Office of Public Affairs (315) 312-2265 June 19, 2002 OSWEGO --
Dr. Helen Zakin compares decades of research on centuries of
stained-glass masterpieces to solving "an enormous jigsaw
puzzle." All the pieces came into place, as the SUNY Oswego
professor and art department chair teamed with Dr. Virginia
Raguin at the College of Holy Cross to produce the two-volume
"Stained Glass Before 1700 in the Midwest States." The 600-page
work is the result of nearly 20 years of research on stained-
glass panels in museums and private collections in Illinois,
Indiana, Michigan and Ohio. Corpus Vitrearum USA, part of an
international organization dedicated to cataloguing works of
Renaissance and medieval stained glass, organized and published
the project, Zakin said. Corpus Vitrearum's cataloguing process
began in the 1950s and 1960s, "but it really started in earnest
around 20 years ago," she added. That's when Zakin and Raguin
took up the project. "We both wrote dissertations on medieval
stained glass," Zakin explained. "I