"Sunshine is the Best Painter"
Perspectives from The Artist's Road
One of the things we would very much like to see in person, is the light effect created by the solstice sun through the stained glass windows of Antoni Gaudí’s fantastic Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.
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At the higher levels of the cathedral, windows are made of clear glass with no coloring at all, allowing the sun to emphasize the grand verticality of the building and to achieve Gaudí’s wishes to bring the temple closer to heaven. He is reported to have said, “Sunshine is the best painter.” The clear glass allows the variable light of the time of day, the season and even the weather to be experienced within the building.
The beautiful intensely-colored stained glass windows are at lower levels, their placement intentionally featuring cool tones of blues and greens on the east side to funnel dawn and morning sun light into the cathedral (the Nativity façade), and warm tones of reds and oranges on the west side to highlight sunset and evening light (the Passion façade).
The solstices are the culmination of the color extravagance. The early summer solstice sunrise shines light almost horizontally through the eastern cool-colored stained glass windows broadcasting blues and greens through the Nativity façade. In turn, the early-setting winter solstice sun shines almost horizontally through the stained glass windows of the Passion façade projecting the warm colors onto the columns within, truly an impressive spectacle to experience. The stained glass was created by the late Joan Vila-Grau. Visit the Sagrada Familia blog to see spectacular images of the color and light effects created by the stained glass in the cathedral.
And, we encourage you to read more about artists using light to create masterpieces in stained glass—in our article, Painting with Glass.
(* Image provided courtesy Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license by Yeonu0407)
(**Image provided courtesy Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license by Canaan)