Christ of the Sacred Heart

This stained glass is emblematic of Alexandre Cingria’s work as a glass painter and his talent as a colourist. He liked to incorporate unusual pieces of glass into his work (in this case, convex glass beads and mirror fragments), and painted the glass using a very freely applied grisaille scratched with his finger, the palm of his hand, a cloth, a feather or a brush, following a method reminiscent of his practice as a painter.

Born in Geneva, Alexandre Cingria was a painter, glass painter, theatre designer, mosaicist and writer. As a co-founder of the Groupe de Saint-Luc, he was heavily involved in the revival of Catholic religious art – Christ the King and Christ of the Sacred Heart being subjects he was particularly fond of. In Romont, he created the stained glass windows in the chapel of the Saint-Charles boarding school (1926–1929) and the high windows in the nave of the collegiate church (1938–1939).

This stained glass was made by Cingria to feature in the Swiss Pavilion at the international exhibition Arts et techniques dans la vie modern in Paris in 1937, a major event that also brought Picasso’s Guernica and Raoul Dufy’s La fée électricité to public attention. Although Alexandre Cingria worked mainly with the Chiara workshop in Lausanne, he produced this major work with the Kirsch & Fleckner workshop in Fribourg. The latter, founded by two young Germans at the end of the nineteenth century, is famous for having produced Józef Mehoffer’s stained glass windows in the collegiate church and future cathedral of Fribourg, a masterpiece of stained glass that fascinated the young Cingria and was a trigger for his own later career as a glass painter.