A glazier has been given this photograph as the cartoon for a single chapel window. The window must still be that picture: same crop, same camera height, same distance to the subject, same place for every person and object. Nothing is rearranged to look more sacred or more symmetrical.
Lead cames follow the large contours — jaw, collar, sleeve, horizon, doorframe — and stop short of tracing every wrinkle. Between the cames the glass is mouth-blown, slightly uneven in thickness, with tiny seeds and faint reams. Skin is warm flesh-tinted pot-metal; clothing keeps the original colours but as saturated cathedral glass; hair becomes darker glass with a little silver stain for the lights. Eyes and lips are vitreous enamel painted on the interior surface, not cartoon symbols and not photographic texture glued on.
Daylight comes through the window from behind, so the whole image is backlit. Inside the nave, a stone sill cuts the bottom of the frame and dust hangs in the beam. The far edges of the photograph become the window's iron armature, not a cropped photo sitting in a frame.
The result is a photograph of that window, not a stained-glass filter over a portrait, not a mosaic of squares, and not an illustration of a church.
