Our Lady of Victory

The window’s palette is built on three simultaneous colour contrasts that drive the drama of the whole. The first — the opposition of deep sapphire (#0F2F8F) and the lighter sky blue (#2F6FD6), ordering the celestial zone in space. The second — the contrast of ruby and carmine (#B0002A / #C1121F) with the purple of Helvetia’s robe (#6A0F1A), bringing the temperature of passion and sacrifice into the earthly section. The third — pointed accents of golden yellow (#F2C94C), partly executed as fired silver stain (jaune d’argent), which light up Mary’s glory, the band of stars, the crown of the Mother of God and the heraldic field of the Fribourg shield.

What proves decisive, however, is not the palette itself but the quality of the glass. Mehoffer and the Kirsch & Fleckner workshop use antique glass of uneven thickness and rich internal streaking — so that every colour panel pulses with inner life, and the colour is never ‘flat’ as in the industrially produced German stained glass of the period. The purple mantle of Helvetia deserves particular attention: here Mehoffer combined the rare purple #6A0F1A with carmines #C1121F, setting into this deep colour field golden borders with a motif of crossed palms of victory, painted in silver stain on white glass. The effect — impossible to convey in reproduction — is the impression of a ‘cool, metallic sheen’, a phenomenon of light rather than an ordinary painted surface: a workshop tour de force of the highest order, testifying to the artist’s full initiation into the secrets of fourteenth-century French glazing technique, which he had studied in Paris in 1891–1896 (the studio of Luc-Olivier Merson, École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts).

Mehoffer conceives the window not as a painted surface but as an instrument of light. Natural light — passing through the window from the south — acts in this work as an active co-author. The morning light from the east draws out the ruby and sapphire tones of the lower section (warriors, banners); the afternoon light from the west ignites Mary’s glory and the band of stars. The window genuinely changes over the course of the day — a deliberate effect of the design, inscribed in the work’s eschatological symbolism. It is a programmed, liturgical dramaturgy of light, in which the daily cycle of the sun becomes a further co-creator of the work.

The lead network serves not only a structural but above all a draughtsman’s function. Mehoffer guides it with the Art Nouveau freedom developed during his Paris years, tracing draperies, hair, angels’ wings and border ornament in fluid contours. The lead line, treated as an autonomous means of expression, anticipates solutions later known from ‘The Strange Garden’ (1903) — the same type of contour defining a field of colour.

Mehoffer’s characteristic Art Nouveau line has a double face in this window. On the one hand — a fluid, undulating, decorative line, recurring in the folds of the Madonna’s robes, the locks of her hair, the drapery of Helvetia’s mantle and the stylised wings of the angels. On the other — a hard, geometric, almost heraldic line, used in the armour, the banners and the ornament of the base. This tension between the soft line (feminine, celestial) and the hard one (masculine, earthly) becomes one of the work’s principal carriers of meaning.

The human body is treated selectively. The celestial figures — the Madonna, the angels, the virtues — are freed of physical weight: their robes seem to float above the body, and the bodies themselves are elongated, ethereal, almost weightless, of the type known from English Pre-Raphaelite painting (Burne-Jones, Rossetti). The earthly figures — the soldiers, and Helvetia herself as a bent silhouette seen from behind — possess by contrast full corporeality, anatomical truth and concreteness. This twofold treatment of the body (corpus gloriae vs corpus terrenum) is one of the work’s most subtle theological devices. The modelling of the faces is executed in Schwarzlot, in a technique of delicate semi-transparent shading; Helvetia’s hair in the lower section — contrasting bands of light and shadow giving the impression of sculptural, almost three-dimensional modelling — is a masterpiece of this technique, characteristic of the finest stained-glass work of around 1900.

The window has no classic, self-contained perimeter border — that function is performed by the neo-Gothic stone tracery itself. Within the composition, however, Mehoffer introduces a whole system of micro-borders: the band of stars on deep blue, an ornamental band of palmettes and lilies beneath the register of virtues, a base frieze with a thistle-and-clover motif, and — the most beautiful in formal terms — the borders of the embroidered robes of Helvetia and the Madonna, treated like real fabrics of courtly craftsmanship. These ornamental insertions act as a rhetorical rhythm (analogous to a refrain in poetry), interrupting the figural narrative and guiding the viewer’s eye across the enormous surface of 18 m². The border does not close the composition — on the contrary, it carries it into the architecture of the cathedral, serving as a zone of transition between the stone tracery and the coloured narrative of the glass.

The most original iconographic solution, without precedent in European stained glass to that date, is the figure of Helvetia shown from behind. The personification of the Swiss Confederation — usually depicted frontally, hieratically, like a monument — here kneels turned away from the viewer, rendered in three dimensions of space. Her expansive purple robe richly decorated with gold embroidery in a motif of crossed palms of victory, her reddish hair pinned high, and the monumental peacock-pink plumage spread behind her back like a canopy-halo — all of this composes one of the most formally beautiful images of state allegory in European art at the turn of the century. In both hands she holds a laurel wreath (the classical, antique-inspired attribute of victory), which she passes to two young knights bearing a shield with the arms of the city of Fribourg (a shield divided per fess: black above, white below — the cantonal colours).

Iconographically this is a representation of triumphus humilis — a humble triumph, in which victory is not celebrated in gestures of power but returned to God in a gesture of gratitude. Mehoffer deliberately turns Helvetia away — stripping the state allegory of its monumental, ‘statuesque’ character and replacing it with the psychology of personal devotion. Helvetia conveys the meaning of the victory to the viewer as she passes the wreath to the men with the shield; she is a mediator between history and the beholder, not an object of devotion.

From the perspective of turn-of-the-century art history, this solution should be read in three overlapping layers: first — as a reception of the compositional devices of Caspar David Friedrich (Rückenfigur), where a figure seen from behind draws the viewer into the depth of the image, making them a participant rather than an observer of the scene; second — as a reference to the modern theatre theory of the late nineteenth century (Adolphe Appia, Edward Gordon Craig), where the actor becomes an element of the mise en scène and the audience co-creates the meaning of the drama; third — as a gesture of artistic and theological modesty: Helvetia does not demand veneration but renders homage to Mary and the warriors; her turned-away position is an act of humility by the political community towards the values that constitute it. This threefold resonance of a single compositional device places Mehoffer in the avant-garde of European sacred art around 1900 — on a level consonant with Maurice Denis in France or Carl Larsson in Sweden.

The band between the base register and the celestial zone is occupied by a group of victorious Confederate warriors returning from the field of the Battle of Murten (22 June 1476). The soldiers wear the late Gothic dress and armament of the last quarter of the fifteenth century — a combination of plate armour, short doublets with swelling sleeves, and high spurred boots — studied by Mehoffer from authentic pieces in the museums of Bern and Geneva and from the miniatures of the Schillingschen Chronik (the Chronicle of Diebold Schilling, c. 1483).

The psychological focus of this zone is the foremost warrior in the third lancet, raising his sword towards Mary in a gesture of triumph, almost shouting with joy — this dramatic moment of emotional expression, unheard of in nineteenth-century sacred art, is one of the strongest psychological accents of the work. The other soldiers lay the captured Burgundian standards at Mary’s feet — banners bearing the arms of Charles the Bold, shown in vivid reds, lowered and drooping in a gesture of vassal humility. The lowered banners — a gesture traditionally read in heraldry as an act of deference to a higher authority (here, Mary and the homeland) — carry the emblems of the cantons that took part in the Murten campaign. Mehoffer subjected the heraldry to strong Art Nouveau stylisation, legible yet not illustrative — as a result of the Fribourg commission’s intervention, the emblems of the participating states were expanded in the course of the design, a documented episode of artistic dispute (see Adamowicz 1982, pp. 142–148; von Roda 1995, cat. no. 4).

The four lancet heads contain half-figures of allegorical personifications rendered in the type of the puella sapiens (the wise maiden), in light, white, almost antique robes. Inscriptions on the bases of the fields allow identification:

• Lancet I: SPES (Hope) — the inscription ‘SPES’ clearly legible; a youthful figure with a radiant star and upturned gaze.
• Lancet II: FIDES (Faith) — the inscription ‘FIDES’ clearly legible; a figure in a white robe amid a halo of flames, with the attribute of a hand laid on the breast.
• Lancet III: FORTITUDO (Fortitude) — a cardinal virtue, identified from its attribute (the dragon), without a legible inscription; the closest to the theme of military victory (identification after von Roda 1995).
• Lancet IV (far right): AMOR (Love) — the readable inscription ‘Amor’; a red-haired figure with red flowers (roses as a symbol of love).

This set — the three theological virtues (Fides, Spes, Caritas) supplemented by the cardinal Fortitude (Fortitudo) — is a conscious programmatic compromise between the traditional arrangement of four competition figures (one per lancet) and the new, unified artistic vision. Mehoffer ‘retains’ an echo of the original competition requirement, subordinating it to the iconographic whole of the work as a kind of choral antiphon crowning the composition.

The window contains three significant groups of Latin inscriptions, integrated into the graphic structure of the work:

(a) Dedicatory inscription: BEATAE MARIAE VIRGINI · RESPVBLICA · FRIBVRGENSIS (‘To the Blessed Virgin Mary — the Republic of Fribourg’). Placed on two scrolls (banderoles) winding through the middle zone of the composition, on a white ground, in Roman capitals with lightly stylised serifs. The text is divided between the two two-light windows: ‘BEATAE MARIAE’ on the left, ‘VIRGINI · RESPVBLICA · FRIBVRGENSIS’ on the right — making it an integral part of the visual narrative. A votive formula that Mehoffer had to defend against critics who accused the foundation of too secular a tone (see the correspondence preserved in the Archives de l’État de Fribourg).

(b) Attribute inscriptions of the virtues: SPES · FIDES · AMOR — legible inscriptions on the bases of the lancet crowns; the fourth personification, FORTITUDO, is uninscribed and identified from its attribute (the dragon). Four personifications in all.

(c) The artist’s signature: J.M. 1897 — in the lower band of the third lancet, in black Schwarzlot on a white field of glass. The original wording of the inscription provoked disputes within the competition committee; the final version is a compromise between the artist’s proposal and the donor’s expectations (Adamowicz 1982, pp. 134–141).

The design provoked lively controversy. The foundation committee, composed of Catholic clergy and representatives of the cantonal authorities, raised — according to the correspondence preserved in the Archives de l’État de Fribourg and discussed by Adamowicz 1982 and von Roda 1995 — a series of fundamental objections:

• (1) the ‘too Slavic’ typology of Mary’s face — critics saw in it the stylistic traits of a softly modelled Art Nouveau face, perceived as alien to the local tradition of representation (a Central European type of beauty). This criticism was part of a broader resistance to the ‘foreign’ Young Poland aesthetic in Fribourg’s Catholic, French-speaking (Romand) milieu.
• (2) the too modest scale of the Mother of God in relation to the historical section — critics wanted to preserve the medieval hierarchy of size, in which the Madonna should dominate physically.
• (3) the insufficient legibility of the cantonal heraldic emblems — it was demanded that the arms of all the cantons that took part in the battle appear on the soldiers’ banners, which Mehoffer partly accommodated and partly restricted for compositional reasons.
• (4) the debatable wording of the dedicatory inscription — in the original design the inscription had a secular tone; the final formula BEATAE MARIAE VIRGINI · RESPVBLICA · FRIBVRGENSIS is a compromise shifting the emphasis towards votive piety.

Despite the pressure and several rounds of revisions, Mehoffer preserved the essential core of his original conception — the composition stitched across four lancets, Helvetia’s turned-away gesture, the vertical hierarchy of scenes, the typology of a subtle, lyrical Mary. He made minor adjustments (expanded heraldry, the final wording of the inscription), but the essential vision remained intact. The window was installed in 1898, and the critics who had earlier questioned the design ultimately judged the work a success. The episode is widely discussed in the Polish (Adamowicz 1982) and Swiss (von Roda 1995) literature, as a model example of the tension between Art Nouveau modernity and the demands of a Catholic patron at the end of the nineteenth century.

The window’s stylistic tension between a historicising subject (the Battle of Murten, medieval heraldry, Gothic tracery) and a modernist visual language (mosaic patches of colour, the ornamental lead line, the japonising angels’ wings, the band of stars as an abstract rhythm) is, in Mehoffer’s hands, not a contradiction but a programme. The artist consciously invokes the ideals of William Morris and the Arts & Crafts movement: a medieval subject demands medieval material (glass, lead, fired stain), but the artistic language must be contemporary — such is the path of a true renewal of religious art.

The window of ‘Our Lady of Victory’ is at the same time one of the purest examples of the meeting between Western European Symbolism (Burne-Jones, Moreau, Khnopff) and the Young Poland idea of national art. Mehoffer — a pupil of the Kraków Academy under Jan Matejko, a friend and long-time collaborator of Stanisław Wyspiański — carries into a sacred work made for a foreign, Swiss patron the whole set of Young Poland convictions about the unity of art, nation and religion. What found expression for Wyspiański in ‘Liberation’ and the Franciscan windows in Kraków materialises for Mehoffer here in the figure of Helvetia — an allegory of the nation in a gesture of abasement before the sacred. It is the same gesture Wyspiański would later show in ‘God the Father’ in the Franciscan church: the allegory of a nation kneeling before God.

At the same time, Mehoffer conducts a creative dialogue with medieval French stained glass (Chartres, Bourges, the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris) — which he had studied in detail during his Paris years — and with the revival of stained glass in England through William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. From the Gothic he takes the zonal hierarchy, the mosaic technique, the primacy of colour and light over drawing; from the Pre-Raphaelites — the lyricism of the figures, the intimacy of the gaze, the decorativeness of the robes; from Viennese and Belgian Art Nouveau — the fluidity of line and the ornamental treatment of surface. The result is a synthesis that would go on to define European religious stained glass in the first three decades of the twentieth century. In this perspective, ‘Our Lady of Victory’ becomes a programmatic manifesto: the renaissance of stained glass is not a return to thirteenth-century Chartres but a transposition of its spirit (a theology of light, noble material, collective craftsmanship) into the language of a contemporary, Art Nouveau sensibility.

The deepest ideological layer of the work is its eschatology of victory — a particular theology of history in which every military victory is merely a herald of the final, eschatological triumph of Good over Evil foretold in the Apocalypse. In this reading, the defeated Charles the Bold is not only a political enemy but a figure of evil overcome by the power of faith. The Confederates returning from Murten are not merely fifteenth-century soldiers — they are the communio sanctorum (the communion of saints), the Church Militant, giving glory to Mary in a gesture of gratitude for her intercession. Helvetia’s laurel wreath is not only the imperial laurel — it is the corona vitae, the crown of life promised to the victor in the Letter to the Church in Smyrna (Rev 2:10).

In this way the work performs a double transposition: the historical event of 1476 is inscribed into the great biblical eschatology; biblical eschatology, in turn, is actualised in local Fribourg piety at the threshold of the twentieth century. This is a procedure par excellence that is medieval through and through — and in this sense Mehoffer is, paradoxically, more ‘Gothic’ than most of his nineteenth-century neo-Gothic predecessors.

Mehoffer’s Fribourg cycle — and within it, in a particular way, the window of ‘Our Lady of Victory’ — should ultimately be interpreted in terms of the Wagnerian idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art. The window integrates painting (the coloured mosaic), graphic art (the lead line), sculpture (the Schwarzlot modelling), architecture (its relation to the neo-Gothic tracery), political history (Murten), theology (Maria Mediatrix), heraldry (the cantonal shields), liturgy (the daily cycle of light) and a modern psychology of reception (Helvetia seen from behind). It is a synthetic work — and in this sense profoundly of Young Poland and profoundly Symbolist.

From the perspective of European artistic craftsmanship at the beginning of the twentieth century, ‘Our Lady of Victory’ is one of the fundamental windows of the stained-glass art of its day. A field that in the mid-nineteenth century seemed condemned to repeating Victorian patterns (especially in the manner of the London and Munich workshops of Mayer, Kempe, Hardman and Zettler) regains, in the work of Mehoffer and the Kirsch & Fleckner atelier, the status of an authorial, synthetic, autonomously artistic creation. Among works of comparable quality one may point to:

• the windows of Edward Burne-Jones and the Morris & Co. atelier in English cathedrals (Birmingham and Manchester among them) — with which it shares the same Arts-and-Crafts desire to return to traditional medieval technique, though they lack the epic narrative sweep spread across entire two-light windows;
• the windows of Louis Comfort Tiffany in the USA (the Tiffany Chapel from the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1893) — comparable in material mastery, but operating in an entirely different language (opalescent rather than antique glass);
• Maurice Denis’s windows for the abbey of Saint-Pierre in Solesmes — the closest in spirit, pursuing a similar programme of renewing sacred art in a Symbolist vein, but with an entirely different, French religious accent;
• the windows of Stanisław Wyspiański in the Franciscan church in Kraków (1897–1902) — the closest in lineage (the Kraków school of Young Poland), created in parallel, yet of an entirely different, expressive, almost cosmic dramaturgy.

Among all these works, Mehoffer’s window stands out through a unique combination of three qualities: (a) a flawless command of the classical stained-glass technique (at the level of a medieval workshop); (b) the boldness of its compositional conception (breaking the lancet division, Helvetia en repoussoir); (c) an iconological depth inscribed in the local political and religious context. It is a synthesis that no one else in Europe achieved at the end of the nineteenth century — and it is precisely this fact that justifies counting the Fribourg cycle among the absolute canon of European sacred art of the Belle Époque.

The artistic, historical and cultural value of the ‘Our Lady of Victory’ window is multi-layered and outstanding, which justifies classing the work among the highest rank of European art monuments of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries:

• In the artistic dimension — the work constitutes the first full manifestation of the ‘Art Nouveau stained-glass narrative’, in which the traditional lancet order gives way to a unified, panoramic scene.
• In the historical dimension — it is a document of the memory of the Battle of Murten and a testimony to the complex ideological negotiations of the late nineteenth century in the multi-confessional Swiss Confederation.
• In the biographical dimension — it is the work in which the 28-year-old Mehoffer finds the complete visual language that he would develop over the next four decades.
• In the technological dimension — it stands as a monument to the craftsmanship of the Kirsch & Fleckner workshop, documenting the revival of the classical, medieval stained-glass technique in the industrial Europe of the late nineteenth century.
• In the cultural dimension — it unites the Polish Young Poland tradition with European Symbolism and the local Catholic tradition of Fribourg, making the work one of the few examples of genuine cultural synthesis in nineteenth-century art.

From the perspective of the Foundation for the Virtualisation of National Cultural Heritage and its long-term programme of digitising and popularising the Fribourg cycle, the ‘Our Lady of Victory’ window (ref. FWNDK-WIT-FRI-002) is one of the key objects of the programme. It brings together all the threads highlighted by research on the cycle to date: the Polish–Swiss synergy (Mehoffer Freiburg), the question of historical memory (victory and reconciliation), technological modernity in the service of tradition, and the international dimension of Polish art at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The gigapixel digital documentation, produced in 2025, opens a new stage of detailed research into the iconography, technology and reception of this work — a stage in which the micro-scale of the lead mosaic, the silver stain and the Schwarzlot becomes, for the first time, fully accessible to scholarly analysis. At the same time it reveals those layers of the work that until now remained invisible even to a visitor to the cathedral — the details of the inscription BEATAE MARIAE VIRGINI · RESPVBLICA · FRIBVRGENSIS, the borders painted in jaune d’argent, the lead network of the peacock feathers, the micro-modelling of Helvetia’s hair — making the object record a truly revelatory tool of enquiry.