The Blessed Sacrament

The base zone contains two symmetrically placed narrative scenes (a procession of angels with thuribles on the right and the adoration of the personification of Faith on the left), separated by the band of the foundation inscription. Beneath the inscription, in the lower left section, Mehoffer introduces a ram entangled in a thicket — a detail of fundamental significance for the entire programmatic whole of the window, to which we return in the iconological analysis.

The tracery crownings (the heads of the lancets) are filled with a lush ornament of foliate scroll and small Eucharistic symbols — in the frames of the upper zone, grapes are clearly confirmed (the classic emblem of transubstantiated wine); the presence of chalices and ears of grain requires confirmation with a tighter frame of the tracery. The scroll ornament is executed in the technique of painting on white glass with silver stain, giving a characteristic cool sheen.

The window's palette is built on the opposition of two dominants: golden yellow (silver stain in the monstrance, the Host, the haloes, the candles, the scroll ornament) and deep ruby and carmine (#B0002A / #C1121F) in the figure of the Crucified, the blood from the wound in the side, and the accents of the angels' cloaks. Between these dominants Mehoffer introduces a band of sapphire (#0F2F8F) and blue (#2F6FD6) — the background of the right-hand scene, Ecclesia's drapery — which forms an “intermediate space” linking the gold of the Eucharist with the red of the Sacrifice. Accents of emerald green (#2E8B57) and turquoise (#1FB7A6) in the thicket and the floral ornament round off the palette with a naturalistic motif.

The window's most important colour decision is the placing of the Host as the optical light source of the composition. The white of the antique glass — which transmits natural light most strongly — sits beside the deepest sapphire of its surroundings, which physiologically heightens the impression of luminosity (“contraste simultané” / simultaneous contrast, described by Michel-Eugène Chevreul). Mehoffer exploits this phenomenon with almost scientific precision: the Host shines not metaphorically but optically. In the afternoon hours, when the sun falls directly on the south window, the effect culminates — the white Host becomes the luminous centre of the chapel, literally brightening the interior in the way Mehoffer programmatically planned.

The lead line in “The Blessed Sacrament” already attains the fully mature formula of Mehoffer's stained-glass draughtsmanship. The contours follow the rhythm of the Art Nouveau arabesque: undulating, organic, wholly autonomous of any constructional necessity. This is especially legible in the angels' wings (rhythmic bands of feathers read like a musical score), in Ecclesia's drapery (the flowing arcs of fabric) and in the clouds of incense smoke (Bézier curves meeting in a swirling geometric ornament).

The modelling of faces and bodies — with Schwarzlot fired in light, semi-transparent layers — gives an impression of sculptural three-dimensionality, particularly in the head of Ecclesia (a Young Poland Madonna type, with an expression of concentration rather than posing) and in the body of the Crucified (a delicate modelling of the anatomy). In this technique Mehoffer attains a level comparable with the finest workshops of the British Arts & Crafts movement (Morris & Co., Whall) and the Royal Bavarian Stained Glass Manufactory in Munich.

The window's border runs as a band of lush foliate scroll set with small Eucharistic symbols: ears of wheat, bunches of grapes and chalices in Art Nouveau stylisation. The scroll pattern, painted in silver stain on white glass, opens towards the architecture of the tracery, creating a subtle transition between stone and glass. In the base section the border breaks up and absorbs into itself the band of the foundation inscription, treated as a separate typographic element — Roman majuscule lettering, classical, yet integrated into an Art Nouveau ornamental frame.

The window's right symbolic altar shows a rare, iconographically refined motif of the Crucifixus inclined towards Ecclesia (the Cross bending down towards the Church). Christ on the cross is here neither a distant, frontal Crucifixus of the Romanesque type nor an isolated Baroque drama — He is supported by angels, and His body leans clearly towards the personification of the Church standing at the foot of the cross. Ecclesia holds a chalice into which a stream of blood flows from the wound in Christ's side.

This motif has deep roots in medieval art (the iconographic type Crucifixus-Ecclesia-Synagoga, known from the ninth century — for example the Andlau altar, the Klosterneuburg crucifix), where Ecclesia (a young, crowned woman with a chalice) gathered the blood of salvation, while Synagoga (a blindfold over her eyes, with a broken standard) withdrew from the other side of the cross. In Mehoffer, Synagoga disappears; Ecclesia alone remains, in the full gravity of the symbol — reflecting the theology of the Council of Trent and the nineteenth-century programmes of Catholic renewal, which concentrated on the positive, ecclesiological aspect of the sacrifice, without a polemical juxtaposition with Judaism.

The angels supporting the cross are handled in Art Nouveau fashion — with richly developed wings in a rhythm of repeated feathers, in gestures at once supporting and tender. The background of the scene forms a “votive carpet”: a woven ornament with ex-voto motifs — hearts, hands, plaques — symbolising the collective response of the faithful to Christ's sacrifice.

The lower band of the window develops two complementary themes. On the right a procession of angels with thuribles (censers) sets out — the smoke of the incense merges into a uniform, undulating web of colour, out of which emerges the figure of a priest or deacon leading the procession. The materiality of the smoke — one of the most technically difficult problems in stained glass — was solved by Mehoffer masterfully: instead of an applied layer (typical of nineteenth-century Munich workshops), the smoke is a mosaic of small fields of glass in a gradient of blues, greys and whites, joined by lead of a flowing, curved course. This makes the smoke mobile — as the angle of the incident natural light changes, these fields “pulse”, imitating the movement of a real censer.

In the lower left, in the thicket at the base of the Eucharistic scene, Mehoffer places the most significant — and at the same time most easily overlooked — detail of the whole window: a ram caught by its horns in the thicket. This detail, small in scale (c. 12 × 18 cm within a window of over 18 m² surface), is the cipher-key to the entire theological composition.

In the base band, between the two narrative scenes, runs a Latin majuscule inscription, in the final version preserved in the executed window (design 1900 / execution 1901). The dating is confirmed by the signatures in the base band: the artist's “Jozef Mehoffer 1900” (lancet 4) and the workshop's “Peinture sur verre Kirsch & Fleckner Fribourg 1901” (lancet 1):

AD AUGENDUM SPLENDOREM HUJUS ECCLESIAE CONFRATERNITAS SANCTISSIMI SACRAMENTI VITREA PICTA PROPRIO SUMPTU FIERI CURAVIT (“To increase the splendour of this church, the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament had this painted window made at its own expense.”)

The inscription is typical of medieval and early modern dedicatory practice, in which the donor does not sign anonymously but inscribes the act of foundation directly into the fabric of the work. The phrase proprio sumptu (“at its own expense”) emphasises that the foundation is neither an episcopal nor a cantonal alms but a communal act of the confraternity. Ad augendum splendorem — “to increase the splendour” — links the Latin tradition of ecclesiastical rhetoric (splendor = the material and spiritual glory of the House of God) with a concrete, almost pragmatic aim: increasing the luminous impact of the chapel. It is a formula at once theological and aesthetic, perfectly summarising the programme of the whole window.

The window's deepest iconology is hidden in an unassuming detail of the lower left zone — the ram caught by its horns in the thicket. This motif refers directly to Genesis 22:13: when Abraham was ready to sacrifice Isaac, the angel of the Lord pointed him to a ram caught by its horns in a thicket, which became the substitute sacrifice. In Christian exegesis (from Origen, through Augustine, to medieval and post-Tridentine theologians) this ram is a type of Christ the Lamb of God (Agnus Dei), the final and sufficient sacrifice that abolishes the need for further blood offerings.

By placing the ram in the thicket at the lower boundary of the Eucharistic window, Mehoffer makes a gesture of programmatic significance: the whole composition above (the monstrance, Ecclesia, the Crucified, the chalice) is the typological fulfilment of the Old Testament sacrifice. The Eucharist does not replace the Cross; the Cross does not replace the Akedah; all three are one act of God, spread out across the time of revelation. This iconographic solution, uniting in one composition the Old Testament type, the Gospel antitype and the sacramental re-presentation, places Mehoffer in the avant-garde of European sacred art around 1900 — in a single line with the mosaic programme of Saint-Paul-Outside-the-Walls in Rome and Maurice Denis's stained glass for the abbey of Solesmes.

The foundation by the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament is to be read in the context of the international renewal of the Eucharistic cult at the end of the nineteenth century, whose signs included: the establishment of the International Eucharistic Congresses (from 1881, Lille; the first Swiss Congress in Fribourg in 1885); the wide spread of the Forty Hours' devotion (Quarant'Ore) and the exposition of the Blessed Sacrament; the development of the practice of perpetual adoration; and finally Leo XIII's encyclicals of 1885–1902. The Fribourg confraternity was part of this movement as a local emanation of a Church-wide phenomenon, and the foundation of a Eucharistic window for the cathedral — within the same programme of renewal — was a theological and pedagogical act.

In this perspective the inscription ad augendum splendorem is no banal rhetorical façade of the foundation; it is a programmatic declaration: the confraternity not only maintains an inner devotion but also publicly increases the glory of the Church through an act of artistic foundation of the highest class. The window becomes a form of aesthetic evangelisation — which is the fundamental thesis of the whole programme of the renewal of sacred art, to which Mehoffer belonged intellectually, alongside Augustus Welby Pugin, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and the Belgian theologian-aesthetes of Beuron.

The window's coherent four-lancet composition — with two “symbolic altars” meeting on the vertical axis of the tabernacle — functions as a graphic scheme of the Eucharistic liturgy. The left altar (the monstrance, Faith, the Holy Spirit, candles) corresponds to the exposition and adoration of the Sacrament — the phase of presence. The right altar (the Cross, Ecclesia, the chalice, angels) corresponds to the memorial and the sacramental re-presentation of the Sacrifice — the phase of anamnesis. The lower zone (incense, the procession) corresponds to the liturgical action in its sensory and communal dimension. The ram in the thicket — the typological background, rooting the liturgy in the history of salvation. The inscription — the anaphora of thanksgiving, the act of remembering the donor in the divine order of the celebration.

The window is therefore literally a visual Mass: not an illustration of the liturgy but its parallel, visual counterpart — programmed so that the chapel, in which the Sacrament is exposed in the real monstrance, should have in its window a perpetual monstrance, painted in light. This is a Gesamtkunstwerk in the spirit of Wagner and Bayreuth, but played out in the space of Catholic worship and the matter of glass.

In the broader perspective of art history, “The Blessed Sacrament” is one of the highest-ranking examples of the European revival of stained glass at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. A field that had been in deep stagnation since the Reformation and Classicism experienced, around 1880–1910, a threefold revival: in England (Edward Burne-Jones in collaboration with Morris & Co., Christopher Whall within the Arts & Crafts movement), in France (Maurice Denis and the Atelier d'Art Sacré group, Marcel Lenoir, the Saint-Pierre windows in Solesmes), and in the German-speaking area (Karl de Bouché, the Mayer atelier in Munich, but above all Jan Thorn-Prikker — a Flemish-German artist of the Werkbund circle).

In the Fribourg cycle, and especially in “The Blessed Sacrament”, Mehoffer effects a synthesis of these three traditions: the Arts-and-Crafts care for material and craftsmanship (antique glass, silver stain, the mosaic technique); the French theology of the renewal of sacred art (the dogmatic programme, typology, ecclesiology); and German monumentality and organicity (the multi-lancet composition, the ornamental lead line). The result is a synthetic work such as none of the three great schools produced separately at the time — and this is, paradoxically, the fundamental contribution of Polish Art Nouveau to the European history of stained glass: the ability to combine traditions into a new quality.

Józef Mehoffer's “The Blessed Sacrament” is a monument of European rank, uniting the highest standards of late-nineteenth-century stained-glass craftsmanship with an innovative, symbolist theology of the image and a deep, programmatically Catholic iconographic programme. It is a key document of the process of the renewal of sacred art at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a testimony to the maturing of the language of Polish Art Nouveau in the international Fribourg context and, in a particular dimension, a material trace of the international renewal of the Eucharistic cult at the end of the nineteenth century. The digital gigapixel documentation, produced by the Foundation for the Virtualisation of National Cultural Heritage in 2025, for the first time makes possible a full analysis of details such as the miniature of the ram in the thicket, the structure of the lead in the smoke of the incense, or the modelling of Ecclesia's face — details crucial for understanding the iconological programme and hitherto inaccessible to observation from the level of the nave.