Ecce Agnus Dei – John the Baptist encountering Christ

The blue background of this window shows the figure of John the Baptist presenting Jesus to the crowd. In the centre of the medallion is the Saint, with a red halo and wearing a green tunic and a purple cloak. His face is turned towards the eight figures on his right who are watching the scene. His right arm points to Christ, who is dressed in a white tunic and a purple cloak. His halo is also red and bears three white rays, symbols of the cross. His gaze is directed upwards and his arms are folded over his chest. A scroll placed between the preacher and Christ bears the inscription ECCE AGNUS DEI, ‘Behold the Lamb of God’. Above the figures, the sky is symbolised by undulating white, red and yellow lines. The medallion is framed by a red segmented border and an outer ring of studded pearls. At the bottom, the border is intercepted by a green frieze with palmettes that form the upper segment of a star.

The three essential elements of the scene taken from the New Testament (John 1:29), the crowd, Christ and in the centre John the Baptist with his very explicit gesture summing up the whole scene, are represented in a concise and direct manner, typical of medieval iconography. The style, at the crossroads of Romanesque and Gothic art, is similar to Burgundian creations.

With the exception of the Rose window, this medallion is one of the few fragments to have survived the destruction of almost all the medieval stained glass in Lausanne Cathedral, which fell victim, among other things, to a fire in 1235, and then to acts of vandalism during the Burgundian Wars and the Reformation. It was used as a filler (repair piece to fill gaps) during a restoration of the cathedral’s great cosmological rose, where it was inserted around 1770 at the latest. Around 1891, the stained glass of the rose was removed by Edouard Hosch and transported to his workshop. Our fragment retains enough of the original elements to allow it to be linked, along with three other fragments, to a window dedicated to St John the Baptist. It was located in the eastern parts of the cathedral, built as early as 1195. The medallion is thus one of the oldest preserved stained glass windows in Switzerland. The fragments recovered from the rose were then placed in the lower windows of the south transept, below the rose window, where they remained until 1934. The broken green palmette frieze and the remnant of a yellow palmette at the bottom of the medallion are remnants of the original framing, when the medallion was part of the window dedicated to John the Baptist. The red and beaded ornamental borders date from the time the medallion was moved to the lower windows.