Researchers have identified stained glass panels depicting “Christ's ancestors” at Canterbury Cathedral in England as being some of the oldest in the world.
but for over 30 years, there has been an unsolved mystery over the cathedral s most famous windows, the ancestors of christ. we thought that the earliest of those dated to about 1176 but in the 1980s, a wonderful art historian, called madeline caviness, suspected these figures were much older. she thought at the time that nobody would ever be able to prove it. she was just going from a stylistic analysis. a team from university college london have been analysing some of the ancestor series. we use a non invasive technique that sends a beam onto the surface of the glass. this beam of x rays interacts with the material and re emit another radiation that is detected and processed by the instruments. studying the chemical composition of the glass, we are able to understand the periods in which it was produced
and also its origin. so what we found out is that the glass from the ancestor series, it is older than we originally thought. so we proved an hypothesis put forward by madeleine caviness in 1987. choral singing. this new research estimates that the windows could be half a century older than previously thought, making them among the oldest in situ stained glass in the world. to now find that she has been proved right is just so thrilling, you know? decades later. that is so wonderful because that art historian is still alive, and to call her up and after all these decades later, to say to her, you were right, and we could prove it , that is fantastic.
but for over 30 years, there has been an unsolved mystery over the cathedral s most famous windows, the ancestors of christ. we thought that the earliest of those dated to about 1176, but in the 1980s, a wonderful art historian, called madeline caviness, suspected these figures were much older. she thought, at the time, that nobody would ever be able to prove it. she was just going from a stylistic analysis. a team from university college london have been analysing some of the ancestor series. we use a non invasive technique that sends a beam onto the surface of the glass.
this beam of x rays interacts with the material and re emit another radiation that is detected and processed by the instruments. studying the chemical composition of the glass, we are able to understand the periods in which it was produced and also its origin. so what we found out is that the glass from the ancestor series, it is older than we originally thought. so we proved an hypothesis put forward by madeleine caviness in 1987. choral singing. this new research estimates that the windows could be half a century older than previously thought, making them among the oldest in situ stained glass in the world. to now find that she has been