Armorial Pane of the City of Strasbourg

Around 1600, cities and guilds in the Upper Rhine and the Swiss lands kept a particular custom. To mark an alliance, a new building or plain goodwill, they gave one another small painted glass panels bearing their coats of arms, to be set into the windows of a town hall or a private house. This one carries the arms of the city of Strasbourg, a red diagonal band on white, and is dated 1606. It was made by an unknown German glass painter, in a craft that was then at its height along the Rhine, with Basel itself one of its centres.