The Laurelton Hall exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has rekindled the admiration of many people for Louis Tiffany — one of America’s greatest artists. Admittedly, the Tiffany firm’s output was immense. But we should not take the achievement for granted. The exhibition may inspire the viewer to seek out the best of Tiffany in architectural settings in the city. No such setting displays Tiffany to quite the effect of St. Michael’s Episcopal Church.

First, don’t confuse Louis Tiffany with his jeweler father, Charles. Second, realize that Louis Tiffany’s achievements in glass represent a sublime fusion of art and science. The productions of Tiffany and other New York glass artists from the late 19th century may surpass even the best of medieval stained glass. As such, the Tiffany moment was a major episode in America’s cultural coming of age.

St. Michael’s stands monumentally at Amsterdam Avenue and 99th Street. It is a finely chiseled hunk of Romanesque revival limestone, designed by Robert W. Gibson and opened in 1891. The building is fine in itself, and the windows would be no less grand in a lesser building. Together, the building and glass make St. Michael’s one of the city’s best churches most people have never set foot in.

We see here that Tiffany was about much more than glass. In 1895, the Tiffany Glass and Decorating Co. (one of the Tiffany firm’s several incarnations under different names) produced the altar, reredos (altar screen), altar furnishings, credence table, and chancel railing, as well as the seven glorious lancets, collectively titled “St. Michael’s Victory in Heaven,” behind the altar. Tiffany hired and trained some of the most talented craftsmen of the day, including Clara Parrish, Edward Sperry, Joseph Lauber, and Louis Lederle, who worked on many of the windows that Tiffany designed.

Each lancet is 5 feet wide by 25 feet high. The windows depict the celebration in heaven after the archangel Michael slays the dragon. The stylization of the figures, the iridescence, the jewellike colorclusters are very much what we think of when we think of Tiffany windows. It’s notable here that the windows remain in their intact Tiffany settings. Also special is the wealth of stained glass by other gifted artists, including Charles Connick and D. Maitland Armstrong.

St. Michael’s this year celebrates its 200th anniversary as a parish, though its present building has served for only 106 of those years. Gibson is among New York’s most underrated architects. His excellent works include the Museum Building (1902) at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx and the Church Missions House (1894) on Park Avenue South and 22nd Street. His masterpiece may have been the Randall Memorial Church at Sailors’ Snug Harbor on Staten Island. Built in 1892, the church has been demolished. He based St. Michael’s loosely on the seventh-century church of Santa Agnese Fuori le Mura, in Rome, though such works of H.H. Richardson as the Brattle Square Church (1870–72) in Boston may have been more immediate influences.

All in all, it’s a very good time to visit St. Michael’s.

fmorrone@nysun.com