On a sunny Bronx morning late last year, an all-star team of stained-glass experts prepared to enter a dank 1894 tomb at Woodlawn Cemetery that had been opened just once in the past century.

The mausoleum at hand held the remains of José Maria Muñoz, a Panamanian-born New York merchant and son of a Spanish general. The scholarly tomb raiders were five energetic stained-glass conservators and art historians conducting an unprecedented survey of some 1,200 stained-glass windows that were installed in free-standing Woodlawn mausoleums from 1878 to the present.