Piecing together the Munich Glass

In the mid-1800s, Glasgow embarked on an ambitious public project to re-glaze the windows of the city’s cathedral.

The resulting 43 windows, made in Munich by the Royal Bavarian Stained Glass Establishment, were produced using a mosaic-enamel method. This meant that the designs were created in stained glass and detail was added with enamel paint which was then fired to fuse with the glass.

The windows were designed to return the building to its former medieval splendour, but unfortunately the glass did not last long. Extreme pollution, exacerbated by Glasgow’s damp climate, quickly caused deterioration in some of the painted surfaces. The glass began to be removed from the windows in the 1930s, which was sped up by anti-German sentiment after the Second World War.

Less than a century after installation only two windows and decorative parts remained in situ. 

The glass that was removed is now cared for by our Collections and Applied Conservation Team.

Since 2020, we have worked with freelance researcher and art historian Laura Ostowski to create digital reconstructions of the surviving window glass, essentially piecing together a century-old jigsaw puzzle of fragments. Previously, the most complete photographic record of the glass was a series of black and white images by celebrated Victorian photographer Thomas Annan, taken when the windows were still in-situ.

Using original project documentation and drawings of the window designs from the 1800s alongside photographs taken in the early 2010s of each of the 1000+ individual fragments, we have now been able to determine which pieces of surviving glass were associated with which original window.   

Some of the fragments were large and depicted figures from biblical stories which were easy to recognise. But others were small pieces of ornamentation which were much harder to place. Laura built up digital images of the windows and over time started to recognise the decorative features, especially the geometric patterns of the borders which were unique to each window location. 

Using the Thomas Annan images, Laura overlaid the more recent colour images of the fragments and created a digital ‘jigsaw’ of each window, leaving spaces where the glass either no longer existed or was too fragmented to have been recorded due to damage caused during the removal process.

These reconstructions gave us a picture of how much of the windows were left. The windows were originally paid for by subscription and donors had their names and often coats of arms incorporated into the glass.

Interestingly, when the windows were removed many of the coats of arms were incorporated into the new glazing and are therefore missing in the jigsaws, even though they still exist in the cathedral windows today.  

Once the research is complete, our aim is to have created digital reconstructions of all 43 windows.

This project has been important not only to improve our own documentation for the surviving glass, but also because so little German stained glass from this period survived the Second World War, making this collection a rare example.

The Munich Glass has gone in and out of fashion over the last 175 years and has spent much of that time out of sight in storage. Once our research is completed, we can begin the next stage of the project, exploring how we can provide digital access to the glass for those visiting Glasgow Cathedral.