and creases that remained when the glass was cooled. Schaechter instead accomplishes the fluid look of fabric by layering multiple flash glass sheets of varying color depth, reflectiveness, and opacity. What both approaches produce is the stunning ethereal quality that no other medium rivals.

“Some medieval guy said it best when he said ‘stained glass is enlightenment embodied,’” Schaechter says in her autobiographical essay “Parables in Glass,” where she also credits an atheist upbringing for her “attraction to the spiritual aspect of transmitted light.”

Impelled by the great public interest in the stained- glass windows and mural in Boston’s Trinity Church, created by his rival John LaFarge, and the increasing significance of decorative murals in the late 19th Century, Tiffany would position his studio to make thousands of windows for churches, homes, and public buildings in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, and Australia.

While the company’s process of making windows hadn’t diverted much from that of Theophilus over 800 years earlier, Tiffany had access to the selection from several glasshouses in Brooklyn. But by 1893, Tiffany Glass Furnaces in Corona (Queens) produced most of the glass in their own furnaces – and there he and his artisans had full control over both artistic and technical elements.