The Fribourg Stained Glass Windows by Józef Mehoffer

In the final decade of the 19th century, the Fribourg Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament initiated a project and, in 1895, announced a competition aimed at completely furnishing St. Nicholas Cathedral with new stained glass windows in the Gothic style. The intention was not only to restore appropriate decoration to the architecture, but also to recreate within the church an atmosphere conducive to religious devotion.

The young Polish artist Józef Mehoffer won first prize and was thus commissioned to design the stained glass, which was executed by the Fribourg workshop Kirsch & Fleckner.

When Mehoffer (1869–1946) took part in the competition, he had just returned to Kraków from Paris, where he had completed part of his artistic education. Throughout his life, he remained closely connected to modern artistic currents, yet developed a distinctive and original style ultimately associated with Art Nouveau.

The painting of the Nazarenes of the Munich school remained for Mehoffer an ideal of religious art. However, his stained glass designs were influenced by the English Pre-Raphaelites, whose representatives strongly promoted the concept of “musical painting on glass.” Polish folk art inspired his vivid color palette and simple decorative forms, while the lush vegetal ornament derived from Art Nouveau. He also frequently drew on Symbolism, which imparted a sense of mystery—sometimes even eeriness—to his compositions. This allowed him to achieve a depth in his stained glass work that distinguished it from the more superficial decorative tendencies of Art Nouveau.

A new approach to materials, evident in Mehoffer’s Fribourg work, had been introduced into art theory by Gottfried Semper in the second half of the 19th century. It had a profound impact on stained glass art, particularly toward the end of the century. Materials such as glass, lead, and iron became clearly perceptible in the foreground. The competition guidelines required the use of blown antique glass (mundgeblasenes Antikglas), which had been reintroduced into production in England around the mid-19th century. Painting on colored glass was limited, as in the Middle Ages, to black or brown contour paint, black enamel (Schwarzlot), and silver stain.

Although Kirsch & Fleckner used these painterly means extensively, they rarely diminished the visual impact of the colored glass itself. The lead cames were not designed, as in historicist stained glass, to disappear within the outlines of figures or internal drawing. Instead, they became a visibly integral part of the composition: larger color fields were divided mosaically into small pieces of glass in varying shades, held together by a flowing شبکه of lead strips.

The materials include mouth-blown antique glass (colored in the mass), lead, and iron, combined with mosaic technique, contour painting, and shading (Schwarzlot). The glass features highly saturated colors—predominantly sapphire, ruby, golden yellow, and emerald green—characteristic of the aesthetics of Young Poland and Art Nouveau.