In the north quire aisle of Chichester Cathedral, light gathers, deepens, and even seems to breathe through the celebrated stained-glass window, designed by Marc Chagall. Commissioned by Dean Walter Hussey, the work is often described in terms of colour, especially the saturated and dreamlike reds and blues. To encounter it fully though is to become aware not only of colour, but of its making: of transformation, and of the layered human and spiritual labour that brings such an object into being.

Chagall’s window is both the outcome of a highly skilled sequence of artistic and technical decisions, and an ongoing event of perception, continually remade as light shifts across the day and seasons.

The window’s subject, drawn from Psalm 150 – ‘Let everything that has breath praise the Lord’ – is itself dynamic. Figures float, play instruments, and seem suspended between heaven and earth. Yet this sense of effortlessness belies the intricacy behind it. Stained glass is rarely a single act of creation; it is a collaboration between design and execution, between artist and craftsman. Chagall provided the vision, but its realisation depended upon the studio of Charles Marq in Rheims, France, who manufactured the window, translating his painterly imagination into lead, pigment and glass. Each piece had to be selected, cut, painted, fired, and assembled with precision. The glowing whole emerges only through this accumulation of careful acts.

What begins to emerge, then, is something close to what the Ancient Greeks understood as Technē: not simply ‘art’ as a finished object, but a disciplined mode of making that spans craft, knowledge and trained intuition. It names a way of working in which vision cannot be separated from execution, nor idea from material. Seen in this light, Chagall’s window is less a singular artwork than the meeting point of several such practices: of design and fabrication, of colour and structure, of artistic imagination and architectural response, each dependent on learned skill and each unfolding through process rather than instant creation.

Chagall himself worked across media, from painting and printmaking, to stage design, but his approach was always rooted in process. He did not treat stained glass as a secondary or decorative form; rather, he adapted his language to its demands. Glass, unlike canvas, doesn’t just reflect light, it also transmits it. This requires a different understanding of colour, one that anticipates luminosity rather than surface alone. The deep blues of the Chichester window are not applied in the way paint is: they are inherent in the glass itself, intensified by layering and by the play of natural light.

These ideas extend beyond the making of the object to its reception. The window is never fixed in appearance. Morning light renders it cool and contemplative; afternoon sun ignites its colours; dusk softens its forms into near abstraction. For the viewer, perception unfolds over time, shaped by movement, attention, and even mood. What you see is continually being altered through the encounter between light, glass, and observer.

There is, of course, also a spiritual dimension to this unfolding. The psalmic theme of breath and praise suggests life as an ongoing act of response to the divine. Chagall’s floating figures, neither bound by gravity nor entirely free from it, seem to exist within this rhythm of becoming. Their music is silent, yet implied; their movement is still, yet palpable. The window does not depict a single moment but evokes a continuous state of praise, a process without clear beginning or end.

Returning to Technē, one might ask whether the analogy between skilled activity and moral or spiritual life holds here. In Chagall’s window, I believe the answer to be yes, though not straightforwardly. The discipline of making mirrors the disciplines of attention and devotion. Both require training, patience, and a responsiveness to something beyond oneself: the properties of materials in one case, the call to praise in the other.

At the same time, the work resists being reduced to technique alone. Its power lies in how process and mystery coexist. We can trace the steps of its creation, understand the skills involved, even analyse its iconography, and yet something remains elusive. The light that animates it cannot be controlled; the meanings it suggests are never exhausted. In this way, the Chagall window at Chichester Cathedral becomes a meditation on process itself. It invites us to consider how making and meaning unfold together, how skill and inspiration intertwine, and how, in the interplay of light and colour, something as intangible as praise can take visible form.