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Revolutionizing Stained Glass
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# : |
18898 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1991 |
1,530 Words |
| Author
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Gary Lee
Gary Lee is a Washington-based journalist who occasionally
writes on the arts. |
One crisp day last September, Eric Bonte, taking a break from his job in a Paris suburb, flew to the Ivory Coast to visit the largest stained-glass church in the world. The newly raised Yamoussoukro Basilica, rising more than thirty stories above the rain forests, is fast becoming one of the African continent's biggest tourist attractions. But Bonte's interest in the spectacular dome was more than the curiosity of a casual tourist. He built it.
From his small, cluttered workshop in Nanterre, a village on the outskirts of Paris, Bonte masterminded the project, which had been commissioned by Ivory Coast President Felix Houphouet-Boigny. Commandeering a team of sixty artists and craftsmen, the 34-year-old Frenchman joined forces with an artist friend to design and construct the basilica's stained glass.
Breakneck Pace
Altogether they made a total of 3,100 brightly colored windows--enough to cover eighty thousand square feet the surface of twelve and a half football fields. The panels were then transported to Africa by ship and pieced together. To finish the order in the eighteen months allotted--the aging Houphouet-Boigny wanted it completed before he died--Bonte worked at a breakneck pace. Before his sojourn in September, he had had no time to see it all in one piece. Even then, following the grand inauguration ceremony, complete with a speech by Pope John Paul, the busy young craftsman had to rush back to Paris. He already had a new idea on the drawing board.
Bonte is revolutionizing the art of making stained glass. At France Vitrail International, the small business he runs in Nanterre, he is trying to take a custom that was mastered by French artisans eight centuries ago and breathe new life into it. Historically, French stain glasses practiced their craft in churches and produced some of the world's wonders in stained-glass architecture, such as those in the cathedral at Chartres and the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. Bonte has worked on some French churches, too, including the restoration of the St. Die Cathedral in eastern France and others in the coastal area of Brittany.
However, at Vitrail (pronounced vee-tray, it means stained glass in French), the accent is not on restoring antique stained-glass windows but on creating new ones and finding novel uses for them. "What we would like to do," said Claude Bonte, Eric's wife and an employee of the company, "is to get rid of the idea that stained glass is exclusively a religious
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