Stained glass roundel with triple Incoronation

This stained glass window is an assembly of original twelfth-century fragments from one or more of the windows in the choir of the abbey of Saint-Denis, with some nineteenth-century pieces made by Alfred Gérente, who in 1850 was in charge of restoring the medieval stained glass at Saint-Denis. The original windows, commissioned by Abbot Suger – a great patron, who was responsible for renovating the church and enriching its treasury with extraordinary liturgical vessels in gold and precious stones – adopted a complex iconographic programme, with the Tree of Jesse, scenes from the childhood of Christ and historical subjects related to Charlemagne. The pastiche now in Turin most probably shows the coronation of Pepin the Short with his sons Charlemagne and Carloman. In the second half of the nineteenth century, historians, scholars and collectors throughout Europe became fascinated with the Middle Ages, and this explains why the work on show here was made. It is a faithful copy of the medieval stained glass window in Saint-Denis, which was dispersed and is now in the Glencairn Museum in Bryn Athyn (Pennsylvania, USA). The tondo with the Triple Coronation, which Gérente made for commercial purposes, soon entered Marcello Galli Dunn’s collection of objets d’art and was acquired by the Museum in Turin in 1888