Martyrdom of Saint George,

13th century and ca. 1918-22

Purchased by the museum in the early twentieth-century as an authentic, intact medieval stained-glass window, this object is actually a composite made up of modern inserts, old glass that has been repurposed, and old glass that has been altered or repainted. Several fragments, notably the head and torso of the figure do come from a window of the same subject-Saint George's martyrdom on a wheel-from the Choir of Chartres Cathedral. However, even these have been heavily retouched. The Chartres Choir window showing Saint George was removed in the eighteenth-century to allow more light into the church. The glass presumably was salvaged to use for repairs to other windows. Indeed, evidence suggests that by the nineteenth-century Saint George-still intact with his wheel-formed part of a window made up of mismatched glass in one of the cathedral's side chapels, which, in turn, had been destroyed in the French Revolution. During World War I, all the glass in the church was removed for safe keeping. After the war, the chapel received a new window and part of the Saint George-a piece of the wheel and one of the saint's arms-was moved to a transept window where it can still be seen today. Soon thereafter, the Princeton fragments found their way into this glass medallion and surfaced in a sale at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris as part of the collection of the dealer Raoul Heilbronner.