Stained glass windows with crows
This year we were asked to create four stained glass windows with crows for a staircase of a beautiful house in the castle hamlet of Bolsena.
At first, the request seemed somewhat original since in Western culture the crow is often associated with ominous messages and bad luck.
However, by doing some research we discovered that the crow is full of different, opposite interpretations, scattered in time and space.
There is an aspect that we find in various cultures where the crow is associated with a passage from one state to another. It symbolizes the transition from life to death, from ignorance to knowledge, from day to night.
While in Christian Europe ravens were associated with witches, as their faithful messengers, and with the devil, in Scandinavian countries, for example, the raven is the sacred symbol of Odin, powerful warrior god of the Vikings.
It is no coincidence that Odin’s two ravens are called Huginn (Thought) and Muninn (Memory) as their thinking is extremely elaborate and they are endowed with a deep and rare sense of memory. In the animal kingdom they stand out for their intelligence and like man they are among the very few who recognize their reflection in the mirror.
The request of the clients was to create very bright stained glass windows with crows. The crows had to sit on a branch and placed on a classic geometric background. A further request was to insert a rune that was repeated in the stained glass border.
For the small diamonds that divide the transparent background and some border pieces, we decided, in agreement with the clients, to use a stunning antique tobacco color Saint-Just glass rich of imperfections and bubbles typical of mouth blown glass.
Not only crows, but also owls, flamingos, doves etc, descover the stained glass with birds by IKO Studio.
