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Another thing is they may have wanted to use newly available colors to show they had new colors -the novelty aspect. Kind of like when people learned to make aluminum it was sought as a luxury item —whereas now no one would think of aluminum as a luxury item.




Extreme example: here's the Hawa Mahal in India https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:One_of_many_windows_...

The large plain panes of boldly coloured stained glass probably looked particularly magnificent when coloured glass was rare and expensive and achieving consistency very difficult. They look somewhat less sophisticated in an era in which the multiple bright coloured translucent pane aesthetic is more often seen in cheap children's toys.

If it was a restoration job, many people who love the sombre wall colours and intricate decoration of Mughal architecture would be sure to insist they'd got it horribly wrong...

(Other aspects of the article's argument also apply here. Very different culture but theres a lot of aspects of the Hawa Mahal that look fantastic to modern Western tastes, the architects clearly valued detail in their carvings and painting of other items, they surely had the technical ability to produce stained glass in a way modern Europeans familiar with different approaches to stained glass windows in their own cathedrals consider to be tasteful and skilful. But there's no missing layer of subtle decoration that's been lost to the years: they just thought combining boldly coloured panes of glass looked fabulous)


Have you been there? Because the photo you posted does not seem to give a very good representation of those architectual details at all: https://www.alamy.com/stained-glass-window-vitrage-indian-or...

Oerhaps they indeed are that garish as in your example, but simple image search shows plenty of examples that seem to suggest the image you posted is simply a very amateurish photograph. After all, European churches are full of glass windows with very strong contrasts of primary colours and they are very pretty indeed.


Yes, I've been there, and been struck by the toy/disco vibes they gave off despite being an integral part of a beautifully laid out palace, which is why I posted on the subject, but it wouldn't be HN without someone who hasn't been there being contrary for the sake of it...

Shockingly, some of the windows look different from other windows and some of the colour combinations and pane shapes look better than others! They also have more effect when the light catches them directly. But yes, they're big plain panes of chunky glass (impressively big and impressively consistently plain at the time) which don't resemble the painted detail and tiny leaded panes of European churches at all, as I mentioned, and I suspect the author of TFA would be unimpressed.

Some more https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawa_Mahal#/media/File:Hawa_Ma... https://www.alamy.com/hawa-mahal-lit-up-at-night-in-jaipur-i... https://thrillingtravel.in/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Ratan-... https://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-photography-tr... https://theyoungbigmouth.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/stai...

And some stained glass windows from some village churches, for comparison http://www.tournorfolk.co.uk/stainedglass.html




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