Beautiful Italian-style medieval mosaics - a scoop for Baltimore

I spent the past week reading numerous articles in the Baltimore Sun that chronicle the building and decoration of our church between 1885 and 1914.  The information found there is not always complete and perhaps not always accurate, but it does paint a picture of the various stages of construction.  Corroborating the information found in secondary sources with what can be found in primary sources may take a while.  One article that caught my eye relates to the five large mosaics in the apse of the church. 

 These five mosaics were installed in October 1896 and were supposedly made by a process which originated in Florence, Italy in the Middle Ages.  The features, folds or drapery and other larger parts are painted and vitrified in fire on larger pieces of opaque glass.  The gold background, the nimbi, and other minor parts of the figures were set in the usual mosaic style with small tesserae set together in numberless minute pieces.    

Corpus Christi may be the only known church in the United States to possess mosaics of this kind.  According to the Baltimore Sun of October 6, 1896, they were most definitely a ‘scoop’ in the United States:

“It will undoubtedly be conceded by all lovers and students of mural decoration who have had the advantage and good fortune to be able to study the glories of Venice, Florence and Rome, that no process yet fashioned or devised by the artistic skill of man for this most important province of decorative art can approach in rich effect or brilliant splendor the glass mosaics of which every fine examples are to be found in medieval Italy.  […] Notwithstanding the rapid and splendid growth of ecclesiastical art and architecture in America of late years, few important examples of mural mosaics are yet to be seen in the churches of the land, and it becomes a matter of congratulation to the city of Baltimore that there has recently been completed in one of the most beautiful and monumental of its Catholic churches, Corpus Christi, on Mount Royal Avenue, the Jenkins Memorial Church, a series of five large pictures, each measuring over five feet in width by eight feet in height, representing five of the great subjects in sacred history, the Incarnation and Passion of our Lord, His Resurrection and “Corpus Christi,” the Holy Eucharist."

The mosaics, just as the stained glass windows of the church, were prepared and installed by John Hardman and Co., a firm from Manchester well known for its ecclesiastical work in England. 

The mosaics exemplify the style of the Pre-Raphaelites, a movement that flowered in England in the 2^nd half of the 19^th century.  The artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, as it was initially called, were discontented with the lifeless academic style of painting that tried to imitate the art of the great artist Raphael and yearned to return to the more vivid and intense painting style of 15^th century Italian artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. [1],[2],[3]

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[1] Walking tour, p. 8.

[2] "Beautiful Mosaics: Splendid Examples of the Decorater's Art Placed in Position in Corpus Christi Catholic Church." Sun [Baltimore] 6 Oct. 1896: 7. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Web. 31 Jan. 2015.

[3] Gettinger, Steve, A Tour of Corpus Christi-Jenkins Memorial Church, p. 8. 1991. TS. Corpus Christi Church Archives, Baltimore, Md.