Why do we seek out and enjoy beauty?

I think the answer is that beauty is goodness made evident, made visible.

Stained glass is the art of light.

And so the experience of stained glass is an incarnational experience and therefore especially appropriate for church art.

They're alive in this space.

They are a living museum.

They're part of the history in the community when they're in this space.

Color and music are the great abstract arts.

The vibration of of a of of an a that note or the vibration of the color red are primal experiences.

We sense that we don't need to bring any intellect to them.

It's very much a part of the architecture.

The stained glass has its practical function that keeps water out of the building, which is vital to preserving the building itself.

But it also serves that esthetic purpose here in the Basilica.

We have all of these beautiful 19th century French stained glass windows.

All of them portray saints.

So when you walk into the Basilica, you are immediately joined by all these holy men and women who live the Christian faith, and they are a reminder to us that what we do here in the Basilica, we don't do in isolation.

Someone who is, shall we say, outside of the tradition, but who comes in to see windows here or anywhere, will look at the esthetics of how the color is manipulated.

And frequently they will be amazed because there is no comparison between a printed image of a stained glass window and experiencing it firsthand.

Father Sorin had that vision, and he said, This is our opportunity.

We're going to build something bigger and better and we're going to buil something that is going to reflect the greatness of this place.

This is his vision.

Vibrant, light stained glass of the basilica at the University of Notre Dame is brought to you by Center for Hospice Care Choices to make the most of life.

Jerry Hammes, Anderson Agostino and Keller, PC Deb and Paul Cafiero, The Bill and Kristin Fenech Family and Barletta Boat Company.

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Van Horn Jewelers.

Alick's Home Medical, Joyce and Roger Foley.

And by.

Thank you.

French speaking... What's fascinating actually, is that those who founded the University of Notre Dame du LAC in South Bend are originally from Le Mans so they know the history and the heritage, as we say today of the.

So to revive the art of stained glass in the 19th century.

one drew inspiration from this heritage history culture.

The famous figure, Eugene Hucher, who is in a way the common thread of this whole story achieved a real feat at the beginning of the 19th century.

That is to say, he made what we're called at the time COC's tracings of the painted glass of the landmark cathedral.

These tracings?

It's not like the paper tracings of today.

In other words, to be clear, they removed the stained glass windows of the cathedral and copied them onto paper.

Now, Eugene Hucher knew that he had, at that moment, extraordinary examples.

And at the time, the 19th century, they were worth publishing.

Yet one could only publish in black and white, and stained glass isn't inspiring in black and white.

You need color.

So who will at that time provide the manpower needed to paint all these tracings by hand to give them all that color?

The Carmelite of Le Mans who, before making stained glass windows illuminated in the medieval sense of the term, all these tracings of the stained glass windows of the Cathedral of Le Mans.

So from the moment the Carmelites begin the manufacture of stained glass, they already have a repertoire of themes of history, of knowledge and of coloring available to them.

So they're going to effectively transpose all that onto glass.

And what's fascinating about the first stained glass windows of the Carmel of Le Mans is that they're nearly identical copies of the 12th and 13th century medieval stained glass windows of the Cathedral of Saint Julien in Le Mans .

French speaking.

I went on a pilgrimage to to Le Mans through the Office of Campus Ministry several years ago and to see the origins of the congregation of Holy Cross, where Father Moreau started the congregation and where Father Sorin came from.

And we saw the different places where the bells were made, where the glass was made.

Know Father Sorin made several trips back to LeMon's to check on the status of the glasses was being made.

The manufacture never came here, so the only liaison between here and there was Father Sorin himself.

French speaking.

It's important to know that in Le Mans, in the 19th century, we were quite simply the capital of the renewal of the art of stained glass, of painting on glass.

There were, in Le Mans, It's hard to imagine today more than about ten workshops for the manufacture of painted glass to give you the general idea.

Today there is but one small workshop in Le Man And it's the largest French stained glass window workshop with about 20 employees.

The Carmel of Le Mans the 19th century, for example, had between 50 and 70 employees.

French speaking.

Here you have an original card.

This is called a preparatory drawing that is signed by the Carmel of Le Mans, so it's a document that dates to the 19th century, something historically very important.

It allowed the creation of the stained glass windows here in France, but also in the United States.

And what's unique is that these stained glass windows were made here to be exported there to the United States.

And what's very interesting is that since the Middle Ages to today, the technique has hardly changed.

That is, stained glass windows are made today as they were made in the 19th century and nearly the same way as they were made in the Middle Ages.

So the interest actually is in finding these documents.

We are lucky to have the preparatory drawing the stained glass windows here in France, the stained glass windows in the United States.

And to understand how the window could have been made.

So it's true that the particularity of the stained glass window is that you start from a drawing that is in black and white, but stained glass is above all color.

So we work primarily with glass that is tinted en masse, which is colored glass.

French speaking.

Most of the glass in the Basilica as the mouth blown glass, which is a very high quality type of glass, very translucent.

So it is a nice medium for painting different layers on the glass.

Some of the glass in the Basilica was silk screened.

Many of it, especially during the figures, have several layers of different paint that was applied to create the depth and the faces and so forth.

Different is an opalescent glass like the Tiffany Glass, which is more dense, more difficult to see through and does not usually have as much hand painting.

Well, I think that the language of stained glass is largely about color.

Certainly, in the American windows that we encounter that are made by people like Louis Comfort, Tiffany and John La Farge that was so much of their contribution was about developing this tremendous range of color and color.

Glass is very much about chemistry.

Those aren't usually things that you hear talked about together, but there is really this magic of chemistry that makes the different colors.

So whether you're looking for sunset at 5:00 or sunset of five or five, that colo palette changes and you can do something like that with glass.

The language also includes conversations about the texture in the glass and then the way all of these different pieces of glass are put together to create an image to create a picture.

So there are certainly conversations about design.

There's conversations about craftsmanship of the glass.

There's conversations about the women who were selecting the glass and putting it together to create an overall picture.

And then there's a conversation about the people who fabricated did the soldering work and install the window.

So there's a lot of different ways that you can kind of talk about these windows.

Stained glass in particular.

You know, in the context of the sacred spaces of churches and cathedrals and temples and monasteries and the like has this power just just purely in terms of its kind of sensory qualities to.

Overwhelm us with our at seeing light move through color, write a color piece of glass, that's pretty astonishing And then I think the second thing that stained glass has alongside the sensory properties which are awe inspiring is the idea of these are sacred stories.

These are sacred patterns that a group of people were saying.

We should share our awareness of these.

And for a lot of people, that's that's really the heart of the deep, communal kind spiritual experience.

I think stained glass windows are very appealing to people because they're they're living there.

It's God's light that's coming through that is constantly changing the picture.

And all day long, you're getting different visions of the same window, and the reflections of the color are just they're just glorious and beautiful.

Father Moreau was born in 1799, just after the French Revolution, and education was not good at that time, so he wanted to educate children through faith and also for school.

So he built an institution called the institution of not for them to send Our Lady of Holy Cross here.

And he built a chapel and we are today in this chapel.

And Father Sorin joined the congregation and he was sent by Father Moreau from here in Le Mans to South Bend, Indiana, to found, I mean to become, to begin the University of Notre Dame du Lac.

French speaking.

The one who really created the workshop at the very beginning was Basile-Antoine Moreau with the Holy Cross fathers.

And if we had more time, I would have taken you to Holy Cross Cemetery to film the first stained glass windows of the Holy Cross fathers and its Barzilai, Antoine Moreau, who will truly create the first stained glass windows.

He's going to found a workshop, and when the Carmelite need to create stained glass windows, it's the Holy Cross fathers with Basile-Antoine Moreau who pass on all the knowhow, including the furnace, the furnace essential for firing the stained glass windows.

So it's really the Holy Cross fathers who are at the origin of the Renaissance in the 19th century of the stained glass window here in Le Mans and of the creation of the workshop of the Carmel du Monde.

It's Basile-Antoine Moreau, the principal creator.

This parish, or this church's name is Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption.

This is the native parish church of Father Edward Sorin, so his house is very close by then.

He used to come here with his parents to participate in the mass prayer, and this is the church where he was baptized.

He entered the congregation of Holy Cross and came here in the mall and became very close to Father Moreau when he arrived in the states really embraced the American life, the American point of view, the American way of thinking.

Father Moreau had probably seen that in him to some extent.

What Sorin was trying to do and many other immigrants and immigrant religious orders were trying to do was retain some sense of tradition while adapting to American culture.

Sorin saw his heritage from France as something that invigorated his life and invigorated his brothers' lives.

The fathers of the Holy Cross, who came and established Notre Dame in a pretty empty territory without much support.

So he saw that heritage in that mission that he felt embodied in that, you know, 2000 years of of Christianity in France.

Father Sorin was a man with big visions, big dreams and he was an entrepreneur.

And he also had an intellect and an eye for art and architecture, and he wanted something of quality that would last.

And I think we can see that here in the Basilica.

We can see in the windows, bringing those artists here, bringing the windows from Le Mans bringing quality art and instilling that in this young country in this young church was so important.

Well, it's a key moment.

Indeed, it was very interesting for me.

The first time I came to Notre Dame.

It was in 1993.

That's taking us back some years, and it was very interesting to try to understand the reasoning behind both the commissioning and the making of the stained glass windows.

So in commissioning the windows, one can see the reasoning of Father Sorin He went there to America as a sort of conquest.

He had to discover a new territory, evangelize in the noble sense of the word And it was indeed necessary for these populations of diverse origins to have a common language, and that common language was the image.

And so what was needed was a sort of gospel in images, and we see it through the letters of Father Soren, who commissions images that will allow him to carry out a good catechetical lesson.

It's about effectively transmitting what the church teaches.

So the image is not chosen by chance.

French speaking This church is very well thought out.

It's not.

It's not an accident how things were placed where they were.

first thing you notice when you walk into the church is that the the stained-glass one is alternate for women and for men, for women and for men.

You can see there's sort of an equality between male and female, which you don't always see in some churches and opposite the four females on one side will be four females on the other side.

So the windows, first of all, are very balanced.

There's four doctors of the church in the from the east, and there's four from the West.

The West would be Augustine, Jerome, Thomas Aquinas and Ambrose, but anyway, then opposite them in paintings or in stained glass, are these women who are also well, Teresa of Avila became a doctor, their church once they figure it out in the late 20th century that you could do that.

So these women are counterparts to the to the very important men.

So Father Soren in some ways was very much beyond just the Roman church, but he had sort of an expansive outlook.

And so he wanted on the East Wall to have the four bishops who are considered the four principal doctors of the Eastern Church to be portrayed.

And those four doctors would be Saint Basil the Great, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, Saint Athanasius and Saint John Chrysostom.

I think one element of Father Sorin that is and appreciated that much is that he loved art, and he toured before he came to Notre Dame to found it.

He went on a little pilgrimage to five Marian shrines and always appreciated the art in that and would speak about it.

So he was somebody who understood a focus of the rebirth of Catholic faith in France after the French Revolution, which was that they felt if you provided, especially in art, it was seen as a vehicle that would teach faith.

People knew the stories.

They were taught the stories from the window.

They were told them there was an oral tradition that extended not just simply to, shall we say, the peasants who were working and coming into the church, but the oral tradition extended to the universities.

Someone lectured and you remembered and you had habits of storing things in memory.

People taught you how to remember things.

So literacy is not the word to use when we're talking about stained glass.

The community tradition enabled people to look at the windows and know exactly who they were.

The iconography is a Catholic.

one icon means face and it is the signs and symbols, the attributes that a particular person holds that identifies them.

Saint Peter as a saint was always represented with short cropped white hair and a short cropped white beard, and typically he held keys.

Here he's not.

But because of the way he's presented to us, we know it's Saint Peter, but look at his position.

His body is open to you.

To us, the viewer.

Look at his feet.

They sit out.

Even his hand on the edge of the bench is open to us.

He is inviting us into this sacred conversation.

So there's a window depicts the scene of the husband confronting his wife, Elizabeth.

What do you have in the fold of your garments?

She said a prayer and the bread, according to the tradition, was turned into roses.

Who knows if it really happened?

But it's a it's a lovely story and it.

But it speaks to the love and care that Saint Elizabeth of Hungary had for the poor and the suffering.

So much so that today she is considered the patronus of Catholic Charities.

And so what we have here this the Carmelite sisters who have this gorgeous stained-glass window of the Battle of Laponto, the ships, the sails, the waves of the seas, the troops, the the the Christian forces and the Muslim forces and their costumes and the color is just magnificent.

The windows for the Basilica of the Sacred Heart were made over the course of eleven years between 1873 and 1884, and they are the largest collection of Carmel glass in North America.

The north south orientation of the Basilica allows the windows to be illuminated all day with direct sunlight.

But this is, however, not the first Basilica or Sacred Heart Church.

Father Sorin built a previous church made of wood, which was much smaller.

You know, the sad truth is the churches always burn The vast majority of cathedrals of the middle age are on the sites of Romanesque churches that burned.

It always gave the bishop an opportunity.

Opportunity wasn't always unhappy to have to update the imagery of it is no surprise that when Notre Dame burned it was recreated in an updated version of the Gothic revival to its benefit because this is the version of the Gothic revival in the 1870s, where they're beginning to shake off the high Victorian frenzy and move to a new philosophy which was keep it simple, keep it quiet, of which not Notre-Dame is a great example of this.

This.

This new awareness of the power of of the sublime of stillness.

one of the finest.

Expressions of reverence is.

Silence.

What can you say?

In the presence of something.

Sublime.

If you are walking along and and you see something that can remind you of the power of.

Of nature.

Say or the beauty of nature you stop.

And you don't try to put it in words.

This building was probably the most expensive bit of construction in the entire town.

There must have been a reason for it.

And the reason indeed was that ability to give a community focu and to feel a sense of belonging to each other and articulating that this isn't everything there is, there is beyond this kind of beauty that seems to transcend you now.

But a that a tiny spark, a tiny reflection of what is the eternal and source beauty that is gone.

The first time I came here was filled with, Oh, cause I had never seen such a building with such windows.

And to me, what came to my understanding was that it's sort of the history of Christianity.

When you move from 111 window to the other and you go through the way of the cross.

It's basically the history of creation, the history of our salvation.

It is actually the Bible itself.

That's how I can describe these windows and the entire church.

one interesting thing about these windows is that when you're in the basilica, the Sun comes in and you see the Saints.

But at night, one of my favorite walks on campus is when I go to a concert at the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center.

I was parked in the Basilica parking lot and so you have to walk by the basilica at night.

So not only does the sunlight come in during the day, but when you're walking outside at night and the lights are on, the Saints are projected out to you on the outside of the basilica as well.

So.

It's almost as if at night when you're walking by and you see the Saints in the windows, they're also inviting you in to the basilica.

And I think that's a really beautiful thing.

Unexpected qualities are almost by definition required for feelings of war.

And that's one of the challenges of finding on our daily lives, right?

So you have to really be surprised.

The experience has to transcend your momentary understanding of the world Catch you off guard, if you will.

And so one of the the interesting challenges is to because of how many benefits that awe brings to us is if we want to go find it, we have to allow for the unexpected.

We have to wander a bit.

Go places we don't fully understand do things that are new.

So we have to cultivate the unexpected and the mysterious.

We really don't understand things to find awe.

Now, It seems almost blasphemous to say this, but the church is a vessel of bringing you to a state of exalted physical pleasure.

Your eyes are delighted.

Your ears are delighted by this.

The swelling peels of an organ or a choir hitting hitting a beautiful chord.

It tells you that that the adoration of God should engage you mind and body and color and sound, or the great instruments for doing that, particularly in the 19th century church.

Faith is taking place here, and that, I think, is what makes a difference.

The fact that it has these glorious colors and oh God, the history of music and the church is incredible.

And what does it do?

I mean, the whole idea is that it's lifting you above an ordinary experience.

I think that is what art does.

But here this is art with the purpose.

There are certainly windows that have been removed from churches and that are in museum spaces today.

But once you take the window out of its space, you certainly lose some of the context for that.

You lose the ability of that window to experience the light from all different times of the day, which is really part of the magic of the window and of the glass is that it changes over time during the day with the sunrise, the afternoon sun, the sunset.

And once you pull it out of that space and it's in a space where the light is saying it, it loses some of that magic.

And I think some of kind of the spiritual impact that it is meant to have.

French speaking.

French speaking.

So here we are.

We are in front of Chartre Cathedral, in front of the famous Notre Dame Cathedral, and you're in front of the western facade which is in fact that a full bear cathedral, some of the first gothic art.

French speaking.

When you enter a structure like Chartres.

There are very few other places where you have true historical references on the stained glass windows.

All the same, it's not only an atmosphere, it's not only the light in the building.

It would still be necessary to understand a little bit what was at stake and all these images because there was a lot at stake.

French Speaking One must never forget that the art of stained glass is an art of commission, so you always have to ask yourself about the origin of the one who is commissioning the windows.

So if the one commissioning is indeed a churchman, the message is going to be first and foremost, a religious one.

As we said, it is about evangelizing, transmitting the word of Christ.

But one must never forget that the one who is doing the commissioning, that is to say the one placing the order, the one who finances is not necessarily a member of the clergy.

It can be others of different social backgrounds.

French speaking.. We know very well in the 19th century it's very commonplace We have public figures, powerful people, nobles who will use this image not necessarily for religious purposes, but for political purposes.

Father Sorin served as filling chaplain for the Carmelite sisters here in Le Mans so he knew them.

And when he went to Notre Dame a long time afterwards for the Basilica, he wanted the windows to come from Le Mans and from the Carmelite sisters.

He saw this as a way of teaching the faith, and the Carmelite sisters also thought of their artwork as a way of teaching the faith.

They were immensely successful because people were very interested in having the hands of those who prayed, actually making their windows The sisters won the gold medals in 1854 and continued to win them with their work.

I'm really interested in the continuity of the history.

Since the building was erected and decorated, it hasn't been frozen in time.

It's not a museum, it's a living space where people still go to worship every day.

I was fortunate to spend a few days there in a row while starting my survey, and the feeling that you get when people come through the space throughout the day is really wonderful.

There are tourists, students, parishioners, young and old who come through that space every day, and I really appreciate the fact that it is still a living parish.

That's reflected in the artwork in the various chapels that changes over the years, as well as in the stained glass windows in the murals, which do not.

I was struck by the North X as I walked in because I mean, I'm used to the windows in the North X being usually something that should make you both reflect on why you're coming in, but also as you're leaving what you should be taking with you.

But the scenes of the last judgment in purgatory are very, very dramatic and very striking.

And so it was I was like, Well, they weren't messing around here.

Each of our stained glass windows is meant to help us think a little bit about who we are and who God is calling us to be.

The vast majority of the windows here in the basilica depict a scene from the Catholic tradition, and underneath that window there's a smaller window with a vignette of the life of a scene.

And when we look at those windows, what stirs up in us is the example of that saint in our life and more importantly, how we might emulate the life of that saint in our own day to day existence and reality.

So the windows are more than just beautiful pieces of art.

They really are meant to convey stories of grace, stories of holiness to help inspire us as Catholic Christians, to remember that others have done this before.

Well, Father Sorin from his own.

Education and early life as a priest must have come to appreciate the the effect of beautiful architecture and.

And art in cultivating reverence.

And so it's not surprising to me that he set a very high priority on creating a place, a building filled with art that would invite reverence.

I think the.

The Catholic tradition has a greater respect for reverence and the kind of beauty and space that invites it.

So there's all of these stories.

It's called hagiography.

Hagiois is Greek for saints.

The Holy one.

So the story of the holy ones are really wrapped up in all of these windows, especially the vignettes.

Those Carmelite sisters knew their hagiography very well.

Clotilde is in the window because she's in a way the most important woman in French political history.

She convinces her husband, Clovis, the king of the Franks to become a Christian, and he does and the no, the noble families do.

And so she's really the beginner of of one of the beginners of Christianity arriving in the French people.

That's why she's there.

Father Sorin and some members of the Notre Dame community were en route to France aboard a ship which was disabled, and so the ship drifted off of its course And in those days, it was almost impossible to find such a ship.

And so it would mostly be presumed that those aboard that ship would perish, and the whole Notre Dame community was praying for the discovery of this ship, as was the Holy Cross community in France.

In particular, there was a church in France that was known to be a place where prayers were answered, and that was the church in Paris of Our Lady of Victories.

And so the Holy Cross community decided that they would go to this particular church, our lady of victories, and would have a mass said with the intention of finding this ship and saving those on board the day that this mass occurred.

The ship was found and later the pilot, the captain of the ship, said that it was a miracle that they were found and he had no doubt about it at all.

So after that, one of the chapel windows then became a chapel to our lady of victories.

And if you come to see that window, that chapel, you'll see Our Lady of Victories, whom Father Sorin and had a devotion to.

And in fact, one of the pictures in the book is Fatehr Sorin and seated at a table next to a statue of Our Lady of Victories.

It's also an interesting image on campus here, because when Notre Dame athletes play in almost any of their competitions, they begin with a prayer to Our Lady of Victory.

This is probably one of my favorite places in the world to be at because I can sit here at this glorious organ.

I can look at the image and the window of Saint Cecilia right over the patron saint of music and surrounded by the beautiful architecture and the wonderful ceiling and the beautiful art of the basilica.

There were 116 different windows and twelve hundred panels just within the space of the Basilica and we did a lot of research before we actually even worked on the windows.

And my father had gone over to France and talked to one of the studios over there and visited a number of churches that those sisters had already done the glass for.

We're in Boston and this is the Cathedral Church of the Holy Cross.

And it is a church built more or less the same time that the Basilica at Notre Dame was built.

And it shows the same kind of deep attention to the entire program, the architecture and the windows, the altars, the statuary, even the stations of the cross all coordinated so that they have a message about the Catholic faith and a message for the people within it so they can see the images in the window.

And then it relates to basically things that they know in their own life in creating sacred space.

I believe there are five principles.

The first is verticality or transcendence.

The second is directionality or the longitudinal.

The third is iconography, imagery, symbolism, the things which we look at the focus of worship.

Number four is geometry, all great architecture and all sacred architecture especially is made up of geometric precision circles and squares, triangles multiple multiples of those shapes forming them into shapes, whether they're into shapes that remind you of a snowflake or of a star or of a cross.

And then number five, they are built for the eternal, which means they're built very well out of masonry, stone, brick or whatever is closest to that.

And they express that idea of being built durably for eternal eternity.

So five things that sacred architecture of all cultures, but especially in the Western culture, especially in Christianity, expresses they create imagery and physical spaces that activate the direct experience of awe.

So when you are in a sacred space in a cathedral?

It is.

A way of of designing the places you find out in the world for a long time evolutionarily, right?

Natural contacts being in the forest and surrounded by canopies of trees.

Being a young child and being around kind of the beauty and strength of older adults.

So art and architecture are directly leading you to these, these ancient experiences of awe.

So it's conscious and unconscious and in a well-designed building.

They work together and you sense that even if you've never been in the gothic church, you immediately get the feeling you're meant to have the encounter with majesty and grandeur and a kind of heightened physicality.

Also, it's extraordinary when it's done well and it Notre Dame does it well.

It's extraordinary how people immediately know to soften and modulate their voice.

A kind of physical humility overcomes you in a space like that.

So the whole concept when you're designing a sacred space is that there is supposed to be a main entrance point, which is usually the North X.

And when you enter through that space, you are supposed to immediately things should be in place for you to cast away the weariness, the troubles of the day to be able to reflect inward.

The windows, for me, are just a visually stunning kind of addition to that kind of gothic space.

It adds kind of a polychromatic infusion of light that that really makes it more meaningful and more beautiful.

Stained glass windows are unique.

In the way that they interpret light, shape, color, you can look at a stained glass window at several different times of day and never see the same image quite the same way.

The fact that they also often very specifically tell a story is also a wonderful feature.

There are paintings which tell stories in their own way, but the addition of light just adds an extra dimension to a stained glass window that you really don't get with any other art form.

I've heard through some of the older craftsmen here that a great stained glass window reads well, whether it's cloudy outside or sunny.

And that's one of the beautiful things about the stained glass.

And Notre Dame is no matter the time of day, no matter what's going on outside, you can really appreciate all the colors.

They're never too bright, never too dark.

But I think a true stained glass artist knows exactly how much paint to put on so that they're not blocking too much light and still allowing enough to pass through impartial veil.

When you paint on glass, it's a question, first and foremost, a revealing a contrast of light.

That is to say, keeping the color of the glass but filtered.

And by contrast, we'll reveal the details of the face.

And what's really impressive is in the stained glass of the 19th century and especially in the stained glass of the Carmelites thanks to the contribution of German artists, the famous Kuchelbeckers to whom we must pay tribute.

We have a work of glass painting that is of a finesse, a delicacy that is exceptional and that is still today very difficult to imitate.

The hand painting and the many layers of paints are pretty indicative, indicative of the European studios.

The layers upon layers that have to go in to create the depth on the faces.

Many of the studios at that time would have their high level artists work on the faces in the hands.

Where some of the other artists may do the draperies, some may do the background, some may do the borders.

So it wasn't uncommon to have studios work in different parts of at the same window.

French Speaking It's been a human expression since the dawn of time, even when you see Neolithic art, et cetera.

We need to create something and all these representations that we're trying to analyze a bit now.

It shows very well that we're curious about something that is beyond us.

French speaking.

You have a clarity because for the most part.

The class is in, it's color is in the mass.

You either have a piece of yellow glass, a piece of green glass, a piece of green purple that is the substratum.

So that piece of glass, a flat piece of glass, is laid on the Glazer's table.

And then it's painted on top.

And that paint is a a basically a neutral color.

Think of the sort of dark rust.

So the artist dampens it here, and then when they want to show detail, they can add they could use a darker line, which then enables them to sort of paint a face and paint, you know, eyelids and to give accents.

So that basically creates something that even if we don't intellectually process it immediately, there is that wonderful contrast between the pulsating nature of the color and that graphic that is on the surface.

One of the things that I find when I'm looking at windows and when I'm talking to people about looking at windows that strikes me is that we often just look at the figure in the center and we focus on the figure in the center.

And then and then we kind of walk away by all of the all of the detail around the borders of these pieces is really intense and there's really, really fine line work and all of these architectural elements that are surrounding each of these images And you you actually only get a sense of them almost from the other side.

Right.

So after you've walked down one side of the nave or something like that and you kind of look back at the other side, you go, Oh my, oh my goodness.

And then you see like the whole surrounding structure that the windows make when you put them together as a grouping and you see the similarities in the way that they've done the borders and the other things around the windows, which is really, really lovely.

Well, I think there are a lot of other places on campus that are sacred I think the vision of having a chapel in every residence hall is so important.

And even in some academic buildings and people find those their special place of prayer, their special place for worship and for the Eucharist, St Edward's Hall has Le Man's windows.

And again, Sorin was involved with those commissions St Edward's Hall is the oldest dormitory on the Notre Dame campus.

Its chapel holds eight stunning windows containing between 200 - 300 pieces of glass, all from Le Mans, France.

Father Sorin was instrumental in other churches obtaining glass from Le Mans.

St Mary Cathedral in Austin, Texas, is home to five windows.

These windows were all manufactured at the Carmelite Workshop in Le Mans, France.

The center windows of the Immaculate Conception and to the left you will see Saint Peter and Saint Joseph's, and to the right we have John the Baptist in Saint Paul.

There's a border at the bottom of the Immaculate Conception window.

You can see the name of Hucher and sons.

And it also mentions Carmel Le Mans France.

We have a receipt of these windows, and these windows were purchased in 1890 for the sum of 40 200 Francs.

Immaculate Conception Jesuit Church in New Orleans is another location in the United States where you can see work from the same studio.

Immaculate Conception has 20 windows, making it the second largest collection of stained glass windows in the U.S. from Le Mans.

Oh, I love this church.

I always say this is one of my favorite places in the city between the beginning of constructing the church sometime after 1857 and before 1873, when the first mass was said.

These windows were built by the Carmelite in Le Mans, France, and they depict incidents in Jesuit.

History of Jesuits are depicted in these.

And the thing about these windows, the figures in the windows are very sharp and realistically created, so you can actually see whoever is depicted in the window.

Just across the street from the University of Notre Dame and next to Saint Mary's College stands the Church of Our Lady of Loretto.

The church holds eleven stained glass windows from Le Mans featuring Mary.

It's interesting to note the similarities and differences in those windows and the ones at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart.

All the windows are unique and handcrafted, with the smallest of details French speaking.

My Carmelites, I have the tendency to claim them for myself because I often visited the Carmel when the Carmelites were still present here in Le Mans or next door in Rouillon They never left their monastery.

How can they have made stained glass windows in the United States without ever setting foot in the United States?

But also, they produce stained glass windows all over Europe, in India, in Japan without ever leaving their monastery here in limbo.

And that remains absolutely fascinating.

And I remember very well that when I was preparing my thesis, I visited the Carmelite a lot.

I went there often and there was the mother prior, as whom I often asked, But how is that possible?

The Carmelite didn't even know how to draw or paint.

How did they make stained glass windows?

How were they so successful?

And the mother prior has told me, young man, it's obvious it's the hand of God.

French speaking.

So the Carmel du Mans signatures are very, I would say, modest and interesting to find.

You'll find them at the very bottom of the the lower windows, but as you come through the church, the signatures will change.

So you'll find Rathouis name showing up and the two in the transept.

You'll see those are rough with signature because by then, not only did he own it, but there was enough lag time in the production so that his name would show up.

And then as you come back into the chapels, you find Hucher's name.

And so it's really wonderful that in itself, if you pay attention to the signatures, will tell you something about the history There's a wonderful poem by Mary Oliver in which she says she doesn't know how to pray, but she knows how to pay attention .

You have to be willing to stop and just pay attention and not impose your own meaning on whatever it is you're seeing, but because if you impose your own meaning on it, you're domesticating it, you're putting it sort of inside your own will and then it doesn't have the power to carry you out of yourself.

The light casts some beautiful images onto the walls and the floor of the Basilica, and as it moves, that light moves throughout the basilica.

So it's a very living reality.

The windows themselves, though static because of the sunlight that gets reflected through them.

They become very living things, bringing a lot of life, a lot of movement into the basilica itself.

Awe tends to shift you out of this self-focus and egoistic view of the world to an opening to being connected to people, to serving other people, to being a community member.

So I think many of us go to a religious space to feel peace, to feel contemplation, to feel closer to a higher power.

And there is something about light that is really compelling and really can almost feel in your body.

So when you're sitting in a pew, for example, in a church and you feel tha and you see that light, you might even feel it, but see that light coming through a window.

You recognize the image and the picture, and then you see the light streaming through.

And it might it might leave an image on the floor or on the wall of that color.

And you're you can be transfixed by that.

So there's just sort of things that are inherent in the material that allows you to experience light in a very particular and nuanced and quite spiritual way.

Stained glass is never the same twice because you never have it exactly the same weather conditions on exactly the same day and the same sorts of things happening in the building.

Or maybe you have different people in the building that day.

So because architecture is the inescapable environment of stained glass, this is it's an experience.

And then beyond that, there's a fascinating thing is happening biologically when you're looking at glass which is that when you look at that painting on the wall, the light is reflecting the image back to your eye when you look at stained glass.

There is no fixed surface for your eye to hit.

So you're seeing the glass you're seeing through the glass, you're seeing the building behind the glass, your eyes are vibrating, they're having an active experience.

So that is all impacting how we not just experience the glass when we're looking at it in that moment, but then when we go home and we take it with us, even even though we may not remember what we saw and who was in the windows and which saint represented what we still felt something in that moment, and we take that feeling home with us because we had experience when we looked at the stained glass.

Additional funding for Vibrant Light Stained Glass of the Basilica at the University of Notre Dame.

Provided by.

Thank you.