The Stained Glass Art of Saint Victor Church

Many of us bring stories into the church. Stories of love, of life and of death. These stories play out the histories of our lives. Sometimes these stories are known to all. Most of the time, they are known only to us and those close to us. Yet when we come into Saint Victor Church, we are surrounded by stories, silently told to us through multicolored panels of glass.

Stained glass windows have been used for hundreds of years as picture books to tell the story of mankind and of man’s salvation. Windows have shown scenes from the Old and New Testaments, the Virgin and Christ, Apostles and Saints. The Gothic age produced the great cathedrals of Europe and brought a full flowering of stained glass windows. Churches became taller and lighter, walls thinned and stained glass was used to fill the increasingly larger openings in them. Stained glass became the sun filled world outside. It was believed that the presence of beautiful objects would lift men’s souls closer to God.

Stained glass windows are often viewed as translucent pictures, and provided a new form of story-telling in pictures. Gothic stained glass windows are a complex mosaic of bits of colored glass joined with lead into an intricate pattern illustrating biblical stories and saints lives. Symbolism has played a large part in the life of all religions and was early adopted by Christians as a means by which their faith could be expressed. Since Medieval times, much of the symbolic language of the Church has found its way into stained glass windows. The beauty of the glass as light shines through it has been considered as a parable of the soul of the believer, as it participates in the light of God.

Manufacture and Design

The windows in St. Victor were made in Innsbruck, Austria by Tiroler Glasmalerei und Mosaik-Anstalt, or TGA. Translated, it is known as the Tyrol, or Tyrolese, Art Glass Company. The company was founded in 1861. Ten windows are signed by the company. They are very "painterly" in style, which follows in the Austrian stained glass tradition that dates back to the Middles Ages.

Now called the Munich Style, Franz Mayer, F.X. Zettler, both of Munich, Germany and TGA, by 1884, had developed a special "American" style to meet American church demands. The "American" style images were very realistic and true to nature, framed with or by glowing surface decoration in a German Romanesque or German Gothic Revival style. The images employed all the means of late Medieval panel painting and included the technique of Renaissance perspective. Worldwide, there were about 3000 installations of TGA windows; how many survive is unknown.

At its peak, TGA employed about 110 people in both Innsbruck and Vienna. There were also affiliated shops in New York and Chicago. The three companies were the great competition for the American firms, such as Tiffany and Lamb, who made liberal use of Mayer, Zettler and TGA popular images and compositions. The trio did not appear to copy Tiffany.

There are twelve large windows in the church, six on each of the east and west walls. They are considered Neo-Romanesque in design. Each window is approximately fourteen to fifteen feet high by approximately six feet across. The story panels are about eight feet high, topped by arched windows and a circular window. The buildings in the arches are interpretations of Romanesque reliquaries of the type found in Cologne, Germany. The bottoms are elaborate versions of the same thing, but given much more architecture. The foliage of the bottom is from Romanesque manuscripts of the Winchester School type, but found all over Germany and Austria in the 12^th Century.

The five windows of the apse are much smaller than the main church windows. They are somewhat hidden from view due to their positions high in the walls and turned toward the perpendicular from the main church. Each window is approximately six feet high by three feet across. Two windows were installed in the early 1960s and do not appear to be from TGA. An arched window, called a lunette, sits above the central door of the church on the south. It is about two and one half feet high by six feet across. The rose window on the south wall contains twelve panels surrounding the central panel and is about twelve feet in diameter. There are two panels in each of the sacristies. They appear to be later additions and are not of the same manufacturer as the main church windows. Each panel is approximately six feet high by three feet across.

Value

It is paradoxical to try to determine the value of the windows. In a sense, they are priceless. The craftsmen and artisans necessary to recreate them have long since left this world. As the windows sit in our church, they have worth nothing to a collector. The only person who would place a value on the windows is a collector. But the only way for a collector to place a value on them is to remove them from the church. If the windows were to go to a private collection, the donor panels would likely be left behind. "Donated by.." and "In memory of..." have no worth to a collector.

Each of the large windows probably had a cost of five hundred to one thousand dollars when they were first installed. It can be estimated that the same windows would be in excess of fifty thousand dollars each if they were to be created today. But they cannot be created today. Artisans like Anton Gassler, Han Ihler, Berta Mader, Liberate Schneibenstock, Gottlieb Schuller, Franz Schwarz, Heinz Thaler and Johan Weiser have passed on. They were the painters and designers who worked at TGA in the 1920s and possibly worked on the windows of Saint Victor Church. TGA still exists, but mostly in name only.

From a historical standpoint, the windows are very significant. They were produced at a time when this type of craftsmanship was beginning to disappear. The artisans were probably in their fifties or older. The first World War depleted the next generation that would have trained under them. The political conditions that begat the second World War were stirring. We have probably one of the last great examples of this art form.

(Click here for the window map of St. Victor Church)