CODART Canon

Stained-Glass Windows and Cartoons of the St John’s Church in Gouda

Dirck Pietersz. Crabeth, Wouter Pietersz. Crabeth, Joachim Wtewael, and others, 1530 — 1603
St John's Church, Gouda

When you enter the St John’s Church in Gouda, the 72 stained-glass windows immediately draw your gaze upwards like a magnet and allow you to wander off into another world, filled with wonderful stories and images. They are among the oldest examples of stained glass in the Netherlands, and among the few that survived the Iconoclasm of 1566. After the Revolt in 1572, Catholic Gouda became Protestant in 1573. When the interior of St John’s Church was stripped of all Catholic elements, the stained-glass windows were spared and the protestants even continued to install stained glass of their own. In the St John’s Church we thus find both Catholic and Protestant windows: a unique situation. Unique is also that the full-sized working drawings (cartoons) of the windows, made by the glass painters following an initial design, have survived. They are still kept in the church today.

— Kristin Duysters, Curator of Ceramics and Glass, Paleis Het Loo, Apeldoorn