On a sunny morning late last year, an all-star team of stained glass experts prepared to enter an 1894 grave in Woodlawn Cemetery that had been opened only once in the past century.
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The mausoleum housed the remains of José María Muñoza Panamanian-born New York businessman and son of a Spanish general. The grave robbers were five stained glass conservators and art historians conducting a survey of some 1,200 stained glass windows that had been installed in private mausoleums in Woodlawn from 1878 to the present.
Woodlawn, in the Bronx, encompasses 160 rolling acres adorned with 1,300 private family mausoleumsincluding extravagant Gilded Age temples erected for captains of industry, robber barons and the simply very rich. These titans of opulence and their spouses often spent lavishly on adorning their final resting places — even if the interiors weren’t meant to be seen by anyone but friends and family.
As soon as the team entered the mausoleum, screams could be heard bouncing off the stone walls. Experts They had found a variety of stained glass that none of them had seen before.
On the back wall of the tomb, behind the stone sarcophagus, a jeweled orb of blue crystal protruded from the window.
“I’m freaking out!” said Liberty Stained Glass Conservation curator Brianne Van Vorst. “This is crazy!”
“Holy cow! Look at the three-dimensionality!” exclaimed Lindsy R. Parrott, executive director and curator of the Neustadt, a major collection of stained glass by master artist Louis Comfort Tiffany.
“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” said Drew Anderson, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The yearlong survey, conducted under the guidance of Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, curator of American decorative arts at The Met, will include a condition assessment and archival research of every stained glass window in the Woodlawn’s diverse collection.
Woodlawn is virtually a museum of stained glass techniques and styles from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But until now, the collection has not been studied in depth. So the team conducting the survey is cherishing the opportunity to see so many long-hidden works of art in their original context.
Before the last quarter of the 19th century, stained glass was traditionally created by painting and tinting the surface of white and colored glass. Reflections from pale yellow to deep orange were achieved by applying silver nitrate to the back of the panel and firing it. Beginning in the Gilded Age, Tiffany and John La Farge revolutionized American stained glass with their use of opalescent glass, characterized, Parrott explained, by “an inner luster and milky translucency.”
Tiffany introduced glass in a wide palette of colors along with glass of different textures and opacities to create detailed painterly compositions admired for their painterly effects. The painting itself was kept to a minimum.
Woodlawn has at least two La Farge windows and more than 60 Tiffany windows, and the survey has resulted in the identification of unsigned Tiffany works. The survey is also illuminating dark corners of the stained glass industry.
“There were a lot of other studios that were producing superlative work,” Parrott said.
But the survey has unearthed many unsolved mysteries, such as the orb that stands out in the Muñoz mausoleum, whose creator is unknown.
For conservators, the priority is to determine which of the stained glass windows at Woodlawn need urgent attention.
“Most of these stained glass windows have never been preserved, they are intact,” said Susan Olsen, Woodlawn’s director of historic services. “It’s important for all cemeteries to know that the initial approach with a conservator is very key.”
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