God manifest in stained glass 30 SEPTEMBER 2022 A new project will conserve Edward Burne-Jones’s stained glass in Birmingham Cathedral, says Suzanne Fagence Cooper TOWARDS the end of his life, the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones was asked about the purpose of his work. He was surprisingly clear. Through his designs, he said, he was “making God manifest”. He went on: “It is giving back her Child that was crucified to Our Lady of Sorrows.” We should keep this stark and demanding claim for his art in mind when we consider a new project to conserve some of his last great works. In 1885, a massive Ascension window was installed in the chancel of St Philip’s, Birmingham, followed by a Crucifixion and Nativity in 1887, and, finally, Burne-Jones’s monumental Last Judgement in 1897. St Philip’s, which became the cathedral of the newly created diocese of Birmingham in 1905, has now been awarded £641,000 by the Heritage Lottery Fund for their Divine Beauty initiative. They intend to raise awareness of these remarkable windows in the city centre, and to preserve them for future generations — or, as Burne-Jones put it, the “thousand ages of them that come after us”. The stained-glass designs are extraordinary, unsurpassed in their scale as the images fill the huge arched windows, uninterrupted by tracery. They were the culmination of decades of experimentation, in Burne-Jones’s studio and in the Morris & Co. workshop, weaving together rich colours and the networks of leading. The results are uncompromising and abstract, drawing attention to the fragmentation of figures and the landscape. They suit the subjects: holy encounters between the sacred and the earthly when the ordinary world is shattered by “God with Us”. Burne-Jones’s visionary art flourished when he imagined angels and saints. He used his exceptional understanding of Byzantine and Gothic art to create works that transcended the naturalism of his contemporaries. Burne-Jones said that he wanted show “heaven beginning six inches over the tops of our heads, as it really does”. In each of the Birmingham windows, he made this idea visible: there are angels in the top half of the designs, and men, women, and children on the ground below. The space between heaven and earth is porous. We can see this most strikingly in the designs for the Crucifixion and Ascension. Christ, high on the Cross, is lifted above his Apostles. Over his head are clouds shaped like rings or hoops. These are openings in the fabric of eternity. They appear again in the Ascension, when Christ has passed through to join the hosts of heaven. It seems as if the Virgin or St John could reach up and touch Christ’s feet. BURNE-JONES had always hoped to present his art on this grand scale, in “public buildings and in choirs and places where they sing”. This project was a sort of homecoming: he was born in Birmingham in August 1833 and baptised in St Philip’s. Burne-Jones took the job here not out of a sense of nostalgia, however, but because he wanted to do “my best to illuminate the contemporary darkness” of his home city. The renovation team wants to encourage some of the 20,000 people a day who usually pass by outside to step into the cathedral and see the gorgeous colours inside. Then they can start to understand the storytelling in the windows, and even get close to the conservators as they clean a century of grime off the glass. There will be light displays, workshops for schools, and costumed interpreters, explaining how the subjects for the windows were chosen. (A local benefactor, Emma Chadwick Villers-Wilkes, put up the money for two of the windows, but she had strong opinions about the designs, insisting that there be no cows in the Nativity scene and no blood in the Crucifixion.) The cleaning and repairs will begin next February. The final celebration of the revitalised windows, with a festival of voices and outreach art therapy, is planned for the spring and summer of 2024. Jane McArdle, head of learning at the cathedral, believes this is an ideal opportunity to build partnerships across the community. The team are already welcoming people from the homelessness charity Let’s Feed Brum, who meet under the great west window of The Last Judgement. And the windows allow volunteers and clergy to answer questions about the central stories of Christ’s life and death, ascension, and return at the apocalypse.