Stained-Glass Window with Scenes of the Passion

Around 1406 the Cistercian abbey of Rein, near Graz, built a new Chapel of the Holy Cross, and this window comes from it. Its two narrow lancets hold two moments of the Passion. In one, Christ stands in a purple robe with his arms drawn to his chest while a man in red points at him, a scene identified as Christ before Pilate. In the other he is bound to a red column against a deep blue ground and scourged. Most of the height goes to towers, gables and pinnacles. Medieval writers read a church as the Heavenly Jerusalem, whose walls the Bible describes as precious stones. A historian of the chapel sees the deep red and blue glass as its rubies and sapphires. The dark lines between the pieces are the original lead strips. The window is on long-term loan from the MAK, Vienna's Museum of Applied Arts.