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By Nicole Burkett

“The Juggler of Notre Dame” entered the Marian Library Collection in 2022 for the Christmas exhibit Juggling for Mary. The stained-glass window is now featured in the Roger Glass Center for the Arts, where it glows against the building’s floor-to-ceiling windows and modern architecture, reminding visitors of UD’s Marianist heritage and the value of visual and performing arts in the educational community. 

The piece offers a contemporary view into a medieval story through a medieval medium. The story tells of a humble juggler who enters a monastery. He quickly realizes he lacks the talents many other monks possess, such as singing and calligraphy. Before a statue of Mary, he decides to honor her using his humble talent and juggles with immense enthusiasm until he faints. Moved by the performance, the statue of Mary comes to life to aid the juggler. In this window, the juggler acrobatically juggles upon his discarded monk’s hood, seemingly on the verge of collapse with one ball already dropped and the Virgin Mother awake and reaching out. 

The beauty of this window, a collaboration of Jeffrey Miller, Sarah Navasse and Jeremy Bourdois, lies in the details. The juggling balls are made out of dalle de verre, French for “slab of glass,” a thick, sculptural glass that allows the balls to stand in stark relief against the rest of the piece, giving the impression that they are spheres. 

The center of the window uses dark green, blue and violet glass pieces with intricate designs painted on them, significantly decreasing the amount of light able to pass through, which allows the figures of Mary and the juggler to shine in bright contrast. This technique was made famous by Charles Eamer Kempe, a 19th-century English stained-glass artist and one of Miller’s inspirations. 

— Nicole Burkett is the art collection specialist in the Marian Library.

A version of this article originally appeared in Volume 2 of Tidings: An Annual Comminiqué from the Marian Library.