Stained glass has been the Cinderella of the
medieval arts, largely because the material is so little known. Yet during
the Middle Ages it was a highly prestigious vehicle for a wide variety of
images, brightly coloured and brilliantly lit, as the famous surviving examples
in York Minster, Canterbury Cathedral or King’s College Chapel in Cambridge
still show today.
Following a major digitisation project many of the
surviving examples of medieval stained glass in Great Britain are now available
to view online. Over 15,000 digitised photographs from the archive of the
Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi (CVMA) have been added to the AHDS Visual Arts image
catalogue at: http://visualarts.ahds.ac.uk/
The
Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi (CVMA), or the survey of medieval stained glass, was
founded in 1949 as an international research project which aims to publish
everything that survives. The CVMA has committees in 14 countries and over 65
printed volumes have been published so far. In Great Britain, the CVMA is
a British Academy research project hosted by the Courtauld Institute of
Art. The photographic archive of the CVMA is housed at the public archive
of English Heritage, the National Monuments Record, and a large proportion of
the archive has now been digitised and made available online with funding from
the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).
With the addition of the CVMA collection, the
number of digital images available via AHDS Visual Arts now totals around 80,000
images. The images of medieval stained glass can now be cross-searched
with other related collections, such as the Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in
Britain and Ireland (CRSBI) and the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association’s
(PMSA) National Recording Project. These high quality digital images are
all freely available for use in research, learning and teaching.
For more information about the CVMA
see: