God Father

The window is executed in a late Art Nouveau idiom with a marked tendency towards early Art Deco: the organic line gives way to axial symmetry, the colour mosaic becomes denser and more geometric, and the tendril ornament coexists with the elegant, classicising lettering of the inscription. This is a chancel idiom, distinct from the exuberant, floral Art Nouveau of the aisle windows (The Martyrs, 1899/1900; Saints and Holy Women, 1909/1910).

The window’s palette is composed of six dominant tones: royal violet (#4B2E83) and deep ultramarine (#0F2F8F) — the colours of the cosmic dignity of God the Father; turquoise (#1FB7A6) in the halo; gold (intense silver stain) in the attributes, the sun and the stars; ruby (#B0002A) and carmine (#C1121F) in the flames of the burning bush; and luminous white (#F2F2F2) in the face of God the Father and in the flowers of the garden. These colours do not describe matter; they build up an aura — a perceptual category designed for the theophany.

Mehoffer’s most daring and, at the same time, most original formal decision is to place at the centre of the window the monumental face of God the Father — a face occupying a substantial part of the composition, frontal, hieratic, almost inhuman in scale. In Western iconography God the Father is traditionally shown as a full figure (the Maiestas Domini type, the Romanesque Pantocrator) or as a bust in glory (from the fifteenth century onwards) — a full-scale face on the scale of a window is a rarity. Mehoffer boldly ventures into unprecedented territory, situating God the Father within the category of iconic theophany: the face is not a portrait but a revelation.

The central figure of God the Father is shown as a monumental face in glory, surrounded by a cosmic order: the sun on one side, the moon on the other, the stars scattered across the vault of the sky. God the Father does not create the world with a gesture of the hand (the canonical Genesis Creatio type); the world emerges from His gaze. This solution is iconographically close to the Eastern, Neoplatonic tradition of theophany (Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor) — God as the source of all being, from which the order of creation radiates.

Around the face runs an inscription in French, referring to the Mosaic revelation at the burning bush (Ex 3:14):

JE SUIS CELUI QUI SUIS “I am who I am (Ex 3:14 — God’s revelation of His own Name).”

The name of God in the Tetragrammaton YHWH (“I am”) is the most fundamental theological revelation of the Old Covenant, taken up by the patristic tradition (Augustine, Thomas Aquinas) as the key to divine ontology. Mehoffer inscribes this name within the monumental frame of the window, making it God’s own signature on the founding act of the world.

Beneath the face of God the Father spreads a cloud of winged angel heads — a rhythm of repeated heads each with a pair of little wings, known canonically in the iconographic tradition as putti / cherubs (a canonical iconography running from the Trecento through the Quattrocento to the Baroque). Mehoffer conducts the rhythm of these heads with musical regularity, turning the cloud into an angelic symphony around the Creator.

The middle zone holds the burning bush — a direct illustration of the Mosaic revelation from the Book of Exodus 3:1–6. According to the biblical text, the bush “burned with fire, yet was not consumed” — the paradox of a theophany of fire that reveals rather than destroys. In Mehoffer’s hands the burning bush is at once a red-and-gold explosion of flames and a lush, blossoming vegetal Art Nouveau ornament. This duality — fire as flower — is an iconographically bold solution, joining biblical literalness with Symbolist sublimation.

The plinth zone is filled with an expansive Art Nouveau garden: large, stylised roses with red and pink petals, dense green foliage and climbing branches. Among the flowers walk white animals with the silhouette of greyhounds/dogs (one with its head raised, as if howling); in the upper band of the plinth appear pink, woolly forms shot through with little flames (perhaps a flock of sheep). This is an image of the created world — a garden of life, the completion of the theme of God the Father the Creator.

The white animals among the roses have the silhouette of greyhounds/dogs; together with the floral frieze at the bottom they complete the image of the garden of creation.

The inscription Je suis celui qui suis (Ex 3:14) is the iconological axis of the whole window. This name — in Hebrew YHWH, in Greek Egō eimi ho ōn, in Latin Ego sum qui sum — marks the turning point of biblical ontology: God reveals Himself neither as one of the gods (paganism) nor as a primary philosophical principle (Heraclitus, Parmenides), but as I Am — as the very fact of being in its pure, primary form. Thomas Aquinas develops this intuition in the theory of ipsum esse subsistens (“the very act of existence as a subject”): God is not a being among beings but the act of existence from which all beings draw. Mehoffer inscribes this most speculative thesis of Catholic metaphysics within the visible, monumental frame of the window.

The choice of the burning bush (Ex 3:1–6) as the compositional centre of the lower part of the window is not accidental. The burning bush is an icon of the fundamental paradox of revelation: God reveals Himself through a fire that reveals yet does not destroy — unlike the pagan theophanies of fire (Zeus, Indra, Vulcan), which were destructive punishments or sacrificial furnaces. The bush of Moses is illumination without consumption. To this theology Mehoffer adds an Art Nouveau element: the bush not only burns but also blossoms — fire as flower, revelation as flowering. This inscribes the biblical paradox within the language of the Symbolist aesthetic of the Belle Époque.

Within the programme of the triptych of the Trinity, “God the Father” functions as a typological prelude for the two neighbouring windows. The burning bush anticipates the Immaculate Conception of Mary; the garden of creation (roses, animals) points to God as the source of life, completed in the work of the Son and the Spirit (see the Marian liturgy, in which the burning bush is read as a figure of the virginal Immaculate). These typological anticipations form the clasp binding the three windows of the triptych into a single programme.

In 1918 Mehoffer is forty-nine and at the height of his artistic maturity. The experience of the war — which leaves its mark on the neighbouring window “Nicholas of Flüe” (1918–1919) — shapes the programme of a theology of peace and divine order, of which the chancel triptych is the supreme expression. “God the Father” is therefore a window of the post-war restoration of order — a programmatic affirmation of God’s presence in a world that had only just passed through four years of mass slaughter.

Mehoffer’s “God the Father” is a monument of European rank, one of the most ambitious theophanic windows of the twentieth century. It joins an unprecedented iconographic solution (the monumental face of God the Father as the focus of the composition) with a profound theological programme (a ladder from the cosmic absolute to the concreteness of the covenant, the inscription “I am who I am” as an ontological axis). The gigapixel digital documentation, carried out by the Foundation for the Virtualisation of National Cultural Heritage in 2025, makes possible for the first time a detailed analysis of the modelling of the face of God the Father (a key workshop point of the whole Fribourg cycle) and of the micro-details of the garden of creation (roses, white animals, floral frieze) — data critical to the study of sacred art in interwar Europe.