Something A Little Different

The picture below is the United Methodist Church in downtown St. Pete.  Nothing is truly old down here, since this area is fairly new as far as towns go.  The church was built in 1926 and they spend quite a little fortune in stained glass windows.  I noticed an ad for a tour of the windows every Wednesday morning, which included a rather large rendition of DaVinci's The Last Supper, and it was free, so why not?   I thought stain glass pictures would be difficult to take, but it wasn't.    

It wasn't a large crowd, only 4 of us, but they were chatty so I didn't have to be.  The windows today are on either side of the chapel.  The ones to the right get the morning sun, the ones to the left, the afternoon.  They have been valued at over a million dollars and are protected on the outside by lexan.  They have not been cleaned in decades.    

I like stained glass and not so surprisingly, I learned quite a bit about the making and designing of panes.  First, stained glass is not smooth like your kitchen window.  Stained glass is manhandled during the process, kind of like icing a cake to make the colors lighter/darker, richer, etc.    

In most classic stained glass religious windows, Christ is wearing white for purity, or red, for the blood he sacrificed.  These windows represent the chronological life of Christ.  

John the Baptist is baptising Christ and using a sea shell, another recurrent feature in many windows.  The shell represents an "eternal" element. 

The sheep represent the meek and passive, while the evergreen in the back is another symbol of the eternal.

The windows themselves are reproductions of famous European windows.  These were made by a company in Ohio.  Imagine the shipping necessary to get these from there to Florida in the 20's.

The golden medallion halo was a popular Medieval painting feature. 

I thought my camera did a pretty good job of capturing the lights and colors of the windows.

The lily becomes a theme in many depictions and we again, see the evergreen on the hillside, as Christ emerges from the burial cave. 

This one really caught my eyes mostly because of the blues and yellows.  It is a very striking color pattern.  Tomorrow we will be seeing the Last Supper and talking a bit about its design.  Its pretty fascinating stuff so be here to join in.  Class dismissed.