What a pane
Where in Pembroke can you find a weesle headed armadillo, a great gogle eyed beetle and a nocoonaca?
In the library, of course. The colourful stained glass window that runs the height of the stairwell in the library’s entrance shows these three curious critters and many more. Having been damaged in 2014, the window was returned to its former glory this week.
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Read on to find out more about the history of this remarkable artistic feature.
An old agreement
When Pembroke purchased the land on which the library now stands from Peterhouse, it was on the agreement that nothing was built that would overlook the Peterhouse Master's Lodge and garden. That was in 1861. In 2001 the local architects Freeland Rees Roberts extended the library and, in order to honour the agreement, they decided to commission stained glass features for the south-facing windows.
After interviewing artists from across Europe, the College chose the respected German artist Hans Gottfried von Stockhausen of the Mayer Studios in Munich. As well as producing an installation for the Yamada Room to commemorate Ted Hughes (1951), he was asked to create something for the entrance vestibule that would cover the full height of the stairwell.
Early botanists
Von Stockhausen took as his inspiration the works of two great English botanists, both Pembroke men.
Nehemiah Grew (1659) was one of the first people to study plants under a microscope. The windows take images and title pages from several of his works, including his Anatomy of Plants (1682). It was this book that offered the steel engraving showing a cross-section of the root of bugloss, which is the most prominent image in the windows. Grew also produced a catalogue of the Royal Society's collections, from which von Stockhausen took illustrations of animals, insects and shells.
These were complemented with images by William Turner (1526). Turner was the first student ever to study botany and zoology in England. His Herbal (1568) was the first systematic collection of such observations and was filled with woodcut images.
Ruin and repair
Hans Gottfried von Stockhausen was 81 years old when he accepted the original commission and the windows were installed in 2001. He died in 2010. Then last year, unexpectedly, one of the toughened glass panels spontaneously shattered. The cause of the breakage is still not known, although experts suspect that the heat of the sun may have caused the frame to change shape and exert pressure on the glass, or that a minute, imperceptible imperfection in the glass might have expanded in the heat.
Our librarian, Pat, gathered up the broken fragments and sent them to the Mayer Studios in the hope that someone could recreate the missing pane. However, the artists wanted to make sure that the colours were a perfect match and so asked that another of the panes was removed and sent over.
Months passed before, a week ago, it was returned. Also in the crate was a replacement for the broken pane, showing the title page of Turner’s ‘Anatomy of Fruits’. Pembroke’s maintenance team worked with a fitter from Cambridge Glass to ease the precious pane back into place – a delicate operation involving four steady hands and several ladders.
Everything is now safely in position and we hope you’ll agree that the overall effect is spectacular.
For more about Pembroke's library, see our website.