The stained-glass windows of Orléans Cathedral (1993-2003)

From 1993 to 2003, Pierre Carron designed the stained-glass windows of seven chapels in the choir of Sainte-Croix Cathedral in Orléans, made with the master glassmaker Michel Blanc-Garin of the Gaudin workshops. He did not simply supply cartoons: he learned glass painting and firing so that he could paint the panels himself, attuning his compositions to the nineteenth-century windows that had survived the war. The photographs show the windows in place, Pierre at work, a painted model, cartoons and two details of painted glass.

He wrote about this work twice: around 1996, when the first two windows were installed, and in 2016, in the publication the DRAC Centre-Val de Loire devoted to the project. Both texts follow in English translation.

The painted window (around 1996)

On the fullness of the invisible…
On two episodes of the heavenly liturgies
placed under the angelic protection of their celebrants.
On the open sky that came before…

That of the raising of a victorious Holy Cross
or that of the breakthrough of the one who inspired
the mission entrusted to the bishops.
This is what two windows of the cathedral
open onto today.

Tomorrow perhaps other windows
will open onto the perspective of the whole,
of one and the same vertical firmament
crossed by oblique exchanges
from sky to sky.

How could I not express my gratitude
to the Ministry of Culture for this commission,
an opportunity I could never have imagined
to paint, centimetre after centimetre,
the expanse of these immense windows
which now belong to the visitors.

It is their turn to give them life

Thank heaven (2016)

Is it not, after all, on the sky, on its brightness, that the very existence of stained glass depends!

Stained glass, that “between-two-skies” painted against the sky, within the thickness of an invisible surface, where what is depicted is transfigured by the iridescent luminosity of the material: that of mystical visions.

How could I fit into what already existed without disturbing it, make use of it, and serve it in turn?

How could I find, invent the missing parts? How could I weave again the links with what has always made up the very history of stained glass, when one was still able to bend the prism of a rainbow to the demands of a story, when it was not, as today, a matter of decoration, but of one of those gestures of powerlessness our times are so fond of? How could I bring into view what belongs to the realm of the spirit, “what is said, what is heard”, which must be summed up in an image. To refuse form as the only aim, to prefer to let go, to let oneself be filled by the theme; in this case, an evocation of the angelic quivering of the celebrants of the heavenly liturgies, moving at the edges of a beyond, in the pallor and depth of the azure, at the border of the vegetal gold of a claustra.

What can I say of the privilege, what can I say of those ten years when, chapel after chapel, from cartoon to cartoon, giving myself over to the improbable technique of painting on glass, centimetre after centimetre, moving back and forth between decision and letting go, I was surprised to find that in the end, despite a near incompetence in the matter, thank heaven, everything had somehow found its place, as the bishop was to confirm when he challenged me at the end of the work: “And you, in all this, what did you do?” I took the question as a compliment: had my wish to disturb nothing been granted to that extent, had I found, rediscovered, thank heaven, almost without knowing it, what the building expected of a restoration?

So, to conclude, I will end with a “thank heaven”, to be taken here as well in the sense of a fervent act of thanksgiving.

Sources: brochure on the window of the chapel of the bishops’ tomb, Sainte-Croix Cathedral, Orléans (around 1996), whose last stanza is quoted under Pierre Carron’s name in Les couleurs de la lumière, Centre international du vitrail; “À contre-ciel”, DRAC Centre-Val de Loire, 2016, pp. 24-25. Photographs: Pierre Carron archives.

English translation. Read the original French text.