Stained Glass Window as Thing: Heidegger, the Shoemaker Panels, and the Commercial and Spiritual Economies of Chartres Cathedral in the Thirteenth Century

Anne F. Harris • DePauw University

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Recommended citation: Anne F. Harris, “Stained Glass Window as Thing: Heidegger, the Shoemaker Panels, and the Commercial and Spiritual Economies of Chartres Cathedral in the Thirteenth Century,” Different Visions: New Perspectives on Medieval Art 1 (2008). https://doi.org/10.61302/MGAM3152

 

 

In the bottom right panel of the thirteenth-century Good Samaritan Window in the nave of Chartres cathedral, seven men identified as shoemakers by the scroll which unfurls before them stand closely together, pressing towards one who proffers forth a stained glass window, while others gesture upwards toward God, who with the gesture of blessing, acknowledges their gift (Figure 1).[1] Also in the bottom right panel of the Relics of Saint Stephen Window in the ambulatory of the cathedral, ten more shoemakers gather around an altar, some placing their hands on a stained glass window balanced there, also positioned as an offering (Figure 2).[2] What is being brought forth in these images? What is being given, received and granted in return? Martin Heidegger’s questions about the definition of the kind “thing”(das Ding) that a work of art is in his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” can challenge us to ask what kind of thing a stained glass window is, and what kind of work it does as a work of art.[3] Through his pursuit of the usefulness of the thing, we can wonder about what kind of thing a stained glass window represented within a stained glass window is. And in his questioning of the work that a work of art does, we can ask about the effect of a stained glass window being offered up to God by a group of shoemakers, especially when it is shown within a stained glass window that also represents their own work of making shoes. Heidegger prompts us to trace more meticulously the possibilities of “thingness” (die Dingheit) for a stained glass window: to inquire more carefully about both the character, use, and effect of a stained glass window within the intersection of the emerging commercial and shifting spiritual economies of the thirteenth century. In this essay, I will use Caviness’s triangulation model to intersect Heidegger’s questions with the thirteenth-century trade windows of Chartres and their socio-historical context.[4]

Fig. 1. Shoemakers offering up a stained glass window within the Good Samaritan window of Chartres Cathedral (nave, south side, Corpus Vitrearum window 44 panel no. 3). Photo: Henri Feraudy Reproduced by kind permission of Henri Feraudy

Fig. 2. Shoemakers offering up a stained glass window within the Relics of St. Stephen window of Chartres cathedral (ambulatory, north chapel, Corpus Vitrearum window 13, panel 2). Photo: Henri Feraudy. Reproduced by kind permission of Henri Feraudy.

These representations of tradesmen proffering forth a stained glass window are part of an iconographic tradition of donors holding models of their gift to the church.[5] Two elements make them remarkable, however. The first is that it is a group of tradesmen, not wealthy ecclesiastics or aristocrats, who holds the model; and the second is that there is a particular degree of abstraction specific to the medium of stained glass in the image of a window as gift. Unlike a building, which, at a distance, can be perceived as a singular image, a stained glass window is not a discrete object; it is a series of fragments assembled together and contained by metal tracery and stone architecture: structurally, it cannot be excised from the architectural fabric of the cathedral wall and manipulated as a thing to be given. And yet the medieval programmers of the thirteenth-century glass of Chartres were able to conceive of a stained glass window in discrete terms, as a thing to be manipulated, exchanged, and even transformed.

Heidegger’s attempts to define “thing” and “work” (das Werk) in seeking the origin of the work of art will help us examine the conditions of possibility for this objectification of a stained glass window, for its being understood as a thing which can be offered within the early thirteenth-century world of Chartres cathedral, rendered increasingly complex by the encroachment of a new commercial economy upon the existing spiritual economy. The “trade windows” of Chartres, as the stained glass images of the shoemakers and other tradespeople throughout the bottom panels of windows in the nave and ambulatory have come to be known, were assigned important work by their designers in negotiating these two realms in the early thirteenth century: the commercial economy of the marketplace with its pragmatic and quotidian use of money, and the spiritual economy of the Church with its symbolic and ritual performances of power. I will thus be pursuing two lines of questioning within this complex world: what kind of thing is a stained glass window? and, what kind of work does it do?

Heidegger becomes interested in defining “things” by being interested in defining the source of art. The question “What is art?” or “Where does art come from?” could simply be answered by saying “Art is whatever an artist makes; art comes from the artist.” But since an artist is only defined as such because he or she makes art, we are right back where we started in a rather tight hermeneutic circle.[6] To say “X paints houses” identifies a housepainter because the thing being painted is a house; to say “Y paints a painting” denotes an artist because the thing being painted is understood as a work of art (whether it is good or not is beside the point here). The artist cannot be the origin of the work of art because his or her identity as an artist is predicated on the concept art itself. For Heidegger, the presence and action of the artist is not the place to look for the origin of art.[7] To break out of the too-small hermeneutic circle, Heidegger posits that a work of art is most fundamentally a thing, an object in the world, and that we must define what makes a thing a thing before we can proceed to know what makes art, art. No medieval designer or receiver of images was pre-occupied with these questions of origins; but the emphasis these questions place on how the material qualities of an object signify its meaning within experience, in short, its phenomenology, would have been of great interest to medieval designers, as attested by the concerns for medium and meaning that Abbot Suger, for example, explores in his De administratione.[8]

Scholars have long engaged in a process of categorical definition in attempting to determine the character and use of stained glass windows, especially those with representations of figures who might be understood as donors of the windows themselves. The character of the “trade windows” of Chartres, all of which depict tradespeople at their labor or in the act of negotiating the sale of their wares in the bottom panels of the windows, has thus been theorized within two primary schools of thought. In 1926, Yves Delaporte summarized the traditional claim that the trade windows existed as a testament to the goodwill which flourished between those who worked and those who prayed.[9] In 1987, Jane Welch Williams forever changed the easy assumption of this idea by arguing that the representations of docile laborers in the guise of donors were the wishful projections of an anxious ecclesiastical class struggling with difficult local politics and a shifting economic landscape.[10] I think that in looking at stained glass images of tradespeople in the nave and ambulatory windows of Chartres, we are looking at neither actual donations nor defensive propaganda.

Using Heidegger’s phenomenological philosophy to ask questions that move my inquiry beyond Williams’s pragmatic Marxist materialism, I will argue that these images, because of their emphasis on the “thingness” of stained glass (that which makes a stained glass window what it is, both physically and efficiently), are an attempt to confront a broader and more consequential issue: the increasingly pressing challenge which the town’s emerging urban economy presented to the church’s way of life and its understanding of the world. Some of Heidegger’s particular vocabulary will be helpful in establishing new interpretive frameworks for the windows. The tradespeople panels negotiate the relationship between what Heidegger calls the “earth” (Erde) (that more fundamental aspect of a work of art, its materiality and essence, which was being perceived and utilized in new ways in the thirteenth century) and the “world” (Welt) the context which make these images make sense, and which was being radically altered by the increasingly quotidian use of money in the thirteenth century). Heidegger’s characterizations of “creators” (die Schaffenden) (those who design or make art) and “preservers” (die Bewahrer) (those whose reception of art make it meaningful) provide a new way of understanding how images of the shoemakers and their fellow tradesmen embodied the relationship between the spaces and practices of the cathedral and those of the emerging urban artisanal marketplace of Chartres at the turn of the thirteenth century.

Thing and Work: The Materiality of Stained Glass

In the words of Heidegger “…even the much-vaunted aesthetic experience cannot get around the thingly aspect of the artwork.”[11] What kind of thing is a stained glass window when it is understood as a thing, as a discrete object in the world, to be handled, manipulated, and given? Heidegger notes how difficult it is to “let a thing be just the being that it is” and to “let [the thing] rest upon itself in its very own essence.”[12] We will see how pertinent this compulsory contingency of things is in understanding what the medieval spiritual economy did in establishing a stained glass window as a possible gift to be donated to a church. It is interesting to pause and consider why a stained glass window, which, because of its structural implication in church architecture, is not a discrete object like a painting or a statue, was categorized as a give-able entity in the medieval church economy.

To the modern viewer, stained glass windows are categorized along with paintings and statues and sculptures as works of art, and it almost goes without saying that they are more often than not the result of a private, individual, or group donation that was not funded through the general funds of the fabric ecclesiae. Within medieval gift-giving culture, however, stained glass windows were not assimilated to aesthetics, but rather (and in a somewhat surprising way) to liturgy.[13] Embedded as they were within the architectural fabric of the cathedral, it is worth asking why and how stained glass windows were separated out so as to be able to be given.

What, then, did it mean to “give” a stained glass window in the way that the shoemakers are represented as doing? A simple answer is that one provides the funds for the construction and design of the window. But the answer is not so simple for our shoemakers, for we have no historical evidence that the thirteenth-century shoemakers of Chartres were organized into a guild capable of raising such funds.[14] Williams notes that corporate identities (guilds and confraternity) for merchants only really began to be formed in the later thirteenth- and early fourteenth centuries.[15] So who is giving what to whom here? And to what benefit are the shoemakers alone amongst all the trades represented as giving a stained glass window? Rather than look to the shoemakers and the tradespeople of Chartres for answers, we might look to the clerical culture of Chartres for a conceptualization of stained glass that would result in its visual representation as a discrete object available as a gift to the Church.[16]

The twelfth-century Necrologue of Chartres lists the calendar days upon which departed individuals should be commemorated in anniversary masses, as well as the gifts that they gave to the cathedral.[17] We have the names of nine such individuals, all clerics of Chartres, and the sixteen windows that they donated to the fabric of the cathedral.[18] All sixteen of these windows were destroyed in the 1194 fire that devastated so much of the cathedral, and thus we have no way of knowing what the visual content, which was never recorded, of these windows were. The absence of any iconographic consideration for the “vitrea” mentioned in the necrologue, be they entire windows or individual panels, reveals the primacy of a concern for the materiality, for the significant “thingness,” of stained glass. The convention for listing donations placed them in groups: land donations would be in one list, rents and dimes in another, books in another and so on. What emerges upon an examination of these lists of gifts is a consistent and fascinating grouping of stained glass windows with liturgical objects such as altar cloths, chalices, candlesticks, liturgical robes and so forth. This grouping indicates a conceptualization of stained glass not as an aesthetic object, but as a thing that presents a liturgical quality.

The necrologue notices provide a glimpse into the type of thing that a stained glass window was when it was given to the church. For the 20th of February, for example, Haimericus is to be remembered, who gave the church “a white dalmatic, and white robe. He also gave three precious pitchers, and adorned the church with decorated windows.”[19] On the 1st of March, Ernardus is praised for giving “three windows, a silk cape, and silver covers.”[20] Arnaldus, a presbiter and canon, was to be remembered because he “decorated the church with a precious silken cape, a silk pallium, one window, and a golden necklace for the treasure chest of the Virgin Mary.”[21]

All of the things described decorate the liturgical space of the altar, and call the ambulatory panel of the shoemakers positioning a stained glass window upon an altar (Figure 3) to mind. These things are all draped upon an altar, or they drape the body of an officiant, and thus participate in the events of the liturgy. They are those things that adorn and frame the visual experience of the sacrament, literally give it color and movement, and demarcate the space of the altar. They signal the sacred quality of the space they inhabit, and when mass is being performed, they amplify it. Thus stained glass windows are much more than the representational surfaces that modern art history would have us see them as. They are performative surfaces, glistening things that shine and flicker and appear to move. They are also things that are dependent upon each other for this effect. Not one donation in the necrologue lists a singular gift of a stained glass window; there is always an accompanying dalmatic or cape or pitcher. Stained glass windows were not perceived individually, but rather in conjunction with these other things. The shimmering glass established a visual call and response to the silken rustle of the dalmatic of the officiant below, the candles on the altar, and the silver of the pitcher as the priest raised it in ritual gesture.

Fig. 3. Shoemakers laboring and offering up a stained glass window within the Good Samaritan window of Chartres cathedral (nave, south side, Corpus Vitrearum window 44, panels no. 1-3). Photo: Henri Feraudy. Reproduced by kind permission of Henri Feraudy.

When medieval viewers saw our shoemakers holding a stained glass window, they saw an object from a liturgical complex, not the aesthetic visual field of modernist art history. They saw an associative and performative thing. Seeing a stained glass window meant visualizing the rich complexity of the rituals that it framed and made meaningful as much because of its materiality as because of its iconographic content. It is important to note how very seldom medieval commentators on stained glass ever wrote about its imagery, and how often they focused instead on its materiality, or its association with other material objects, as we just witnessed within the Necrologue of Chartres.[22] Heidegger’s emphasis on the phenomenology of things (the “thingness” of things), on how materiality as it is experienced and perceived can be meaningful, is very productive for understanding the medieval emphasis on materiality. Modern art history has tended to perceive and analyze stained glass windows according to their individual panels (which are reproduced in publications and lectures as mini-paintings), but a new art history of stained glass can be written when it is perceived as a thing, not a representational surface.[23] This new (old) way of seeing stained glass embeds it more deeply into its architectural frame, and implicates it more profoundly in the activities of church space.

In the hands of the shoemakers, the stained glass window signaled the participation of these merchants in the liturgical life of the cathedral, an implication that the cathedral chapter was particularly keen to make as it sought to reconcile the spiritual economy of the Church with the commercial economy of the marketplace. In the shoemaker panels within the Good Samaritan Window, we see the active prayers of the group gathered behind the stained glass window immediately next to, indeed facing, the vigorous labor of three fellow shoemakers, as they strain, stretch, pull and sew the leather of their shoemaking craft. The stained glass window, already associative to the ritual devotions of the liturgy, now takes on a new set of association with the mundane, or, to use Heidegger’s term, “mere” (bloß), thing of the shoe. It is at this point, with its association of the shoemakers’ equipment, that the stained glass window becomes useful and that we can analyze its manipulation by the shoemakers.

Work and Truth: The Usefulness of Stained Glass

“Truth happens in Van Gogh’s painting. This does not mean that something is correctly portrayed, but rather that in the revelation of the equipmental being of the shoes, that which is a whole – world and earth in their counterplay – attained to unconcealedness.”[24] Heidegger makes this statement at the end of his section on “Work and Truth” in which he pursues his interest in the work of a work of art, that is, in its usefulness. He introduces a series of new critical terms that are worth reviewing. “Truth” (Wahrheit) and “unconcealedness” (Unverborgenheit) are related terms for Heidegger; truth is not a fact, but rather a type of revelation. Thus, it is not the factuality (the correctness) of van Gogh’s painting of shoes that makes this work of art work, but rather its ability to project a revelation about the shoes, their materiality, their history, their owner, and their experience – the contingencies of his phenomenological investigation, which are dubbed the “equipmental being” of a thing.[25] Heidegger provides a surprisingly moving account of the shoes represented in van Gogh’s painting, inviting the viewer to look more closely at these “mere things:” “In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of [the peasant woman’s] slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind.”[26] In sighting traces of use, Heidegger cites the usefulness of the work of art.[27] I will attempt a similar process by looking at how the twelfth-century Belle Verrière window of Chartres was re-used after the 1194 fire in a thirteenth-century window, revealing the crucial role which stained glass had to play in mediating the relationship between human and divine. The profound difference in my analysis from Heidegger’s is that I will be looking not at the representation of a “mere thing,” but rather at the re-presentation of what became a sacred one.[28]

It is also within his description of van Gogh’s painting of shoes that Heidegger first introduces the all-important dynamic between “earth” and “world:” “Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth… This equipment belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman.”[29] The call of the “earth” is silent because it is largely unseen and unacknowledged in its mundane, mere existence. The term “world” bespeaks the more complex idea of being (as opposed to mere existence), an idea which human beings seek to articulate and make visible.[30] The interaction of “earth” and “world” is crucial for Heidegger, the play between our experienced existence (those mere things and mundane moments) and our understood being (those philosophical pronouncements and meaningful moments). The stained glass panels representing shoemakers working on shoes, selling shoes, and offering up stained glass windows did precisely this work of negotiating and mediating the mundane and the meaningful.

In this section, I will thus pay particular attention to the image of the shoemakers’ window as an image within an image, a representation within a representational field. It is as a thing within an image that the shoemakers’ window becomes useful, that it becomes a visual entity to be given to God in exchange for salvation. As a thing within an image, it becomes an object of negotiation (like so many other things being made, bought, and sold within the trade windows); here, however, the negotiation is not between man and man, but rather between man and God. I would first like to establish the twelfth-century window known as the Belle Verrière as a precedent at Chartres for the conception of a stained glass window as an image that mediates the relationship between worshipper and divine. I will then return to the shoemakers’ windows to demonstrate how their windows’ mediating role is amplified by being twice-framed, that is, by being an image within an image.

The Belle Verrière (Figure 4) is a unique window at Chartres in that it is comprised of three twelfth-century stained glass panels, representing the Virgin Mary with Christ seated on her lap, surrounded by thirteenth- century panels to create a new window.[31] It presents, more literally and physically than the shoemakers’ windows, a window within a window, an image within an image. Miraculously rescued from the cathedral’s 1194 fire, the twelfth-century panels were re- positioned in the thirteenth century in a window also depicting the Temptations of Christ and the Marriage at Cana and placed in the western end of the south ambulatory.[32] In representing the Virgin in the Sedes Sapientiae (Throne of Wisdom) pose so popular at Chartres, the Belle Verrière window combined the cultic aspect of Mary with the medium of stained glass, in which she was now so iconically visible.

Fig. 4. Belle Verrière window of Chartres cathedral (ambulatory, south side, Corpus Vitrearum window no. 30a, panels 10-24). Photo: Henri Feraudy. Reproduced by kind permission of Henri Feraudy.

Cultic images in stained glass are an extreme rarity in the Middle Ages, but the clerics of Chartres made several liturgical and iconographic decisions which suggest that in their translation of the Belle Verrière’s twelfth-century panels to the first bay in the ambulatory, they were attempting to create an awareness of the image of the Virgin as an image. The first of these decisions was the placement of an altar before the window. Such an altar existed at Chartres until the late nineteenth century, and its existence is attested to in 1324, when Geoffroy des Fouchiez donated funds for the upkeep of an altar “before the window of the blessed and glorious virgin Mary.”[33] There is an even earlier date signaling a liturgical arrangement for devotion to a stained glass window in a notation from 1137 in the Cartulaire de l’Abbaye de Notre-Dame de Josaphat. Bernard was the caretaker of the sacristy at Chartres, and requested, as part of a donation charter, that a lamp and surrounding candles be kept lit before “the image in glass of the Blessed Mary” in perpetuity.[34] Whether the window in question was the Belle Verrière or not, there did exist in the twelfth century, an organized devotion to an image in a stained glass window at Chartres cathedral.[35] This devotion is the precedent for the usefulness of the shoemakers’ window within the devotional dynamic of Chartres cathedral. Their devotional gesture towards their stained glass window as a holy image (cradling it in a cloth like a relic in the nave panel, and positioning it on an altar in the ambulatory panel), emerges from the devotional use of stained glass as established by the Belle Verrière window. The liturgical practice of kneeling before an altar positioned below a stained glass window image of the Virgin Mary informed the devotional act of offering a stained glass window to the Virgin Mary (and God, and the Church).

What is the devotional usefulness of a stained glass window? I suggest that we look at how, through the iconographic decisions of the Belle Verrière’s programmers, the stained glass window refers to itself, to its own function and usefulness as image. On either side of the three twelfth-century panels representing the Virgin and Child in the Sedes Sapientiae pose are six thirteenth-century panels representing angels with censers and processional candles. The twelfth-century panels are surmounted by the dove of the Holy Spirit and the representation of a church, an allusion to the celestial court of which the angels are also a part. The panel depicting the head of the Virgin was reworked in the thirteenth-century to accommodate the censers of the two angels near the top of the frame.[36] All six thirteenth-century censing and processional angels that surround the Belle Verrière are visual markers of liturgical activity (and indeed recall the kneeling poses of the shoemakers around their windows as they offer these up). Holding censers and candles, they create a liturgical frame for the image of the Virgin and Child. A visual interaction with the Belle Verrière window becomes a visual interaction with a devotional image when we consider the angels’ association with the rituals that surround a cultic statue. They form a direct correlation with the liturgical activities that we know took place before the Belle Verrière: as their candles burn and censers swing around the image of Mary, so sweet smells and flickering lights surrounded the Belle Verrière. The angels operate as visual signs to create a realization of the Belle Verrière as a cultic image. The image of Mary is thus framed both by images and rituals, and images of rituals.

Fig. 5. Shoemakers laboring and offering up a stained glass window within the Good Samaritan window of Chartres cathedral (nave, south side, Corpus Vitrearum window 44, panels no. 1-3). Photo: Henri Feraudy. Reproduced by kind permission of Henri Feraudy

The images of the windows held by the shoemakers also respond to rituals of devotion. In the Good Samaritan window in the nave, the window offered up by the shoemakers leads the eye to the left, toward the bodies of laboring shoemakers. (Figure 5) The visual relationship created between the shoemakers’ devotional bodies and their laboring bodies is significant. Labor was increasingly valued in the thirteenth century, and many miracles from the Miracles de Notre-Dame poems of 1210 and 1260 relate the miraculous recovery of laborers who had been divinely punished for working on the wrong days or in the wrong way.[37] Work was granted a new dignity in the thirteenth century by being included in miracle records such as the one at Chartres, and it was being taken into serious theological consideration.[38] It thus becomes meaningful to compare the energetic gestures of the censing angels with those of the laboring shoemakers, as gestures which mark the image of the window being offered up within the image of the shoemakers offering up the window as being sacred. The same hands which fashion the shoes are those which handle the stained glass window, and the move from mere thing to sacred image occurs quickly within the stained glass panels: they are directly juxtaposed.

Fig. 6. Shoemaker negotiating with a client and shoemakers laboring in the Glorification of the Virgin window at Chartres cathedral (nave, south side, Corpus Vitrearum window no. 42, panels 1-3). Photo: Henri Feraudy. Reproduced by kind permission of Henri Feraudy

If we broaden our visual frame in the nave to encompass the Glorification of the Virgin window (Figure 6) directly to the left of the Good Samaritan window, we see more shoemakers in the bottom three panels of the window.[39] The window depicts the Dormition of the Virgin, her funeral procession, her entombment, and her Coronation in Heaven at the side of Christ, and features three more scenes of shoemakers at work. Two panels are taken up with more laboring shoemakers, in one panel straining to lift many sheets of leather, and in the other, a shoemaker seemingly putting the finishing touches on a shoe. The line of vision, going from right to left, initiated by the shoemakers holding the stained glass window in the Good Samaritan window ends with the body of a shoemaker engaged in a price negotiation with a seated client. (Figure 7) We will return to this scene of negotiation in the final section on the effect of stained glass. For now, it is enough to note that the labor of the shoemakers inform their gesture of holding a stained glass window, and vice versa.

Fig. 7. Shoemaker negotiating with a client in the Glorification of the Virgin window at Chartres cathedral (nave, south side, Corpus Vitrearum window no. 42, panel 1). Photo: Henri Feraudy. Reproduced by kind permission of Henri Feraudy

In the Relics of Saint Stephen Window, which is positioned in the central axis of the northeast chapel of the ambulatory, the shoemakers’ labor (in the left panel) is visually positioned in sacred association with the window being placed atop an altar in the right panel (Figure 8). A dynamic of sacralization emerges beneath the depiction of the life, martyrdom and relics of Saint Stephen.[40] As in the Good Samaritan and Glorification of the Virgin windows, the sacred narrative above the donor panels visualizes Heidegger’s “world” view (its sacred and profound concerns with being) as the donor panels approximate his idea of “earth” (and its practices of existence). The panels (in the Good Samaritan and Relics of Saint Stephen Windows) depicting shoemakers offering up a stained glass window negotiate both “earth” and “world:” the shoemakers’ mundane and laboring gestures of making shoes is amplified by their sacred and devotional gesture of offering up a stained glass window.

Fig. 8. Shoemakers laboring and offering up a stained glass window within the Relics of St. Stephen window of Chartres cathedral (ambulatory, north chapel, Corpus Vitrearum window 13, panels 1-2). Photo: Henri Feraudy. Reproduced by kind permission of Henri Feraudy.

The window within a window is here very clearly twice-framed: once by the hands of the shoemakers (those same hands which labor for the manufacture of shoes) and again by the stained glass window itself. If we recall our associative materiality of stained glass, we see more double-frames: the altar upon which the stained glass window image is placed, and the actual altar which the actual stained glass window presides over; the architectural arches above the stained glass window as image, and the actual architectural vaults of the chapel above the window.

The framing and double-framing of the shoemakers’ windows serve to emphasize and reify the windows’ liturgical associations. It is in this visual strategy of self-referencing that the devotional usefulness of the represented stained glass window becomes apparent. The shoemakers do not simply hold a stained glass window in their hands. They hold a piece of liturgical equipment, a thing with a function, which engages them in a series of associations that lead very rapidly from the mundane to the divine, from “earth” to “world”. The initial frame of their hands, which recalls their labor upon the mere thing of the shoe, is doubled out by the liturgical frame that the example of the Belle Verrière tells us was possible for a stained glass window. In the ambulatory, the architectural frame of the chapel and its liturgical function further implicates the shoemakers in the sacred realm of divine ritual. All of these associations would not be possible without the image within the image of the shoemakers holding a stained glass window. The usefulness of the image within the image is to initiate this series of powerful connections between man and God. This usefulness was put to use by the medieval viewers of these images, which brings us to the effect of stained glass as a mediator between “earth” and “world,” between the mundane things of existence such as shoes and money, and the sacred meaning of being articulated in ritual devotion.

Truth and Art: The Effect of Stained Glass

In stating, “The preservers of a work belong to its createdness with an essentiality equal to that of its creators,” Heidegger leads us to consider the effect of the medium on the programmers and audiences of stained glass.[41]

In the final section of “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger makes several connections between art and truth and inserts these within history. “Art then is the becoming and happening of truth,”[42] he declares, characterizing the work of a work of art as bringing forward truth. He makes this statement after having introduced two new protagonists in the operations of art: creators and preservers. “Creators” is a broad category that can include patrons, designers, artists, institutions and the like – those personas that are “behind” a work of art’s production. “Preservers” are those whom we would now call audiences, recipients, viewers, users and so on – those who stand “before” a work of art and enact its reception. As the quote above highlights, preservers are just as important as creators in the “createdness” (the coming into being, das Geschaffensein) of a work of art: the shoemakers, as audience, as just as crucial to the meaning of “their” stained glass window as the clerics who designed and may even have paid for the windows. This statement seems almost self-evident now, but it is exciting to read these terms, which provide an inkling of the ideas that would flourish as reception theory, from 1950, when Heidegger published his essay.[43]

Heidegger places his primary focus on the persona of the preservers and positions them in relationship to both truth and history:[44] “[I]n the work [of art], truth is thrown towards the coming preservers, that is, toward an historical group of men.”[45] This terminology of projection engages art with a historically implicated audience. The shoemakers and other tradespeople of Chartres may not have understood images of themselves as “truth” (although the new realism of such a depiction does avail itself to discussions of truth), but the images of saints and the divine figures of Mary and Christ which were displayed gloriously in the windows above the donor panels certainly projected truth.

It is within this intersection of truth, history, and preservers that Heidegger hints at an idea that I find gripping: that the work of art is also that of subjectivity formation. “Preserving the work means: standing within the openness of being that happens in the work.”[46] “Openness of being” is a phrase that Heidegger uses often in conjunction with truth, and therefore associates the subject position of preservers as “standing within” the truth that happens in a work of art. I take “standing within” to be a powerful assimilation of the viewer (preserver) with the truth of a work of art – it is a stronger claim of interaction than merely “standing before” a work of art. These distinctions become important when we consider the effect of seeing stained glass window panels depicting shoemakers and tradespeople on the historical shoemakers and tradespeople of thirteenth-century Chartres.

We have examined the materiality of stained glass as thing in its associations with other liturgical things within its immediate physical context, the usefulness of stained glass as equipment within the architectural context of the church in evoking the performance of devotional ritual, and now, we have a chance to examine the effect of stained glass as a work of art within the increasingly contested space of a cathedral in proximity to an emerging commercial marketplace. The aim of this section is to understand what effect the shoemakers’ stained glass windows, cradled in cloth and presented on an altar, had in the Church’s attempt to negotiate the growing tension between the spiritual economy of the Church (which trafficked in practices such as prayers, masses, and liturgies instead of goods) and the commercial economy of the marketplace (which trafficked in goods and human labor). The presence of so many merchants and clients in the trade windows of Chartres and other thirteenth-century cathedrals attest to the concern the Church had to engage this new population. How did the shoemakers’ windows seek to transform them, and other lay viewers, from merchants with commercial concerns to worshippers with spiritual aspirations?

A very specific force was putting pressure on the Church to make itself relevant to the marketplace: the increasing use of money. The abstraction which money represented soon became its own reality and introduced a third presence between the good that was produced and the labor that stood behind it.[47] In the absence of a central economic authority, this third presence required negotiation to arrive at a price satisfactory to both merchant and client.[48] As it was little involved in the monetary practices of the marketplace, the cathedral chapter was at risk of losing the little relevance it had to the lives of the tradesmen. The Church had had a tradition of trading largely in land and labor, and had been using money symbolically and diplomatically, not for commercial exchange.[49] The negotiation practices of the tradesmen were being increasingly exercised outside the church’s jurisdiction, and the canons were hard pressed to find a way to ensure tradesmen’s presence in the fold of cathedral life.

In addition, the marketplace profited at will from the most fundamental aspect of the human condition since Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden: labor. Physical work had long carried with it a penitential quality.[50] The process of penitential labor was perpetual and yet precise in that it determined the daily and seasonal rhythms of both clerics and lay people.[51] Labor did not find its end within a negotiable good, but rather was cyclically reinvested into the lifelong process of regaining salvation. The innovations of the marketplace – money, negotiation and profit – combined to form a formidable challenge to the ecclesiastical world view, specifically to the ways in which the Church understood itself in relation to the secular realm.

Discussions of labor in thirteenth-century canon law were increasingly theological.[52] The changes which the marketplace had wrought upon the penitential character of labor could no longer be ignored. A shift in the purpose of artisanal labor is suggested in the shoemakers’ windows: instead of being subsumed into profit, the labor of the artisan could be transformed into a salvific donation of a stained glass window. The windows display both the possibility of material gain and the benefits of sanctified labor. This process of transformation, of projecting a new truth, is the effect of the shoemakers’ windows that we must now trace.

The representation of this process begins with the client and shoemaker in the leftmost panel of the Glorification of the Virgin Window. (Figure 9) This pair initiates a “narrative” which can be traced from left to right in the bottom panels of the Glorification window and ends with the image of our shoemakers holding a stained glass window in the Good Samaritan window next to it. The shoemaker is dependent upon no authority but his own to establish a price for his product. We see him walking with energy towards his client, extending his right hand to begin the discussion. The client sits, his right leg crossed over his left, his foot unadorned by any shoe, contemplating the merchandise before him. The shoe, mundane enough to the eye, is extended into the space between the two men, and becomes that crucial socio-economic thing upon which their relationship hinges. The image suspends this moment in which nothing has been decided and all hangs in the balance, and constructs it as a tense, possibly anxious moment in socio-economic time. Why does the shoemakers’ panel place such emphasis in the negotiation scene? Why draw attention to the artisan’s character as merchant? Why focus on the individual, pragmatic, and precarious aspects of this exchange?

Fig. 9. Shoemaker negotiating with a client in the Glorification of the Virgin window at Chartres cathedral (nave, south side, Corpus Vitrearum window no. 42, panel 1). Photo: Henri Feraudy. Reproduced by kind permission of Henri Feraudy.

Theological attention in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was lavished on concern about the justum pretium (just price) for a product. The just price sought to include that amount which exceeded the basic cost of materials and could fairly compensate and artisan for his labor.[53] The basic value of materials could be fixed quantitatively through weights and measures. But the value of human labor was much more difficult to fix, and much more problematic in its repercussions upon the worth of the laborer[54] – an entity which should have been determined only by God (a person’s labor) was subject to market forces. The problem of just price was outlined in the Middle Ages by Augustine’s treatment of a related idea found in Book Five of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, which formulated a theory of justice and economic exchange.[55] In his Ennaratio in Psalmum, (Expositions on the Book of Psalms), Psalm 70, Augustine argued against the common patristic mistrust of the merchant by distinguishing the merchant’s morality from that of the marketplace: the merchant who involved his honest labor in the marketplace, that is the artisan-merchant, could be counted on both to ask and to receive the just price because of the inherent moral value of labor. This reasoning did not solve the practical problem of assigning an exact price to human labor instead it sought to position the penitential value of the merchant’s labor against the potential ills of marketplace negotiation. If only the artisan-merchant remained conscious of this value of his labor, the marketplace could operate within the moral structure of the Church. The challenge which the stained glass donor panels rose to meet was to reintegrate the commercial structure of the marketplace into the moral structure of the Church.

The context of the shoemakers’ windows was extensive, and the effect of their images was meant to be powerful. The images of the just price negotiation scene to the far left and of the stained glass donation to the far right of the two shoemaker windows in the nave frame images of their labor. Throughout the nave, the trade panels depict scenes of labor and scenes of negotiation – drapiers, money changers, spice merchants, butchers, and fish merchants all engage in gestural exchanges with their clients over goods about to be purchased. (The fish merchants’ window (Figure 10) is especially interesting on the issue of just price negotiation as it depicts the fish merchant counting off a price on his fingers.[56] The location of this window, next to the southern transept and the bustling marketplace directly below it, is highly suggestive of the stained glass windows’ role in modeling fair just price behavior.) But only the shoemakers’ labor is associated with its transformation into a donation. The juxtaposition of labor and donation becomes especially powerful in the ambulatory, where the shoemakers appear in the Relics of Saint Stephen Window directly above an altar. Here, the imagery is simpler, more direct: to the left, labor, to the right salvific donation (Figure 11). The stained glass window being held by the shoemakers is no longer a thing simply associated with other liturgical objects, it is no longer an equipment linked to devotional ritual, it is now an image of the shoemakers’ honest and earnest labor. It represents that abstraction that only art can perform which leaves us “suddenly somewhere else than we usually tend to be,” as Heidegger states about van Gogh’s painting.[57]

Fig. 10. Fish merchant negotiating with a client in the St. Anthony and St. Paul window at Chartres cathedral (ambulatory, south side, Corpus Vitrearum window no. 30b, panel 2). Photo: Henri Feraudy. Reproduced by kind permission of Henri Feraudy.

Fig. 11. Shoemakers laboring and offering up a stained glass window within the Relics of St. Stephen window of Chartres cathedral (ambulatory, north chapel, Corpus Vitrearum window 13, panels 1-2). Photo: Henri Feraudy. Reproduced by kind permission of Henri Feraudy.

The stained glass images of the shoemakers in the ambulatory are visually linked to the sacred space that frames them. The altar of the Chapel of the Confessors stands directly beneath the shoemaker panels and amplifies the significance of the altar represented within the window. Throughout the sacred space of the ambulatory, tradespeople are not shown in just price negotiation scenes (those commercial matters were relegated to the less liturgical space of the nave), but rather only in gestures of labor. This distinction sacralizes their labor by associating it exclusively with liturgical devotion. The transformation of the shoemakers’ labor into the devotional gift of a window in the ambulatory thus takes on an even more pronounced liturgical quality than in the nave. The laboring shoemakers are strenuously bent over their work (Figure 12). A pile of completed shoes rises on the table between them. This pile of mundane things is colored in the same golden hue that informs the stained glass window being placed on the altar in the adjoining panel; the bodies of the shoemakers frame the pile of shoes and are then seen to frame the stained glass window. The effect of the stained glass window has taken place: the mundane labor (physical labor) of the marketplace is now visually aligned with the devotional act of opus dei (work of God); the shoemakers’ gestures of labor and work are transformed into those of prayer and devotion.

Fig. 12. Shoemakers laboring and offering up a stained glass window within the Good Samaritan window of Chartres cathedral (nave, south side, Corpus Vitrearum window 44, panels no. 1-3). Photo: Henri Feraudy. Reproduced by kind permission of Henri Feraudy

Conclusion: Stained Glass and Truth

It is perhaps not a coincidence that Heidegger prized Van Gogh’s shoes in his attempt to locate the origin of the work of art through a definition of “thing” and that the programmers of the windows of Chartres cathedral gave such a privileged role for the shoemakers to play in representing them in the act of offering a stained glass window not once but twice. The mundane quality of a shoe appealed to both Heidegger (“But what is there to see here? Everyone knows what shoes consist of”)[58] and to medieval thinkers. In his commentary on the verse quoniam non cognovi negotiationes (“for I do not know about business tradings”) from Psalm 70, Augustine holds a conversation with a merchant, in which the merchant is allowed to defend and justify his profession.[59] He does so according to his labor. In his final justification of commercial practices, the shoemaker provides his most sympathetic example of the laboring artisan-merchant: sutor, calceamenta faciam hominibus (“I, the shoemaker, will make shoes for men”). The shoemakers appear again in de opere monachorum (of the work of monks) when Augustine, in extolling the nobility of labor, evokes the shoemakers of ancient times as honorabiles sutores (honorable shoemakers).[60]

The mundane quality of shoes allowed Heidegger to trace his process from thing to truth (as mediated by art), and allowed the medieval programmers of Chartres cathedral to construct a new truth about labor and salvation as mediated by the thing of a stained glass window. Heidegger claimed that art projected truth from its struggle between earth and world. The struggle in thirteenth century Chartres was between earthly concerns increasingly being defined by money and a spiritual world still full of divine mystery and ritual. The new truth was presented by the shoemakers in the form of a stained glass window which contained and revealed a liturgical “thingness,” a devotional usefulness, and a transformative effect.

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Anne Harris is Associate Professor of Art History at Depauw University. Her primary interest is the intersections of medieval imagery with popular culture. Major publications include “Pilgrimage, Performance and Stained Glass at Canterbury Cathedral,” in Art and Architecture of Late Medieval Pilgrimage, ed. Sarah Blick and Rita Tekippe, 2 vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill Press, 2004), 243-281; “St. Nicholas in Context: Stained Glass and Liturgical Drama in the Archbishopric of Sens,” in Proceedings from the 2004 Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi Colloquium in Nürnberg, 2004 (Freiberg: Corpus Vitrearum Deutschland, 2006); “The Performative Terms of Jewish Iconoclasm and Conversion in Two Saint Nicholas Windows at Chartres Cathedral,” in Beyond the Yellow Badge: New Approaches to Anti-Judaism and Anti-Semitism in Medieval and Early Modern Visual Culture, ed. Mitchell B. Merback (Leiden: E. J. Brill Press, 2006).

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