Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis, Loretto Chapel, and Stained-Glass Speculations

[OlDoinyo]

Santa Fe, New Mexico is home to many historic structures, and two of the most celebrated are associated with its first Catholic Archbishop, one Jean-Baptiste Lamy. They are the Romanesque Revival Cathedral and what is now called the Loretto Chapel, a French Neo-Gothic structure, a few blocks to the south. The Loretto Chapel is also home to the famous "miracle staircase," but I will not go into that here (if you are interested, check out my Reddit post on the topic.)

 

The cathedral was built of local limestone between 1867 and 1886. During a recent visit I captured two UV views of the exterior with the Sony A900 at ISO 100 and the Tamron 17mm lens. Shooting quarters were very tight and some heavy perspective correction was needed, but the 17mm lens had just enough FOV to pull it off. The filter was U360/S8612 and display intent was BGR:

 

 

 

The statue in the second photo is meant to depict Kateri Tekakwitha, one of the few Mohawks to be canonized as a saint (although the home of the Mohawks was 2000 km to the east--I don't quite get that.)

 

The Loretto Chapel is difficult to get a good photographic angle on, but I tried my best from the north side using the same gear:

 

 

It is not particularly a good picture, and badly afflicted with lens flare, but it does show the basic details.

 

I had hoped that, like some of the European posters here, I would be able to come up with some interior UV shots of the structures, but I was largely thwarted in this--the owners of both buildings have done a very good job of excluding UV light from the interiors, and there is less to work with than in many of my outdoor night shots. Here is a 10-minute exposure of the interior of the cathedral at ISO 6400:

 

 

The skylights, which let in copious visible light, are almost dark except for some residual long-wavelength leakage. They may have been covered in polycarbonate. The interior lights are presumably LED--totally blacked out in this frame. The brightest light source comes from behind some glass in the transept, perhaps some sort of side office with fluorescent lighting. Getting a good image under these circumstances would have required hours of work and stacking images, and I did not have time for that.

 

Some light did come in through the stained-glass windows, and I changed to the Steinheil and the Baader U2 filter to pursue that angle. As I did not take any visible photos of the windows, I will instead provide links to publicly viewable reference images taken by others. (I do not have any rights to these, so I will not directly post them here.)

 

From the Loretto Chapel:

 

(Reference image)

 

(Reference image)

 

From the cathedral:

 

(Reference image)

 

(Reference image)

 

Some things do stand out here. Although one would naively expect red glass to be the most UV-opaque, this turns out not to be the case, as it generally seems to come out dark green in these pictures. If this had been due to IR leakage, one might expect to see it in the yellow glass as well, but this is not so--it must actually be real UV we are seeing. The most UV-opaque glass appears to be the green, with the yellow a close second. Some of the panes have overpainting on them as well, and this may modify their transmission profile in complex ways.

 

If one looks closely at some of these, one can see that there are pairs of pieces of glass that look almost identical in the visible, but clearly differ in UV appearance. Whether this is because of repairs or because of different batches of glass used in the original construction, I do not know.

[Cadmium]

Clark, Very nice and interesting photos!

[diant]

Very interesting to see how the color glasses in stained-glass windows change they appearance in UV in different ways.

St. Mark window in last photo is a good example.

 

Some my guesses.

Blue glasses - cobalt glass, expected UV-transparent appearance of Cobalt in glass.

Green glasses (around Mark) - black UV-appearance. More probable it is usual chromium glass, cooked in oxidation conditions. A total blockage of UV - their property.

In the same time the same chromium glass, cooked in reducing conditions (with As for example), obtains emerald appearance in visual and open a large UV-window in 330-430nm region. Such may be two emerald leafs under feet of St. Mark - they have obvious UV-transparent appearance.

Red lion - puzzle. It has also strong UV-transparent appearance, and so it couldn't be any kind of colloid glass (Selenium etc.). Its visual appearance also strong suggests against its colloid nature. I may guess that it may be stained by Mn and Ni, but without any confidence.

 

Little deviation from out theme. Lion before the feet of Mark, so frequent symbol of so many icons, bás-reliefs, sculptures etc.

What can it symbolize else as not the brutish nature of the man, his "beast", beaten and placed under the command of higher inner man, his spiritual mind and the spirit itself?

OlDoinyo, thank you for the examples!

[Stefano]

Interesting. I wonder if the green you saw (green is still green in BGR) is a ~340 nm bump. That would be quite strange, but who knows.

[Kristine]

Very interesting. I found out by accident that the luminosity of stained glass can be different between infrared and visible. It dit not occur to me that it could happen in UV but it makes sense. Thank you.

[Andrea B.]

So cool to see some of my local sights in UV!

The Basilica is very striking in UV, isn't it?

Thanks so much for posting these.

[OlDoinyo]

Postscript: Two Other Ecclesiastical Structures

 

The church of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe stands about 170 kilometers north of the places described above, across the border in Conejos County, Colorado outside the town of Antonito. It was built in the 1880s, then gutted by a catastrophic fire and rebuilt in 1926. It is often touted as the oldest church in Colorado. Unlike the two French-styled churches depicted above, this one is in a distinctly Spanish Colonial style. I arrived late in the day and was shooting into backlight here. I photographed the façade with the A900 and the Steinheil 50 fitted with the Baader U2 filter, at f/16 and ISO 100. Display intent is BGR.

 

 

It was immediately apparent that the windows had polycarbonate guard panes or something similar--they appear black. Although there is some interesting stained glass, trying UV inside was most likely a lost cause and I did not attempt it.

 

Far to the northeast, in eastern Douglas County, Minnesota, stands the Svenska Augustana Forsamling church, a wooden structure in a Midwestern Neo-Gothic style built in 1906. I photographed it with the Tamron 17 and a U360/S8612 filter. Sprinkling rain from the skies kept landing on the filter and resulted in some image blemishing.

 

 

Here there was no guard pane issue, just simple glass in the windows, so I attempted a UV of the altar area inside, again using the Tamron 17. As the day was overcast, the UV through the windows was still weak, and I had to use an exposure of 30 secondds at f/5.6 and ISO 800 to pull it off.

 

 

The lens is a bit soft opened up this far. The altar and altar rail, an interesting bit of folk woodcarving, have a fresh coat of modern-looking paint (as does the exterior.)  In the right corner one can make out (though not too well) the pulpit, an elaborate folk piece that was carved by one individual with a jackknife over a century ago. The surface is quite UV-dark. The overall impression is very different from that evoked by the style of the Catholic structures above.

 

For good measure, I switched to a Tiffen 12 filter and snapped an IRG image of the area:

 

 

 

[colinbm]

Beautiful images.