The Ninefold Rose

The rose had been on the fabric committee’s list since 1946, which is a long time for anyone to live with a window that lets the weather in. When we finally got the scaffold up in the spring of 2019 the problem was not the glass at all. It was the ferramenta. The original iron had been packed into the stone with lead and had been rusting outward ever since, and rust occupies more room than iron does. Every one of the nine lights was under compression from its own frame.

That changes the job. You are no longer conserving glass, you are conserving glass while dismantling the thing that is breaking it, and the two have to happen in an order that never leaves a panel unsupported. We worked from the outside lights inward, two per season, and each panel came down under a rubbing taken the day before so we would know exactly where it had been.

What we found in panel 22

Panel 22 had no medieval glass in it whatsoever. Someone in the 1870s had replaced the whole panel in a passable imitation and then, to be fair to them, recorded that they had done so — on a lead flag soldered inside the border, which is more honesty than most of that century managed. We have left their flag in and added our own beside it.

The replacement glass we cut for the losses is deliberately a shade brighter than what surrounds it. That is a conservation decision, not an aesthetic one. A repair that matches perfectly on the day it goes in becomes a lie within twenty years, when it has weathered differently from the glass around it and nobody can tell any more which is which.

The four quarries

In four places the Victorian restorer had reassembled fragments in the wrong order. We know because the paint runs off the edge of one piece and continues on a piece two quarries away. Correcting it took a fortnight of laying fragments out on the bench under raking light and photographing every arrangement before moving anything. The cathedral archive now holds the whole sequence.