Glass & Salvage

Have you ever taken a look at our stained glass here at Sarasota Architectural Salvage? Well, I want to talk to you a little bit about a special kind of stained glass that's called the Dal de Ver style. Now, think about glass. Glass has been used in construction for hundreds of years. Back in the Middle Ages, they'd take chunks of glass and they'd put it into the dirt that they used to form structures. And that is what the beginnings of stained glass was all about. In about the 1950s or so, they modified that process using saws and hammers to chip the glass at special angles so that they'd have more of a reflective and refractive surface that would penetrate into the interior spaces, but still using that traditional cementitious type material. So, they then, in the 60s and 70s, added epoxy- So, basically Jean Gaudin, a Frenchman in the 1950s, kind of formalized this process and created the Dal de Ver window that we know today. And this one here was actually salvaged from a local church here in Sarasota, and it is a really beautiful piece. This one does have a little bit of religious symbolism with this chalice or eternal light, but we also have some that have no religious symbolism at all. So, really fun stuff. I'm going to just turn it over so you can see the back and see this one's probably the inside. And again, I'll hold it up for you. We do have a cloudy day here, but it really brings in a lot of beautiful light and really a wonderful technique, originally dating back to the Middle Ages. So, that's my little take on stained glass. Come on in and check out all the stained glass we have here at Sarasota Architectural Salvage.