no endowment. They’re full of history, but history isn’t going to fix the glass.”

—Ann Morrow