That is especially true of the thirteenth century glass windows as seen,
for example, in the Cathedrals of York, Lincoln, Westminster,
Canterbury, Chartres, Rheims, and in Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle,
Paris. Modern art with all its boasting cannot begin to make anything
comparable to that antique glass made and put in place by faith and love
long before Columbus discovered America. There are tiny bits of it in
this country as a result of the relic hunting of our soldiers in the
World's War. Many of them got a fragment of the shattered glass of
Rheims, "petrified color" deep sky blue, ruby, golden green, and sent it
home to a sweetheart, a wife or sister to be mounted on a ring or set in
a pin.

The donors for the most part of the glass of the thirteenth century
Cathedrals, were guilds at that time. For the Cathedral of Chartres
e.g. the drapers and the furriers gave five windows, the porters one,
the tavern-keepers two, the bakers two.

In Dante's time glass-making reached its climax and then the curve began
to decline, until in the eighteenth century and in the early part of the
nineteenth century glass-making reached its lowest point.

Great as was Dante's day in the efficiency and education promoted by the
Guild system--Dante himself was a member of it--the achievement of his
era in architecture was the "most notable perhaps because what happened
there epitomizes all that was done elsewhere and the nature of what was
accomplished is precisely that which informed the whole body of medieval
achievement." (The Substance of Gothic, p. 137.)

In the course of the century that gave birth to Dante, architecture rose