Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi
© 2010 King's College London
The Search Form fields are grouped under headings. Those for Place & Window describe the physical setting of the glass that is shown in any given photograph, at the time when the photograph was taken. At present, full data are available only for the County and Location fields. It is possible also to search under the headings Date, Firm, Subject & Form and Provenance (Relocated Glass); work is continuing to make fuller data available for these. The archive also includes images on paper that record stained glass, such as watercolours, drawings and diagrams of conservation work. These can be searched under the heading Drawings, Diagrams &Other Media.
To make a search, you can fill in as many fields as you like, but it may be best to begin with a broad category to ensure that you do not miss what you are looking for. This is especially true at present, when full data is available only for a proportion of the images. Most fields have drop-down lists to choose from, and at the foot of the form, you can specify how many resulting records you would like to see per page. The results will be displayed in alphabetical order of location and then by CVMA window number. Click on 'View full record' to go to the Image Record, which gives all the data available for a particular image, including a thumbnail of the image itself and church ground-plans. Clicking on the thumbnail will display the image at full size in a separate window. This may be kept open while you make further searches. Click on Search Again to return to a clear search form.
Click on any entry below to explain the search field and its drop-down list.
The counties listed are those existing immediately prior to the reorganization of 1974. Once you have selected a county, the available sites will automatically be listed in the following field. If no location is available for a particular county, this field will read 'No Locations'.
A drop-down list of all locations for which the Picture Archive holds images.
The churches, houses and institutions where stained glass is located are included in this drop-down list, with the dedication (for churches) or name by which a building in commonly known.
This field allows you to search for stained glass in buildings of different kinds, according to their status at the end of the middle ages. A date of 1535 has been chosen, shortly before the Dissolution, because data have been drawn from a national survey of church wealth, called the Valor Ecclesiasticus , begun in that year for King Henry VIII.
This field describes whether a window faces to the north, south, east or west.
This list allows you to search for images of glass in the major component parts of a church. You may wish to search in a particular building (the nave of Canterbury Cathedral, for example), or generically (all naves).
This list allows searching for images of glass in subsidiary parts of a church. You may wish to qualify other fields (the north aisles of the nave in Canterbury Cathedral, for example), or to search more generically (all aisles).
If you know the dedication of a chapel in which a window appears, it may be listed here.
In this field you can choose from a short list of parts of secular building in which stained glass has been located (halls or chapels, for example).
The CVMA has a system for describing the position of a window within a building. It works as follows (see diagram, for a sample parish church). Letters are used to indicate position north, south, east or west: in lower-case for lower windows (n, s, e, w) and in upper-case for upper windows (N, S, E, W). They are then numbered consecutively, in upper-case Roman numerals, counting from the east window (which counts as I), in sequences along both the north and south sides. Where there is both a lower and an upper east window, they are denoted eI and EI, respectively; where there is only one east window, this is denoted (exceptionally).
Every stained glass window is made up of one or more panels. The CVMA has a system for describing the position of these within a window. It works as follows (see diagram, for a sample window). In the main lights, the panel number will take the form of an Arabic number and a lower-case letter (1a, 1b, etc.), the number designating the panel's position within a light (counting from the bottom upwards), and the letter representing the light (reading from left to right). In the tracery, a capital letter precedes a number (A1, A2, etc.), each letter representing a tier of tracery shapes (reading from the bottom upwards), and the number, the position in a horizontal sequence (reading from left to right).
The panels in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London , are searchable by their museum registration numbers. Most begin with the letter 'C', which should not be followed by a full stop (for example, C335-1937, not C.335-1937). If you know the registration number, enter it in this field.
The two fields here allow searching between two dating brackets, which can be chosen from the drop-down lists. The terms are 'early' (arbitrarily defined as, for example, 1201–1232), 'mid' (1233–1266) and 'late' (1267–1300) in any given century. A search between, for example, 'Late 13th c' and 'Late 14th c' will return all records within that bracket (including those entered as 'Mid 14th c'). Work is continuing to make this data available for as many images as possible.
Guidelines to follow
Guidelines to follow
The drop-down list allows searching for formal characteristics. They include architecture, comprising both the painted architectural structures commonly found framing subjects in medieval glass, and representations of buildings; borders, the decorative edging to many panels; figurative subjects; grisaille, or panels made predominantly of white glass, painted and/or leaded into an ornamental pattern; heraldry, or armorial subjects; medieval inscriptions and texts; quarries, or lozenge-shaped pieces of glass painted with a self-contained design, which were combined to make a common form of medieval glazing; and roundels, single pieces of glass painted with a self contained design and usually round. In panels of fragments only the most obvious component parts are described.
This field allows you to search for the country of origin of glass that has arrived in Great Britain from continental Europe, or that has moved from one location to another in Britain. It is a useful way to search museum collections of glass, such as that in the Victoria & Albert Museum, which is well represented in the Picture Archive. Current national boundaries apply. The project is keen to hear of new attributions.
This field allows a more detailed search for the original location of displaced glass, where this is known. The project is keen to hear of new attributions.
Records of stained glass have often been made on paper and they can be valuable evidence for its state at a particular time. The drop-down list for this field allows searching for drawings, watercolours and prints, but also for conservation diagrams. Conservation studios make these actual-size rubbings to record both the original state of a panel and the work that they carry out.
The drop-down list includes the names of artists responsible for records of stained glass, but also those of studios responsible for making conservation diagrams.
The drop-down list comprises the collections and studios that own paper records of stained glass, images of which are held on the image database.
© 2010 King's College London