Michael Lassen, stained-glass artist, died on September 8th, aged 61
ALMOST nothing is known of the men who built the great medieval cathedrals. A mason’s mark chiselled on a column; a game of nine-men’s-morris scratched on a stone; a gargoyle’s half-human face, of foreman or master of works, are all that remind observers of the crowds of labouring souls who raised Canterbury or Winchester, Beauvais or Cologne.
The dangers of such projects were legion. Contemporary illustrations show cathedral spires collapsing, vaults caving in, high scaffolding keeling over in a chaos of planks and poles. Casualties were expected, and were many, though the fabric accounts often could not name them. In modern times the labour is no less perilous; but in the days of health-and-safety and hard hats, accidents are rare. Hence the horror in Durham when, on September 3rd, Michael Lassen fell from a ladder as he helped to fix a new stained-glass window in the south quire aisle of the cathedral. He died some days later in hospital.
Climbing up in the south quire to look at the traceries originally, he had found them heavily fissured, like all Durham’s ancient sandstone. Blocks were missing on the exterior, and one side of the main arch was worn away almost to a skeleton, as though two or three centuries of wild north-east weather had blown through it. But all the stone had been carefully stabilised before his work began.
The window was of the Transfiguration of Christ, made by Tom Denny, and one of the largest to be installed in Durham in modern times. Mr Lassen was working from top to bottom, fixing the glass he had leaded. He started with the small quatrefoil lights of the Holy Spirit and the crucifixion, proceeding down through the main panels of Christ and his followers on the mountain, with all the way the white shaft of God’s transfiguring light growing broader through the fire-and-storm colours of the glass. The four principal lights, nicknamed after the chief figures in them, were Cuthbert, Moses, Elijah and Michael; they became familiar friends. He was fitting a small panel at the bottom left-hand side, a pane of bruised blue glass that showed the broken and suffering about to be transformed by light, almost the last piece in the window, when he fell. He was not particularly high up, working at the ledge. But stone flags are unforgiving.
Mr Lassen had been called in late to lead and fix this window. The man originally contracted had fallen ill, and the deadline for the installation, the end of September, was fast approaching. Help was needed fast; Mr Lassen provided it, expertly and fully. The tight timetable troubled him; but he was not a keen marathon runner for nothing.
His training had been traditional, in the Government School of Stained Glass at Hadamar in Germany; though English, he had spent many childhood years in Bavaria. After working as a glazer and glass-restorer, he had turned to glass-painting and designing, gradually obtaining commissions in churches all over Britain. His own windows, at St Cadoc’s chapel in Cowbridge in South Wales, or in the Church of Sts Peter and Paul at Great Somerford in Wiltshire, showed a love of blocks of pure colour carefully contained within thick, angular leads, especially glowing blues and rich reds: the medieval way of glass. His figures, too, had a medieval solidity, dignity and stillness about them.
Lead and fire
The techniques needed to lead and fix his own glass had barely changed. He would stretch the H-section lead strips, or cames, to stop “creep” in the soft, ductile metal; cut them expertly straight with his pliers, so as to leave no gaps between them when they were moulded round the glass pieces; apply the hot chisel-tip of the soldering iron just long enough to melt the solder, not the lead, when joining the strips together. The double-layered and plated technique of leading Mr Denny’s glass, with the lines almost lost in the painting, was at first new to him, and correspondingly tricky. But by the time of the Durham project he had become an enthusiast, and all was going well until he fell.
A memorial service for him was held at the foot of the window while the scaffolding still covered it. Mr Lassen, who worked from Bristol, was barely known in Durham, although he had once had a studio at Worship Farm, not far away. To most of the people who attended, extending the human crowd in the bottom panels of the window, he was just “that nice chap” who had had the accident. But when September 25th came, the day of dedication, he was remembered in a different way. The clue lay in George Herbert’s poem “The Windows” which was sung as an anthem at evensong. Man was “a brittle crazy glass”:
Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford This glorious and transcendent place To be a window, through thy grace.
As the congregation pressed through afterwards into the south quire aisle they found the windows still wreathed in incense, like the cloud of God that had enveloped Jesus on the mountain. Through it shone the glass. Its golds and blues were smoky in the evening light, but the central column blazed white, like the transfiguration of a man; and of all men, named or un-named, whose lives and skills are embedded in the stone and glass of great cathedrals.
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