FSU Museum hosts historic stained glass exhibit

The Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts is hosting the exhibition “In Company With Angels” until March 28. The exhibition consists of seven stained glass windows created by the famous Louis Comfort Tiffany, who revolutionized the American stained-glass business.

“It’s not something that we usually do here. We usually have exhibitions that have more pieces in them, and just having the spare space [for the windows] is very reverential,” said Communications Coordinator Terri Yoo of the museum’s decision to host the exhibition. Tiffany is a well-known name in the glasswork community, making these pieces incredibly valuable.

The artist Louis Comfort Tiffany revived a medieval technique to create his stained glass images.

When he began his glassmaking business in New York, Tiffany revived the medieval technique of infusing color directly into glass by melting metal oxides and sand together, then layering the glass together to create a multi-textured design. This technique allowed for a greater variety of color and texture than just painting color onto glass. He incorporated multiple layers of glass into each window, which increased the potential for detail.

The title of the exhibit is a reference to the writings of theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, who claimed that angels walk among us, but we are unaware. His writings provided indirect inspiration to Tiffany through his mentor George Iness, a landscape painter.

The seven windows are adorned with angels, each one representing a church in Asia Minor that received letters from the apostle John, acting under instructions from a vision of Jesus. In the letters, recorded in the Book of Revelation, John transcribes Jesus’ extolling of each community’s virtues, while warning them against their faults. Swedenborg believed that the seven churches symbolized the various stages of a person’s spiritual growth.

“I think that people view the angel as sort of a sign of hope and power” said Yoo, “By having angels in artwork people can relate to that.”

These particular windows had been owned by the New Church Society of Glendale in Ohio, but had been given as a gift to a sister church in Cincinnati. In 1964, the church was razed for highway construction, and the windows were removed and stored in various basements of clergymen and parishioners. The windows were then purchased by the Swedenborgian Church in Temenos in 1989 and stored for over another decade. They were rediscovered by Reverend Susannah Currie in 2001, and were immediately taken to be restored by Arthur Fremenella, who later became the curator of the exhibition.

The first part of the exhibit is a short movie detailing the restoration of the windows. Restoration took a year and a half, and was careful, painstaking work. The angels were covered with dust, and there were certain anomalies in the glass due to chemical reactions with the packing material. The restorers did their best to maintain the original piece, but some parts, like the angels’ faces, needed to be touched up with paint.

“I thought that [the painting] might have been untrue to the original piece,” said Gustavo Smith, a visitor to the exhibit.  “I’d be more interested in seeing how it was originally, and how it would have been if it had aged naturally.”

The main gallery is occupied by the accompanying exhibition FSU set up, which includes many engravings and prints from the university’s permanent collection, as well as a few pieces from the Ringling museum. The engravings are from a multitude of artists, ranging from John Martin’s dramatic illustrations of Paradise Lost to the dreamy, impressionistic prints of Henri Fantin-Latour. As different as they are in style, the paintings carry the common theme of humans interacting with the divine.

The exhibit features a short documentary film and seven stained glass windows. It's one of the smallest to visit the MoFA.

The real centerpiece of this exhibition is the stained-glass windows themselves. Each one is framed in a wooden box, a light shining from behind it, revealing the remarkable texture of the opalescent glass. Upon closer inspection, you can see the sheer amount of detail that went into each window, which the photographs don’t do justice. The angels’ fiery red wings were etched with acid, giving the appearance of real feathers. You can actually see folds in the fabric that some of them wear, especially the angels of Thyatira and Ephesus. Some of them are adorned with jewels, which were actually cut in the shapes of stones rather than being left as flat pieces of glass. This is especially noticeable in the blazing white stone that the angel of Pergamos holds.

“It literalizes something that we believe in,” said Lee Ingram, another visitor. “I think it’s interesting because they have wings, like birds, because I met someone who traveled with a group of Huichol Indians and they said that the birds are the messengers of the gods, and that’s sort of what angels are. They are between us and the gods.”

Admission is free, and the windows should definitely be seen by stained-glass connoisseurs. However, you don’t need to be familiar with Tiffany to appreciate their beauty.

“Being able to bring something that had been hidden away, a piece of history from the church that had been destroyed, you get to see things that you wouldn’t normally see,” said Yoo, “It’s different and I think that people really appreciate that.”

The windows are a traveling exhibit, with recent stops in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Orleans. FSU has contributed some of its own artworks to the exhibit including paintings, engravings, and statues.

All images courtesy of InCompanyWithAngels.org.