Mother and Child in Blue: Stained Glass for the City Chapel in Petrovac

Petrovac is a small town on the Montenegrin coast, between Budva and Bar, where the old mountain road comes down to the Adriatic. A 16th century Venetian fortress still guards its little harbour, and Roman mosaics have been found in the town. In 2007 we brought a new kind of light to its City Chapel.

A chapel in a garden

The City Chapel stands on a green slope: a simple house of pale stone with a red tile roof and a porch of white columns, among cypresses, olive trees and curving stone terraces, with the mountains rising behind. Inside, it needed windows that would comfort, not overwhelm.

2 windows, 1 language

We answered with 2 modern windows that speak the same language of color: deep cobalt, turquoise and sea blue, lit by bursts of gold, green and orange.

In the first, the Madonna holds the Child close. Her blue mantle wraps around both of them in one long curve, and their faces, drawn with only a few lines, lean together cheek to cheek. Around them the glass breaks into a circle of gold and blue, like a halo that has spread to fill the whole window.

In the second, Christ stands on the cross with His arms spread wide, His body a single pale form against a sky of blue. Rays of yellow and turquoise open behind Him like sunlight, and at His feet the blue glass runs in waves, like a river or the sea below the town.

The Madonna and Child Christ on the cross

Made in Sombor

The figures are kept simple on purpose. There are no painted shadows and no crowded details: the lead lines draw the faces and the folds, and the color does the rest. Every piece was cut, leaded and soldered in our studio in Sombor, Serbia, and the windows traveled down to the coast to their place in the chapel.

When the morning sun comes through, the blue of the Madonna's mantle falls across the floor and lies there like a piece of the sea.

See more of our sacred art and stained glass commissions, and the City Chapel in Budva, made the year before.

Chapel: City Chapel (Gradska kapela), Petrovac, Montenegro
Work: modern leaded stained glass windows, Madonna and Child and the Crucifixion
Fabrication: Stanisic Studio, Sombor, Republic of Serbia
Year: 2007