Saints and Holy Women

To each of the four figures Mehoffer assigns a distinct chromatic dominant that builds up its archetypal “type”: St George — turquoises and the coloured accents of the dragon’s scales (the chromatic alarm of the combat zone); St Michael — reds and golds (the order of heaven contrasting with the darkness of the Luciferian zone); St Anne — greens and deep blues with accents of gold (stability, rootedness, foundation); St Mary Magdalene — blacks, violets and muted greens with precious accents (transformation, mourning, awareness).

Above the middle (portrait) zone, just below the crowning zone, a band of French inscription with the saints’ names runs across the whole window: S GEORGES · S MICHEL · S ANNE · MADELEINE (it is interesting that Mary Magdalene is given without the title “saint”, in keeping with the French hagiographic tradition that treats Madeleine as a familial, more intimate form of address). The letters are set into an Art Nouveau vegetal scroll — typography as a graphic element of the image, not a caption beneath a scene. This is a programmatically Mehofferian solution, continuing the treatment of lettering from “The Apostles” and “The Martyrs”.

The most strongly Art Nouveau features of this window are: the vegetal scrolls of the canopies (a dense interlace of leaves and stems, Mehoffer’s “whiplash line” at full maturity); the inscription band with its bent scrolling line; the patterning of the garment fabrics (especially the fleur-de-lis on St Anne’s navy robe and the patterned brocade of Mary Magdalene’s gown); and the base ornamentation (the dragon’s scales as a rhythmic geometric structure, closely related to the posters of Eugène Grasset and Alphonse Mucha from the 1890s). The window is at once a monumental sacred work and a manual of the applied arts in the spirit of Arts & Crafts.

The most technically advanced passage of the window — and one of the most difficult in the entire Fribourg cycle — is Mary Magdalene’s veil. Here Mehoffer and the Kirsch & Fleckner workshop achieve an effect of fabric semi-transparency by a technique in which three elements act together: carefully selected antique glass with a slight condensation of colour; layered Schwarzlot applied in thin, semi-transparent coats fired one after another; and an intricately guided lead network of flowing, organically curved segments. The veil and robe are moreover richly decorated (brocade, an intricate pattern); the effect of fabric semi-transparency itself, however, cannot be asserted with certainty from the panoramic frame and requires verification with a close-up frame. The intended optical effect is the impression that the veil “transmits” the light of the background in a manner analogous to real fabric — something nineteenth-century stained glass (Mayer, Hardman), relying on flat fields of colour and surface painting, had not previously achieved.

St Michael is shown in the middle zone as the commander of the heavenly hosts — in armour, wings outspread, his lance raised, with which in the base zone he pierces the falling Lucifer. In the base zone, beneath him, the scene of Lucifer’s fall unfolds: the defeated angel cowers, surrounded by an infernal rabble (the motif of the “hound of hell”, breathing fire). The iconographic canon derives from Revelation 12:7–9 (factum est proelium in caelo — “there was war in heaven”) and from medieval three-realm legends. Mehoffer shows Michael not as a tender angel (the late-Baroque type), but as a figure of ethical decision and of justice on a cosmic scale.

St Anne, the mother of the Blessed Virgin Mary, is the patron saint of the chapel housing the window under discussion, which makes her presence programmatically central. Mehoffer shows her as a monumental figure, in a navy robe with a fleur-de-lis pattern (a heraldic motif of the House of Bourbon, but also a symbol of the Marian Trinity in the medieval tradition of piety). Beneath her name is a scene with Christ, his hands raised, and the dove of the Holy Spirit, together with a woman in a veil (Mary). On the available frames, by contrast, neither the attribute of the book nor the motif of “Anne teaching Mary to write” (the Anna docens type) is confirmed. In the composition of the window Anne functions as an axis of stability between two figures of action (George, Michael) and a figure of transformation (Magdalene). She is a figure of generational wisdom — of the beginning, the roots, the handing-on.

Mary Magdalene is shown in accordance with the concatenated hagiographic canon that combines three New Testament figures: Mary Magdalene (Luke 8:2; Mark 16:9), Mary of Bethany, sister of Lazarus (John 11), and the unnamed sinner of Luke 7:36–50. This identification, introduced by Pope Gregory the Great in his 33rd homily (591) and fixed for the whole of the Middle Ages, gives the figure of the Magdalene an iconographically rich set of attributes: the precious vessel of ointment (Luke 7:37–38), the sumptuous garments of a courtesan from her worldly past, the black veil of conversion and of mourning for Christ. Mehoffer employs all these elements, treating the Magdalene as a figure of transformation that remains visible — differently from the theatrical ecstatics of Ribera and Reni, in a contemplative manner close to Maurice Denis and Edmond Tigny.

The most poetic iconographic passage of the window is the crowning zone, in which two eagles are seated on the tracery canopies, turned towards the sun at the centre. This motif comes from the early Christian bestiary Physiologus (second–third century), where the eagle renews its youth when it gazes into the sun — identified with Christ (Ps 103:5: renovabitur ut aquilae iuventus tua, “thy youth shall be renewed like the eagle’s”). This motif, present in medieval bestiaries (the Aberdeen Bestiary, twelfth century), in the sculpture of Romanesque capitals and in Gothic stained glass, is taken up by Mehoffer in its Symbolist dimension and placed as the final conclusion of the window. The “symbolic ladder” — from the drama of combat, through ethical choices, towards metaphysical renewal through the contemplation of Christ-the-Sun — closes in this highest zone.

The deepest iconological achievement of the window lies in its consistent transformation of narrative into sign. The figures here are not “illustrations of the saints’ biographies”, but archetypal signs. George’s dragon is not zoology, but a symbol of chaos. Lucifer beneath Michael is not a specific fall, but a universal gesture of pride. The Magdalene’s vessel is not a prop, but the memory of the Easter morning. The eagles gazing into the sun — that is a pure symbol without narrative. This transposition of the whole programme from narrative into sign situates Mehoffer at the very centre of European Symbolism around 1909 — in a single line with Maurice Denis (définition du néotraditionnisme, 1890), Aristide Maillol and Karl Fryc (the German stained glass of that era).

The deliberate recourse to the early Christian bestiary Physiologus in the crowning zone is a programmatic gesture. Mehoffer shows that the renewal of twentieth-century sacred art need not stem from a rejection of tradition — it may be a return to the deepest layers of Christian semantics, before scholastic systematisation. The Physiologus — a text of the second–third century operating in a symbolic, allegorical, pre-dogmatic language — was for Symbolism around 1900 an almost canonical source (see Marcel Schwob, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Léon Bloy). Mehoffer inscribes the Fribourg cycle within this European movement of return to the sources of the Christian imagination.

The window should be read in the context of its place: the Chapel of St Anne is one of the oldest devotional centres of Fribourg Cathedral, connected with the cult of the Holy Family and with traditional local piety. Anne, the patron saint of “good marriage” and of parenthood, was in the Fribourg tradition especially venerated by the town’s craft and burgher communities. The window “Saints and Holy Women” is therefore not only a realisation of a general Catholic theology of holiness, but also a deliberate contribution to the cathedral’s local devotional ecosystem — an inscription of Mehoffer’s programme into the living topography of the church.

The year 1909 is for Mehoffer a moment of full artistic maturity in the Kraków dimension: together with Wyspiański (d. 1907), Malczewski and Stanisławski, he is one of the leading figures of the Polish school of turn-of-the-century art. The Fribourg window of this phase is produced in parallel with monumental Kraków works: the stained glass of St Mary’s Church (1908), the Bernardine Church (1907), and Wawel Cathedral (designs 1908–1910). In each of these ensembles Mehoffer continues a programme of archetypal, Symbolist hagiography — the same striving to transpose narrative into sign.

“Saints and Holy Women” is a monument of European rank, combining canonical hagiographic iconography with a radically Symbolist language of form. The introduction into the programme of the “cat-dragon” in place of the canonical heraldic dragon, of the motif of the Physiologus eagles as the final conclusion, and the virtuoso resolution of the technology of Mary Magdalene’s veil — these are three of the many solutions that place the window among the highest-ranking stained-glass works of the Belle Époque. The digital gigapixel documentation, produced by the Foundation for the Virtualisation of National Cultural Heritage in 2025, makes possible for the first time a detailed analysis both of the micro-textures of the antique glass in the dragon’s scales and of the semi-transparent technology of the veil — constituting material of key importance for studies of the Kirsch & Fleckner workshop in the period of its full technological maturity.