A.L. Pitassi’s Cartoon for Eve
Before a stained-glass window can adorn a church, naturally it must be planned. To do so, artists create a drawing called a cartoon, which guides their cutting, painting, and leading of glass pieces. Stained-glass cartooning goes all the way back to the eleventh century. Initially, medieval artisans sketched their window designs on whitewashed wood; during the Renaissance, designers switched to paper as a drawing surface.
This cartoon shows Eve surrounded by symbols of the Fall of Man (Genesis 3), clad in leaves and bearing the apple. Her down-trodden demeanor indicates a measure of shame as her head points towards the serpent slithering up a tree. Eve is surrounded by geometric flourishes called grisaille, a hallmark of Gothic windows. The cartoon, however, does not come from the medieval period; rather, Leo Pitassi of Pittsburgh created this design for Toledo’s Rosary Cathedral in Ohio, likely in 1935.
The Pitassi Stained Glass Studio made Gothic Revival windows for more than twenty churches throughout eleven states between 1926 and 1960. Leo’s daughter, Louise Pitassi Ellis, took over the business after her father died in 1947. In 2021, the founder’s granddaughter, Nancy Ellis, donated this cartoon and more than 600 other stained-glass drawings from the Studio to the Verostko Center for the Arts—a generous gift that instantly made Saint Vincent College the steward of one of the largest stained-glass design studio archives in the United States.
Nancy Ellis’s transformational gift also included documentation and several windows. Over the past three years, the Verostko Center has digitized and catalogued a substantial portion of this extremely rare and exciting collection, but work is still ongoing. Conservation and archival storage projects are underway as the Verostko Center preserves the Pitassi collection for generations to come.
Eve is on view at the Verostko Center for the Arts through July 17, 2026.
A.L. Pitassi, Cartoon for Eve, Organ Loft Window, Rosary Cathedral, Toledo, OH, ca. 1935. Charcoal on paper, 57 x 22 ½ in. (144.8 x 55.9 cm). Saint Vincent Art and Heritage Collection, Gift of Nancy Ellis, 2021.1.153