Goldich, Louis Myron2024-08-132024-08-1319771977https://hdl.handle.net/1828/17916From a quantitative point of view, the churches of Italy offer far less stained and painted glass than the cathedrals of Northern Europe. The four most popular though theoretical explanations for this situation include: one, the "modern" French architectural style of the early twelfth century, now called Gothic architecture, with its integral expanses of stained glass windows, was simply not as popular in Italy as it was in the rest of Europe; two, the popularity of traditional and contemporary Italian art forms such as mosaic, fresco, panel painting and cosmati work, were visually incompatible with stained glass; three, the warmer Italian climate was not conducive to cathedrals with large expanses of glass; and four, the scarcity of raw materials necessary for the manufacture of glass did not permit the development of a stained glass tradition. The subject of this thesis is an examination of the Italian glass industry and its influence on the production of native ecclesiastical stained and painted glass windows. Through the presentation of literary, physical and documentary evidence, it is first shown that there existed in Italy an old and well established literary tradition concerned with the transmission of technical information related to the manufacture of glass. Secondly, it is shown that in Italy the earliest surviving evidence of glass used as a window-fill can be dated to the first century A.D., and, that in ecclesiastical settings, the use of figurative windows dates back to the sixth century while the general employment of glass in windows is well established by the ninth century. Thirdly, that while documentary evidence suggests the eleventh century for an actual glass producing industry in Italy, archaeological evidence dates the industry earlier to the seventh-eighth century. Our conclusion based on the foregoing evidence is that at no time during the Middle Ages would Italy appear to have had an ineffectual glass industry or one that would have negatively influenced the production of Italian stained and painted glass windows.150 pagesAvailable to the World Wide WebThesis