„…lights are exchanging on the material membrane dividing time from real history: glass. “, are the words by the poet Tonko Maroević. While building the God's house, people were leaving time at outside border and at inner border they felt as participating in real history. The role of connective tissue was always played by light. Although the traces of painted glass - that glass which will later develop into stained glass - can be found already in Roman time, and although the first stained glass in the real sense of the word is found in Europe in Germany in 10th century, the peak of this technique of transforming light falls in the gothic period – when building constructions enabled almost general opening of walls. The inner places of European cathedrals are indeed huge kaleidoscopes which change according to the unrolling of the day and of year's seasons. The glass, coloured by metal oxides, was combined with lead, and that whole network stimulatingly combined with the artistic ideas of medieval art masters.
Gothics did not die out with the arrival of Renaissance - the new age, but like a subterranean river remained preserved during future centuries, either as a encoded, solemn, and especially sacred style or as a Romanesque connection to the late baroque, classicist and Biedermeier creation. Her new apogee is the period of historicism - the end of the 19th century. But, this new peak – especially in developed milieus was announced much earlier: in the first half of that century. The depiction which Croatian Post chose to mark and wish a happy Christmas 2015 is such a historicist one. It can be seen on a stained glass in the sanctuary of the Cathedral in Zagreb and was ordered by the cardinal Jurij Haulik who had it done in Munich, from 1843-1845 at the Institution for Glass Painting of King Ludwick I of Bavaria. Its authors are famous painters Max Ainmiller, Heinrich Maria von Hess and Wilhelm von Kaulbach. The same institute and the same authors were also working on the cathedrals in Regensburg, Köln, Glasgow, Petersburg… The stained glass from Zagreb is representative - it is a world example of its function, technique and time.
Cardinal Juraj Haulik (1788-1869), Slovak by birth and Croat by his life and work, was the first Croatian archbishop; in 1852 he managed to take the archbishopric of Zagreb out from the Hungarian frame. At two occasions he was Croatian viceroy. He was opposed to any idea of the South Slavic union („a Balkan Babylon“), envisaging the future of Croatia within the Habsburg Monarchy Confederation. He is therefore often regarded as an opponent to Josip Juraj Strossmayer. However, far greater is the similarity in their huge contributions to Croatian state. At the Parliament session held on 23 October 1843, as the viceroy and president of the Parliament, Haulik spoke out a famous sentence“: „It is a unanimous wish of all classes and segments of our society that the national language be introduced in all businesses“. A supporter of Illyric ideas and of the viceroy Jelačić, the builder of the church an and a monastery for nuns (whom he brought to Croatia) on Frankopanska Street, the founder of the Literary Society of St Hieronymus, engaged in improving Croatian education system and especially its social dimension, a co-author of the park Maksimir (which at his time was known as Jurjaves, and for which he also ordered from the sculptor Fernkorn a statue of St. George, which today stands next to the national theatre), a generous sponsor of innumerable economic and cultural initiatives, he was indeed a great character in Croatian history. With its joint issue with Slovakia in 1999 Croatian Post dedicated him a stamp. Since the numbering of his merits on this occasion is focused only to his contribution to the Cathedral, apart from stained glass at least the sculptures by the famous sculptor Sickinger deserve to be mentioned, next to new organ, lighting…etc.
After the period of top orders of world class quality art incorporated into the Cathedral, there came times which showed much more ignorance and bad taste for culture. The stained glass on this year's Christmas stamp with this wonderful painting and its message full of light is thus intended to remind us that the holiday is enrooted in heritage but also that the heritage first of all is a debt.
Željka Čorak
