VENTUS SPIRITUS
Breath of the wind

The word "stained glass" comes from the French vitrage (derived from the Latin vitrum), which means "glass", "working on the skylight". It was the possibility of creating a color transformation of light that gave rise to the art of stained glass, "dessert for the human eye."

Probably, every person, picking up a piece of colored glass, will look through it at the light. What if there are a lot of these pieces, and they are processed and assembled into a single combination with an understanding of the color scheme, the work of shadows and penumbra? We will get a stained glass window that brings a little fantasy and dreams to life.

The stained glass window is close to a mosaic that originated thousands of years ago. The advent of glassblowing in the 1st millennium BC gave rise to "games with light." Stained glass was widely used in the architecture of Byzantium, Medieval Europe, and the Eastern kingdoms. The use of stained glass in Gothic churches "lightened" the oppressive and majestic atmosphere. Although stained glass is very common in Byzantine Orthodoxy, there are few stained glass windows in Russia due to the architectural features of the cold climate. The exception is the churches of St. Petersburg (for example, St. Isaac's Cathedral, 1858).

The beginning of stained glass can be considered the use thousands of years ago of thin translucent cuts of stone in a mosaic installed "in the light". The advent of glassblowing and glass coloring made it possible to create glass panels in which glass was bonded with clay, cement, iron, and lead... In the second half of the 19th century, Louis Comfort Tiffany proposed wrapping each piece of glass with a thin copper ribbon, and then soldering it with tin solder. This technique not only simplified the work with the pieces of the "frozen rainbow", but also allowed them to give a variety of three-dimensional shapes.