The windows in the Upper Church of Gesu were made at the Royal
Bavarian Art Institute in Munich, Germany under the supervision of the
noted German artist Franz Xavier Zettler in the first decades of the
twentieth century. They manifest
the
“Munich Style.” In
this style, religious scenes
are painted on larger sheets of glass and then fused to the glass
through firing in intense heat. This allows for a blending of colors
not attainable by the old medieval style, in which any change of
color required a separate piece of colored glass which had to
be
cut to size and fitted with its own leaded framework.
In windows of
the Munich Style the leaded seams do not interrupt or intrude upon
the scene, but are camouflaged by the design in a way that
made them hardly noticeable. This allows for extremely
detailed depictions of scenes. The Style was heavily
influenced by the emotion and sentimentality of the 19th century
European Romantic style of painting and the detail and ornateness of
the German Baroque.
The Munich Style was later adapted and modified by the great American
designer, Louis Comfort Tiffany. While the latter’s name may
be more known to
people today, in their own era it was apparent who was the master and
who was the student: at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition
in Chicago, a Zettler window won top prize over a Tiffany!
