Moulded Glass
Two quite distinct applications of glass fall under this head. When the glass paste, in a fluid or semi-fluid condition, is pressed into a mould, we have a simple process for making either imitations of cameos and intaglios cut in precious stones, or again small articles of verroterie in no way differing from those produced by the peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean from an early period. Most of the work executed in this way in Roman times has little claim to artistic merit or originality. Masks and busts thus prepared were afterwards applied to the decoration of other objects—furniture, or even metal ware[[32]]—or they were fused on to the sides of vessels of blown glass.
Much attention was given to the imitation of precious stones. In the British Museum is a remarkable series of medallions and plaques in a paste made in imitation of lapis lazuli, the sapphirus of the ancients. The colouring matter in this case would appear to be the famous Egyptian blue, which was certainly known to the Romans (see p. [27]). In one example at least we can see that the coloured paste only formed a coating upon a base of ordinary glass, and this would point to the former being a material of some value. The large plaque of this blue paste, inscribed Bono Eventui, seems to have been finished with the tool, but we cannot look upon it as throughout a work of the sculptor. Heads of the Medusa or of Jupiter, viewed in full front so as to fill the roundel, are the commonest type. The dark paste in which some small portrait heads in the British Museum are cast is probably an imitation of the rare black sard.
1. BEAKER WITH OVAL BOSSES
GRECO-ROMAN
2. FLASK WITH MAZE-LIKE PATTERN
FROM MELOS
3. PYX FOR COSMETICS
FROM SIDON
I have now to speak of another class of moulded glass, of what is, in fact, a true ‘hollow ware,’ made by blowing a vesicle of glass into a mould. This is the first time that we unmistakably come across the use of the blowing-tube. In the case of glass it is practically impossible to use a mould in the shaping of a hollow vessel without some such method of forcing the viscid material into its place by pressure from the inside. I think, therefore, that it is not unlikely that it was in connection with some system of moulding that the blowing-tube was first introduced. Thus combined, the process calls for less manipulative skill than is required in the shaping of the free paraison by the glass-blower.
Moulded ‘hollow ware’ was produced at a comparatively early date in the East. Unfortunately we have no means of determining whether the glass-blowers of Sidon were acquainted with the process before the first century B.C. By that date, at least, the little flasks, unguentaria or what not, blown into moulds, had completely displaced the primitive chevron bottles that had so long been in favour. These moulded flasks are shaped in imitation of various fruits—dates, bunches of grapes, pomegranates—again the double scallop shell was a favourite pattern; more rarely we find the head of a man or a woman, especially of a negro. The glass is of various colours, but a rich honey tint is the commonest.
Another frequent type, especially to be connected with the towns of the Phœnician coast, is to be found in the little bottles, generally with eight panels round the body, on which are impressed various implements connected with the sacrifice, or at other times Bacchic emblems or musical instruments. In one or two cases the reliefs on these flasks have been thought to have reference to the Jewish worship. These little octagonal bottles have been found in various parts of the eastern basin of the Mediterranean, as well as on the north shores of the Black Sea. The glass of which they are made tends to decompose to a white porcelain-like mass, without further injury to the surface, a fact which would point to its containing a certain amount of lead and perhaps of tin. Here, for the first time in the history of glass, we come across the name of the manufacturer—we can hardly say the artist. It is, indeed, as might be expected, to the moulded ware that we are indebted for the most important of the scanty inscriptions that have been found on Roman glass; of these I shall have something to say on a future page. Such inscriptions in relief are above all prominent on the only other type of moulded glass which I can find space to mention. I refer to the cylindrical cups of thin greenish glass, which were apparently given as prizes for victory in various contests, or which perhaps merely served as mementoes of the occasion. Among the most interesting of this class is a series of glasses of which the best examples have been found in England; these are surrounded by double or triple zones, showing in relief chariot-races or combats of gladiators. All are of late date, and are of no merit as works of art. On one, exceptionally perfect, found near Colchester, and now in the British Museum, above the two bands of reliefs showing the rival chariots rounding the critical point at the extremity of the spina, the inscription Crescens Ave—Hierax Vale would seem to celebrate the victory of the first-named charioteer, but it may perhaps only express the hopes of Crescens’ backer.
The moulded hollow glass of the Romans often calls to mind the red Samian pottery decorated with reliefs, to which it is, however, as a whole inferior in artistic merit. The material does not lend itself well to elaborate designs, and one misses the crisp outlines given to glass by the cutting-tool. There is generally an air as of a cheap and second-hand copy, which gives a very modern aspect to many of these moulded pieces, and this is above all the case when the glass is transparent.[[33]]
CHAPTER IV
THE BLOWN GLASS OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
It is after all in the development of the art of blowing glass that the principal merit of the glass-workers, in the age immediately preceding our era, is to be found. By this method the real capabilities of the material, both practical and artistic, were first disclosed. The art was probably first practised on the Phœnician coast, perhaps at Sidon, not long after the time of Alexander. Beside the moulded flasks of which I have spoken above, there are others of plain globular form, with simple short necks, which we may perhaps look upon as among the earliest work of the Phœnician glass-blowers. Some of these are little more than spherical vesicles of the glass as it came from the blowing-tube. With these are associated certain plain spheres of thin glass of various colours, which may have been used as balls by jugglers, as mentioned in a passage in one of Seneca’s letters. But the balls of cool glass, mentioned by other writers, held in their hands by ladies in summer, must surely have been solid, like the spheres of rock crystal put to a similar use by the Japanese. The next step was to give the bulb of glass a ‘kick’ at the base, and to prolong the neck; we have then the type of the so-called lachrymatories, perhaps the commonest and best known form of classical glass.
There is in the British Museum an important collection of blown glass vessels which have been found in Syrian tombs. The actual provenance is here, as indeed in the case of so many other finds of glass, very difficult to ascertain. Some of the pieces are said to come from the neighbourhood of Nazareth, but the majority were probably found nearer to the coast, not far from Sidon and Tyre. The forms are on the whole classical, but Oriental influences may be seen in some cases, as in the double unguentaria which resemble certain Egyptian kohl-pots ([Plate VII.]). The apparent abundance of this Syrian glass, and the clear, nearly colourless material, point to a time rather after than before our era.
We know that soon after the middle of the first century, all the various forms and applications that we associate with the blown glass of the Romans were in general use in Italy. The proof of this lies in the vast collection of ancient glass in the museum at Naples. There were some years ago in this collection more than eight thousand pieces of glass, and it is constantly being added to. By far the greater part of this glass comes from Pompeii. Now that town was destroyed in the year 79 A.D., and it had sixteen years previously suffered so seriously from an earthquake that little glass can have survived; we are thus able to fix within exceptionally narrow limits the date of most of the glass discovered in the ruins. Apart from a few elaborate examples extracted from the tombs—some of these may well be of an earlier date—we find a vast series of vessels adapted to various domestic purposes, but more especially to uses connected with the storing and drinking of wine. These are for the most part made of a transparent and often colourless blown glass. By this time, then, the art of the glass-blower must have been fully developed in Southern Italy. The Pompeian glass has been well preserved by the thick bed of dry ashes, and has suffered little from surface decomposition.
SEPULCHRAL GLASS FROM THE SYRIAN COAST
FIRST CENTURY B.C. TO FIRST CENTURY A.D.
From a few scattered references in Roman writers we can in a measure trace the rapid change in the position of glass at Rome, say between the latter days of the Republic and the end of the reign of Augustus. Cicero mentions glass as an article of merchandise brought from Egypt, together with paper and linen. Strabo, writing under the rule of Augustus, says that at Rome every day new processes were invented for colouring glass and for simplifying its manufacture, so that ‘a successful imitation of crystal may now be made so cheaply that a drinking-glass with its stand can be sold for a copper coin’ (xvi. 25).
It is not, however, from Italy, or even from Mediterranean lands, that the greater part of the Roman glass in our collections comes, and this is especially the case if we confine ourselves to the ‘hollow ware’—the true blown glass with which we are at present concerned. Already in Pliny’s time the new industry had spread to Spain and Gaul, where, before long, favoured no doubt by the cheapness of the fuel and of the raw materials, important centres of manufacture must have sprung up. We learn from Strabo that not long before his time the Britons obtained what little glass they used—this was confined, indeed, to articles of verroterie—from the Continent. But though we have no direct evidence on this point, there can be little doubt but that glass-works were established at least by the second century in the southern parts of England, and that, to give one example, the large globular and quadrangular urns of greenish glass were made at glass-works not far from the tombs in which they are found.
Indeed, the bulk of this northern glass is of a sepulchral character. The large size and the graceful shapes of the well-known cinerary urns argue a complete mastery of the technical processes, and point to works on an extensive scale where large glass pots must have been in use. These spherical urns owe their preservation for the most part to the fact that they were enclosed in ‘coffins’ of lead or stone. The somewhat prosaic and ungainly square bottles that often replace them must have been blown into a mould of some kind.
Little or no trace of local influence can be found in the shapes or the material of the glass made in the second, third, and fourth centuries in Gaul, in Britain, or on the Rhine. In the Glass-Room in the British Museum, the large vessels of blown glass are chiefly of Gallic origin; the most important come from a collection made many years ago in the south-east of France. They may be compared with the Roman glass found in Britain exhibited in the Central Saloon. On the whole, these large glass urns are characteristic of the northern and western provinces. While they appear to be unknown in Greece and in the East, in the Roman columbaria they form a very small proportion of the urns ranged in the niches and along the shelves.
The gigantic cinerary urns from Kentish cemeteries are only rivalled in size by some of the Pompeian glass at Naples. Among the glass from cemeteries in Southern Britain in the British Museum are many jugs and bottles of quaint and original form, and others which for grace and purity of outline it would be difficult to rival elsewhere ([Plate IX.]). Notice especially the handles, and above all the insertion of the lower end of these handles into the side of the vessel. It is the neglect of attention to this point that so often gives an impression of weakness to the handles of modern ware, whether of pottery or of glass. But here the ribbed handle terminates in spreading lines that clasp the flank of the jug like the claws of a bird of prey; I do not know of any happier or simpler application of the viscous material. At times the central rib of the handle is prolonged into a wing-like flange descending nearly to the base of the vase, or may be ending in a long trail of glass worked by the pucella into quills or teeth.
A greater variety of forms is naturally found in glass made for domestic use than in specimens destined for the tomb. It is this variety that gives a special interest to the collection at Naples. M. Froehner has described nearly thirty different forms of glass vessels (Collection Charvet, pp. 76-80), and has attempted to apply to each of them the distinctive classical name, both Greek and Latin. But many of these terms are rather names of Greek fictile ware than of Roman glass, and as to the remainder, it is rather to the Byzantine scholiasts of later times than to writers of a good period, where allusions to glass are rare and vague, that resource has been had. The richest mines for information of this kind are the works of Petronius and Athenæus—this last author gives a list of a hundred varieties of drinking-vessels. But in both cases it is of vessels of silver or of pottery rather than of glass that the writer is generally thinking.
As a rule, the shapes and methods of decoration of Roman glass follow a line of their own, dependent on the ‘habits’ of the material. It is, however, easy to recognise forms derived from pottery, and even from bronze, in any large collection of Roman glass. Just as the so-called Samian ware is imitated in the moulded glass bowls, so we find that a class of pottery, common in England, in which the soft clay has been pressed in, perhaps with the fingers, to form on the sides vertical trough-like depressions, has been closely imitated in blown glass—such rounded depressions are easily given to the paraison by means of a blunt piece of wood. Again, the decoration of white slip, equally common on Romano-British fictile ware, is imitated by means of ‘trailed stringings’ on glass, if indeed in this case the imitation is not in some measure the other way—from glass to pottery.
Perhaps the most characteristic decoration of the earlier transparent glass is given by a series of parallel ribs. This ‘pillar moulding’ may be formed on the surface in various ways—by stringings partly melted on to the surface, or by the use of a mould at one period in the development of the paraison. A graceful type of these little ribbed or gadrooned bowls—amber coloured, or again white with blue ribs—has been found over and over again in pre-Roman tombs on both sides of the Alps; these bowls are often seen in the museums of Switzerland and North Italy. Apart from beads and small objects of verroterie, they appear to be the earliest articles of glass exported to the Celtic tribes of these districts, but nothing is known as to their place of origin. In other cases such ribs or stringings, bending round the body in a more or less gentle spiral, form a very happy scheme of ornament.
The decoration by trailed stringings—necessarily a rapid process, by which happy effects are sometimes attained almost by accident—may be regarded as a genuinely vitreous process. It is often combined with fringes and toothings impressed—on the margin of the handles above all—by the rapid and skilful use of the pincers. The commonest, and probably the oldest, application is as a more or less closely coiled stringing round the neck of the bottle or jug; this is convenient for handling, and gives the appearance at least of additional strength. The stringings on the later forms tend to hang loose upon the surface, sometimes taking the form of hastily written characters.[[34]]
The cords and threadings may often be of a different colour from the vessel upon which they are applied—they may be reduced to knots or mere drops applied here and there. In such cases we have an apparent approach to decoration by enamel. But the form of ornament that we are now dealing with is applied directly to the soft paraison or to the still unfinished vessel, and the glass of which the stringings are formed is probably of the same composition as that on which it is superimposed.
So of the splashed or mottled ware. We have here real splashes of a liquid material applied to the paraison while still on the blowing-tube. When the neck was subsequently shaped, these circular markings were drawn out into ellipsoid forms, showing that this part of the vessel was made at a later period. It is instructive to compare this result of the work of the blowing-tube with the patterns on the millefiori bowls. In these latter patterns we find no trace of subsequent distortion—a proof that the glass of which they form part has never passed through the stage of a paraison or vesicle.[[35]]