Rose window
The scarcity and the brittleness of the vestiges of this time does not make it possible to say that complete rose window in tracery did not exist in early Middle Ages.
They usually occur either around the drum of a dome, as at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem, or high in the end of a gable of low-pitched Classical pediment form, as at Sant'Agnese fuori le mura, Rome, and Torcello Cathedral.
[12] A window of the 8th century, now in Venice, and carved from a single slab, has alternating tracery-like components of two tiers of four lancets separated by three oculi.
The designs closely resemble the motifs found on the Byzantine relief carvings of marble sarcophagi, pulpits and well heads and pierced decorations of screens and windows of Ravenna and Constantinople.
The church of San Pedro de Nora has at its apsidal end a trio of rectangular windows with pierced decoration of two overlapping circles, the upper containing a Greek cross, the window being divided by the circles and the arms of the cross into numerous sections like tracery "lights".
In Germany, Worms Cathedral, has wheel windows in the pedimental ends of its nave and gables, very similar to the Early Christian Basilica of S. Agnese in Rome.
The Church of the Apostles, Cologne has an array of both ocular and lobed windows forming decorative features in the gables and beneath the Rhenish helm spire.
In Italy, the use of circular motifs in various media was a feature of church facades, occurring on Early Christian, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque churches, a well-known example being those great circles in polychrome marble which complement the central circular window on Alberti's Early Renaissance façade at Santa Maria Novella in Florence.
[13] On the Romanesque façade of Spoleto Cathedral there is a profusion of recessed and traceried oculi surrounding the central features of a rose window set within a square beneath a large mosaic of 1207.
It no longer has its original form, but a mid-19th-century drawing by the restorer Viollet-le-Duc indicates that it had a very large ocular space at the centre, the glass supported by an iron hoop, and surrounded by simple semicircular cusped lobes cut out of flat stone in a technique known as "plate tracery".
The window now has Gothic tracery in it, possibly added by Viollet-le-Duc who was very concerned about the lack of stability of the whole façade, and having restored the towers, was impelled to demolish the northern one when it suddenly subsided.
The next important development in its use for the Gothic style was to put it under a pointed arch, as was done in the Notre-Dame de Reims (after 1241), in the transepts as well as in the later roses of the facade.
Medieval Beverley Minster has an example of an Early Gothic wheel window with ten spokes, each light terminating in a cusped trefoils and surrounded by decorative plate tracery.
At Christ Church Appleton-le-Moors, Yorkshire, the 19th-century architect J.L.Pearson appears to have taken as his inspiration the regional floral symbol of the white rose.
This unusual plate-tracery window dating from the 1860s has been designed with five double sections like the two-part petals of a simple rose.
The largest rose window in England is believed to be that installed in the chapel of Lancing College in 1978, with a diameter of 32 feet.
First United Methodist Church in Lubbock, Texas, houses one of the largest rose windows at 26+1⁄2 feet (8.1 m) in diameter.
In 1954, the French artist Henri Matisse created the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Memorial Rose Window on the east wall of the Union Church of Pocantico Hills, New York.
