Church windows – the people of earlier times saw them as gates to heaven, as a passage from the material to the immaterial world. Even those who are far removed from religious ideas of levitation and the afterlife, the glass art in the houses of God leaves no one untouched. When points of light dance over heavy stone floors as if through a kaleidoscope, when the atmosphere in the room changes depending on the time of day. Whether in the pictorial traditions of Gothic masters or in enigmatic abstractions, especially in Munich, the city with world-famous glass art workshops, there is a lot to discover in the churches.
Secret writing from nails
“He carried his cross and went out to the so-called skull height, which is called Golgotha in Hebrew / There they crucified him and with him two others, one on each side, with Jesus in the middle.” This excerpt from the St. John Passion is written on the huge glass portal in front of the Sacred Heart Church in Neuhausen, built by the Munich architect Allmann Sattler Wappner, inaugurated in 2000. However, you cannot really read the crucifixion text there because it is open encoded extremely complex way. This secret script was invented especially for the Sacred Heart of Jesus by the British artist Alexander Beleschenko. Nails as symbols of the tools of the crucifixion are formed into pictorial symbols and are reminiscent of the Sumerian cuneiform writing, like prints of styluses with a triangular cross-section in a fresh blue tone.
Detail of the glass facade of the Sacred Heart Church in Lachnerstrasse in Neuhausen.
(Photo: Catherina Hess)
Beleschenko uses two sheets of glass, the nails are blue on the outside and transparent on the inside. Three to four nails are each choreographed into a grid of many blue fields. The master brain of a computer has translated the Bible text into this world of symbols. The technology used in this glass art was also incredibly complex. Printing glass with raised enamel colors, Beleschenko had developed this method in the nineties together with the experts from the Mayer’schen Hofkunstanstalt, and now he and the world-renowned Munich workshop were able to demonstrate all their skills at this fascinating portal.
Herz-Jesu-Kirche, Lachnerstraße 8, www.erzbistum-muenchen.de/pfarrei/herz-jesu-muenchen
Spherical lungs
Years may have passed after the pandemic, and yet you will probably never be able to look at these choir and oratorio windows of the Holy Cross Church without prejudice. They were created on the basis of more than 1000 thorax images. When the Munich-based photo and video artist Christoph Brech came up with the idea for this extraordinary glass art, a virus that was rampant worldwide and attacking the lungs was hardly imaginable. A pulmonologist had once given him the X-rays, they probably came from TBC series examinations or were taken before operations.
A pulmonologist once let Christoph Brech take the pictures from which he designed the window.
(Photo: Wolfgang Pulfer)
The Memento Mori was not inscribed in these pale blue and spherical-white neo-antique glasses, which were created in a very complex process in the traditional Schwabing workshop of Gustav van Treeck, from the start. More like being touched by the inner beauty and vulnerability of people. These pairs of lungs act like a host of seraphim striving upwards. For Christoph Brech there is also the idea of the breath that God breathed into his creation. From the breath, which is the seat of the soul. His own chest image is also somewhere in this prayer of 1000 glass souls.
Heilig-Kreuz-Kirche, Gietlstraße 2, open daily from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. www.hl-kreuz-giesing.de
Calculation aid from the astrophysicist
Those who seek consolation often direct their steps into a house of God. St. Florian, Catholic Church on the Human Rights Square in the Messestadt Riem, is a good place for such meditative moments. This is mainly due to the central glowing glass artwork by the Berlin artist Hella Santarossa. The 120 square meter work, at the time of its creation in 2005 the largest sacred glass window in Europe, characterizes the simple church interior designed by Florian Nagler with its bright, light colors and the asymmetrically placed cross that seems to float. “The resurrection” is what Santarossa called this window picture.
Church window designed by the glass artist Hella Santarossa in the Church of St. Florian in the Messestadt Riem.
(Photo: Florian Peljak)
The artist installed special Plexiglas tubes in the recesses, which also capture light from outside. This should show how death is turned into life. That’s how she described it herself. An astrophysicist has calculated for her what the angle of incidence has to be so that a beam hits the center of the altar exactly on St. Florian’s Day. Santarossa, who also designed the small red Florian window on the left and the blue St. Mary window on the right of the altar, wanted to have the central image in view when it was created. In a specially rented hall she was therefore pulled over the glass surface by helpers on a mobile scaffolding according to their instructions, spreading the ceramic, fusible yellow paint with giant brushes lying or kneeling directly from above. That seemed a bit chaotic. But she had a plan. Fortunately, the fragile construct survived the transport to an Austrian industrial glassworks almost unscathed. The local pastor once called the picture an “explosion of joy”. It works. Even when you need consolation.
St. Florian in the Messestadt Riem, Platz der Menschenrechte 2, www.sankt-florian.org
Rarity from the late Gothic
Stained glass windows were of great value in the Middle Ages because of their costly manufacture and their luminosity, which has been compared to that of precious stones. Today they are precious thanks to the skill with which they were once created. A special rarity, unique in Munich, can be found in the castle chapel of the Blutenburg in Obermenzingen: the glass paintings there from the late Gothic period have been preserved – a rarity – as a complete cycle.
The historic windows in the Blutenburg Palace Chapel.
(Photo: Stephan Rumpf)
Eight picture panels, divided into 32 individual windows, show in the lower part the story of the Passion from the entry of Christ into Jerusalem to his resurrection and the annunciation of the angel to Mary. In the upper part, Duke Sigismund, the founder of the castle chapel, which was built between 1488 and 1497, had coats of arms attached. They should identify the House of Wittelsbach as a member of the European high nobility. Made between the 15th and the first quarter of the 16th century, these glass paintings document an intermediate form between the monumental church glazing of earlier centuries and the later cabinet glass painting. They are still composed of individual, solid-colored pieces of glass, but they already have internal drawings made of black solder, for example, to be able to design creases in clothing or faces in more detail. The more than 500-year-old stained glass, stylistically reminiscent of the paintings by the late Gothic master Jan Polack, is currently being restored for a good 30,000 euros.
Castle Chapel, Blutenburg, Obermenzing, daily from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., www.blutenburg.de
6000 shades
Detail from a window of the Christ Church in Neuhausen.
(Photo: Florian Peljak)
He moved the returning Christ as ruler of the world on a rainbow, his feet on the globe, shows excerpts from his life, took care of change and redemption. The glass artist Helmut Ammann (1907 – 2001) created glowing parables on the three choir windows of the Christ Church in Neuhausen. He composed the coloring and dramatic imagery from up to 6000 glass tones. Red tones can be found in the tongue of the healed as well as in the wounds of Jesus after he was deposed from the cross or as inflamed, moving hearts with Mary and Magdalena next to them. Amman used yellow and orange more sparsely. They appear in the “Heavenly City”, the bread for “feeding the five thousand”, in the “Tree of Knowledge”, literally falling towards you as stars at the beginning of creation. These are scenes that flow into one another and yet stand for themselves, in which the colors alone tell stories. “Glass windows are a testament of my child’s soul”, he is supposed to have said once.
The choir windows of the Christ Church are not the only work by Ammann in Munich. The colorful lead glass windows of the Luther Church in Giesing also come from him. But in none of the windows he had previously created did Erich Kasberger, friend, connoisseur and administrator of Ammann’s artistic estate, once said that he had devised such an expressive, brightly colored, almost poppy world of images as in the Christ Church.
Christ Church, Neuhausen, Dom-Pedro-Platz 5, opening times at www.evnn.de