Stop! Look! Stained-glass windows can speak movingly through just light, color, and shapes

Time and again, I see visitors and colleagues here at St. Stephen’s freeze, transfixed by the rose window that presides over the eastern half of the church from the heights of the transept.

The window was dedicated in November 1914 as a memorial to a “sensitive and exquisite spirit,” according to the rector Dr. Carl E. Grammer who announced the gift. It honors a congregant admired for her deep love of beauty and her work on the chancel committee: Marie Louise Baird, who died in 1913 at age 41. Commissioned by her mother and siblings, the transept’s new rose window, said Dr. Grammer, would illuminate the chancel that Miss Baird arranged so assiduously in life. For several Sundays after the window’s dedication, he reported, its older companions in the gallery would be covered so they would not “injure” the “delicacy of this window’s color scheme.”

This rose window, according to the Vestry Minutes, is the second in that space; I have yet to find information on the first. Judging by pre-1914 photographs of the transept’s exterior, there was then a rose window of about the same size, in a similar wide, pointed arched frame. It was likely part of Frank Furness’ 1878 design. Furness used rose windows effectively in various types of buildings in Philadelphia around that time: notably the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the First Unitarian Church, and the Fisher Fine Arts Library at the University of Pennsylvania.

So the framed formats were similar. What triggered a change? An opportunity that enabled a shift in taste?

A close look at the Tiffany window up in the gallery tells us it has a companion not visible on the floor. Beneath it is a separate three-part panel in Tiffany’s opalescent glass with the dedication to Marie Louise Baird and the Tiffany studio mark. The two glass elements are set within dark wood frames that together fill the pointed-arched window. Thus supported underneath, the framed rose window, with “tracery” also of carved wood painted dark, emerges from the wall to float above the shadowy transept gallery.

However different, both rose windows in the transept could be considered the progeny of two oculi [bull’s eyes, round windows] with stained glass high on the east wall flanking the chancel. We see them here in A.Z. Shindler’s painting of the church interior around 1858.

If we rely on descriptions of the interior from the 1820s that I’ve found so far, where they are not mentioned, the oculi may have been added later, perhaps with the stained glass for the chancel windows of about 1853 ordered by architect Richard Upjohn. Yet magazine articles were selective in what they described. The oculi could be Strickland’s, designed to flank his chancel windows and fill out the east wall. The oculi and successive transept rose windows lived together until Louis Tiffany bricked in the oculi around 1918 as he completed the church redecoration that we see today.

The Tiffany Census lists over 100 rose windows by the studio (this one included), many of which still survive. Several, like one at the Second Reformed Church in Hackensack, NJ, are similarly ornamental. All, to judge by photos on the Census website, are remarkable in their differences.  So far, I haven’t found any like this one.

Significantly, “ornamental” isn’t necessarily “without meaning.” Knowing that the medieval rose windows that inspired this modern design teemed with messages in composition, color, and forms, I looked for evidence within our 1914 Tiffany version. Too many traditional symbolic possibilities within the window emerged to be coincidental; there were plenty of books and experts on the subject then. So, working with standard Christian symbolism, I offer a reading based on elements of this twentieth-century American version.

Depending on the point of reference (glass or tracery), the window’s shape can be interpreted as an open rose (often associated with Mary, pure human mother of the man-God Jesus) or a spoked wheel, an adaptation of the ichthys [fish], symbol of Jesus as both man and God, the third element of the Trinity. The number of petals/spokes—eight—is symbolically vital: Eight is a number that appears repeatedly in the Bible to signal resurrection, regeneration, new beginnings or new orders.

Though we can’t see them easily at ground level, variants of the quatrefoil [a stylized four- leaf form] appear throughout the window; in traditional Christian imagery they represent the four Evangelists, witnesses to, and messengers, of the Word.

The window’s glowing hues repeat and graduate in value (light-dark) and intensity, from light and delicate at the center to darker and richer at the edges. At our distance on the floor, the overall palette may blend into Tiffany’s familiar warm turquoise. However, look closely. The individual colors—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet—parallel those of the rainbow, symbol of God’s covenant with the earth (Genesis 9:13) and of human faith in divine support to the end.

In these Christian symbolic terms, St. Stephen’s Tiffany rose window could be, like many early ones, an image of the cosmos. This one seems to suggest nonfigural presences, divine and human. Rather than offering a diagram of a hierarchical cosmic structure, it renders fluid dynamism: affirmative interaction and reassuring messages transmitted through Scripture across time. In such symbolic language, the window’s geometries celebrate ordered, harmonious diversity; the energy of its radiant composition and chromatic shading conveys unending, coursing vitality. The vehicle for this sophisticated representation is light, that natural force so often identified with divine presence, especially within a church.

Whether we “get” all this—even if we can’t even see the subtle details—their fusion into a rainbow radiating from the center is profoundly affecting. In such a complex nonfigural design that’s as welcoming as it is thought provoking, Tiffany’s masterful glass and its special interaction with light exercise special power on the senses, imagination, and emotions.  

—Suzanne Glover Lindsay, St. Stephen’s historian and curator