Roman Glass in Britain
There does not seem to be any example of a vessel of glass from a pre-Roman tomb in Britain. The little ribbed bowls that have been found in Celtic tombs further south did not apparently reach our country. The ὕαλα σκεύη and the λυγκούρια mentioned by Strabo in an involved passage as among the imports into Britain, we must interpret as beads of glass and amber. From that time until the eighth century, when the Venerable Bede wrote his history, we have not a word of documentary evidence bearing upon the question of glass in our country. Nor have we any definite evidence, apart from a few lumps of glass that may have had their origin in an accidental fire, that any glass-works existed in England during this long interval,—no evidence, that is to say, apart from that based upon the large amount of Roman glass found in England and the size of many of the specimens. The English glass, however, in no way differs from that taken from Roman tombs in the north of France. I have mentioned already the most noticeable types—the large urns, both spherical and quadrangular, the graceful jugs and vases with ribbed handles, and the little bowls of thin moulded glass with scenes taken from the circus. It is perhaps remarkable that the art of the enameller on metal, which we know at this time had been brought to a great perfection in Britain,[[56]] appears in no way to have influenced the glass-blower, and it would seem that in Britain glass vessels have been rarely found together with specimens of champlevé enamel.[[57]]
Most of the finer examples of native Roman glass in our museums have been excavated from cemeteries adjacent to the lower Thames valley, around Colchester and other stations to the north, but above all on the southern bank, in the district lying between the mouth of the Medway and the Isle of Thanet. In this neighbourhood, in the flat land between Sittingbourne and Faversham, were situated what were probably the most extensive potteries of Britain, and it is hereabouts if anywhere in England that we might look for traces of glass-works of Roman date. As we go further west and further north, glass, large examples at any rate, becomes comparatively rare, and this is true even of the neighbourhood of such important stations as York and Cirencester.
ROMAN GLASS FROM BRITISH GRAVES
In the case of the glass of the ancients, the material is so vast, so varied, and spread over so wide an area, that a concentrated treatment of the subject, as this must needs be, is rendered very difficult. Much that is both interesting and important must be omitted or only briefly alluded to; and this must be my excuse for making little more than a passing mention of the inscriptions found at times on this glass.
These inscriptions fall into two classes:—1. A propitiatory sentence or expression of well-wishing addressed, it would seem, to the person to whom the piece is presented; of such we have already given some examples. 2. The name of the maker. With few exceptions these inscriptions are confined to glass that has been blown into a mould, and this for practical reasons which will be obvious.
The signature of Ennion may be read in many cases on little vases or bottles found in Italy, in Cyprus, and in the Crimea. Ennion worked probably at Sidon or at Tyre and quite possibly as far back as the third century B.C. The words ΜΝΗϹΘΗ Ο ΑΓΟΡΑΖΩΝ ‘Let the buyer remember,’ which he sometimes added to his name, were perhaps intended to accentuate the signature. The glass-blowers of Sidon seem to have been proud of their native town; along with their signature its name generally appears on the ‘thumb-piece’ of the handle: that of Irenæus is in each case accompanied by the head of an emperor in relief—Augustus or perhaps Caligula. Artas, whose signature has been found more often than any other, gives his name both in Latin and Greek—ARTAS SIDON—ΑΡΤΑϹ ϹΕΙΔΩ.
Let us now pass to examples of a later date that are characteristically and distinctly Roman. What can be more so than the large quadrangular bottles, on the base of which so many inscriptions have been found? Here, as on the contemporary pottery, the reference is generally to the owner of the works whose name is accompanied sometimes by the word patrimonium. But the inscription is often reduced to four letters placed in the angles—letters that have been a standing puzzle to antiquaries. Many pieces of glass bearing the stamp of Firmus, of Hilarus, or again of Hylas—contracted or in the genitive case—have been found not only in Italy (as in the neighbourhood of Perugia), but also in the Cologne district. On the other hand, the signature of Frontinus is above all frequent on a series of barrel-shaped glass vessels of a late date, which come from various places in the north of France, more especially from Picardy; but the signature is found in the Rhine country also. The firm seems to have been as important and its outturn as widespread as that of the Bonhomme family of Liége in the seventeenth century. Several examples of the Frontinus signature in various forms are given by M. Froehner.[[58]]
It is a curious fact that in no case, as far as I am aware, has the custom of the manufacturer adding his name to the glass made by him become general in later times. The practical difficulties in the case of blown glass may be a sufficient reason for this. Perhaps the most important exception may be found in the stamps of makers’ names on wine-bottles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Let me in one final word accentuate what seems to me the commanding point of interest in this rich and varied series—the glass of the Romans. We have in it the one branch of Roman art that was not dominated by Greek influence and traditions; it was an art which, although essentially developed under the Roman rule, had its origin in Semitic lands. As an industry I cannot help thinking that it spread along with that interpenetration of Hellenised Syrians that played so important a part in the propagation of Christianity and other Oriental cults through the west of Europe.
CHAPTER V
EARLY CHRISTIAN GLASS, BYZANTINE GLASS, AND THE GLASS OF THE MIDDLE
AGES IN THE EAST AND THE WEST.
The vague and indefinite use of the terms ‘Byzantine Period’ and ‘Byzantine Art’ has been the cause of much confusion in many branches of history, and nowhere more than in the history of architecture. Were I treating of the latter art I should prefer to use the term in its narrower sense, confining it within definite limits of time and space. With the minor arts, however—illuminated manuscripts, ivories, and metal ware—the case is different. Here the term Byzantine may often be conveniently applied to cover a very wide field; so in the case of glass, the rare specimens that come to us from widely scattered sources find, for a long period, a common centre, as it were, in Constantinople.
After the end of the third century the East begins once more to assert itself. The spread of the Christian religion, the transference of the capital of the empire to Constantinople, and again the advance of the barbaric tribes, were all important factors in this movement. As far as our northern lands are concerned, the importance of this last factor as an orientalising influence has perhaps not been sufficiently recognised. We think of this advance chiefly as a descent of Germanic tribes from the north upon Italy. But this last movement was only a side issue—the general progress was from East to West. We know now that for whatever culture these tribes brought with them at the time of their advance, they were at least as much indebted to the early civilisations of Western Asia as to that of Greece and Rome. It was only with the fringe of this latter civilisation, and that comparatively lately, that they had come into contact. In a measure we may look upon the influence of what we call classical civilisation as merely a temporary interruption, a breaking in upon the old established route by which the peoples, and still more the produce, of the East reached Western Europe. This is what gives that Oriental nuance, often so difficult to define, to so much of our Western European art of the early Middle Ages,[[59]] up to the time when the Roman culture, under the lead of the Western Church, asserted itself once more.
So in the somewhat miscellaneous assortment of glass from many lands, and often of uncertain date, that we treat of in this chapter, it is this new wave of Oriental influence working upon the now decadent Roman types which gives in some measure a common note to objects otherwise so divergent.
In another way the spread of the new religion had an even more direct and practical bearing on our subject-matter. If between the fourth and thirteenth century—between the later Gallo-Roman glass and the enamelled glass of the Saracens—there is in our collections a gap representing nearly a thousand years, only sparingly filled up by a few rare examples, the immediate cause is to be found in the abandonment of the practice of cremation, and of the habit of burying objects of value with the deceased. Fortunately for us, however, there was at first one important exception to this rule, and to this exception we owe the survival of so many specimens of a family of glass which is essentially both Christian and Roman, a family which should therefore rightly find its place at the commencement of the present chapter.
GILT GLASS OF THE CEMETERIES
1. FROM COLOGNE. 2 AND 3. FROM ROME
The Gilt Glass of the Cemeteries is, indeed, strictly Roman, both in provenance and in its artistic and technical relationships. The essential character of this early Christian glass depends upon the inclusion of a foil of thin gold between two plates of glass united by fusion. This is the principle of the decoration of the two bowls from Canosa that I have already described, and, indeed, in the technical difficulties overcome, and still more in artistic merit, these bowls far excel any later work of this class. As it is, the interest of these vetri a fondi d’oro, as the Italians call them, depends rather upon the fact that they constitute one of the earliest records of the art of the primitive Church, than upon any especial merit they may possess as examples of glass.[[60]]
It is now well known that nearly all these little discs of glass have formed the base of tazza-shaped bowls, or of cups of conical form. Most of them have been extracted from the plaster in which they were embedded at the sides of the loculi, where in the passages of the catacombs the corpses were deposited. There is also a class of smaller medallions or studs, covered with thick lenticular glass, which were inserted round the body of a glass cup; in a few rare examples, chiefly from Cologne, the medallions remain in their original position on the cup ([Pl. X.]). These studs are sometimes of blue glass, and we are then reminded of a style of decoration in use in earlier times—blue bosses or ribs, appliqués or fused into the body of the bowl.
Apart from a few remarkable specimens found beneath some of the old churches of Cologne, as at St. Ursula and St. Severinus, these gilt glasses come almost exclusively from the catacombs of Rome. The Roman collections naturally contain the most numerous specimens; in the British Museum, however, may be seen an important and typical series, illustrating most of the points of interest.
In the preparation of these vetri a fondi d’oro, the gold leaf was laid down upon the glass with some gum or varnish; the superfluous gold was then scraped away, and the internal lines of the draperies accentuated with a sharp metallic point; a covering of glass was then superimposed. So far all are agreed; but as to the actual process by which the two sheets of glass were united, there is some difference of opinion. The problem had already appealed to Heraclius, the writer of some barbarous hexameters treating De Coloribus et Artibus Romanorum. Heraclius was probably a monk living at Rome, perhaps about the end of the tenth century. The fifth of his little didactic poems is inscribed ‘De fialis auro decoratis.’ In this he tells us how he produced some small cups of pure glass, smeared them with gum with a brush, and then proceeded to lay down on them leaves of gold. On the gold leaf, when dry, he inscribed birds, men, lions, as it pleased his fancy. ‘Finally,’ says Heraclius, ‘I fitted over the surface, glass rendered thin by a skilful blast of the fire; but when the glass had yielded equally to the heat, it united itself admirably to the phials as a thin sheet.’[[61]]
Theophilus, writing a few generations later, probably in Germany, knew nothing of this cemetery glass. He describes, however, the process by which the Byzantine Greeks made their gold mosaics by sprinkling a layer of powdered glass over the gold leaf covering the surface of the tesseræ; this coating was then fused on. But this was an enameller’s process, and the coating must have consisted of a somewhat fusible glass, perhaps containing lead. The Greeks employed, he tells us, a similar process in decorating their glass cups.
Signor Andrea Rioda, the art director of the Impresa Venezia-Murano, tells me that in the case of some clever imitations of fondi d’oro made by his firm, the gold leaf was fixed upon a thickish sheet of glass, a thinner sheet was then placed over it, and the whole heated to the softening-point. A third method has been adopted in the preparation of some experimental imitations made by Mr. Westlake: that gentleman soldered together the two sheets of glass round the edges only, by means of a flux.
In the general treatment of the figure, and in the choice of the subject, we are reminded in the case of this cemetery glass of the reliefs upon contemporary Christian sarcophagi—that is to say of the more rudely executed of these reliefs. But among these fondi d’oro there is a small class of portrait heads, highly finished by means of a sort of pointillé or stipple process, which are of a somewhat superior artistic merit. In these circular medallions—miniatures, we might call them[[62]]—the large eyes, the small mouth, and a peculiar affable but sad and ‘worn-out’ expression, remind us of the portrait heads on late mummy cases brought from the Fayum. These highly finished miniatures are probably of somewhat earlier date than the typical glass from the catacombs.
We find occasionally in this cemetery glass a sparing use of coloured enamels, above all on the draperies.[[63]] In others the outlines, it would seem, were cut into the glass and filled up with coloured pastes, a process of great technical interest; I have not, however, myself seen an example of such work.
A few rare pieces with Jewish symbols have been found, but not in any case, I think, from Jewish cemeteries. We see the scrolls of the law lying on the aron, and the seven-branched candlestick. I have already pointed out that at this time in Rome the working of glass was very probably to some extent in the hands of Jews and Judaising Christians.[[64]]
The cemetery glass dates, it would seem, from the fourth and from the first half of the fifth century, but some of the finer pieces may be a little older. The disasters of the fifth century and the rapid decline of Rome after the time of Honorius help to explain the total extinction of this genre soon after the latter period.
Apart from these gilt medallions, the examples of glass that may be classed as early Christian present no special feature. There is in the British Museum a series of cameo medallions, some of hæmatinum and others of sapphire-blue glass paste. In these the treatment of the figures—the Virgin and Child and St. George (or possibly St. Theodore) are the favourite subjects—is quite Byzantine in character. In the Vatican Museum, among many other such medallions, are some cast from the same moulds as our English examples. The little pendeloques of stamped glass remind one of the late Roman and Saracenic glass weights found in Egypt; they have formed probably parts of a necklace, or they may have been attached to drapery.
The early Christian engraved glass is of more importance, but it in no way differs in technique from that carved with pagan subjects; some of the vases may possibly have served as chalices for use in the service of the Eucharist. In the British Museum is a conical cup from Cologne; the figures are roughly cut with the wheel, and the subjects from the Old and New Testaments are the same as those found on contemporary sarcophagi. The design on the Podgoriza bowl,[[65]] perhaps the finest example of early Christian engraving on glass, shows the influence of the northern barbarians; there is a Viking air about some of the subjects. Notice especially the ship from which Jonah is being thrown, and the gaping monsters in the sea, more like dragons than whales. (See Mr. Arthur Evans’s paper in Archæologia, vol. xlviii.)
As I have already said, the gap which exists between the later Roman and the great school of enamelled Saracenic glass of the thirteenth century can only be filled by a few scattered examples from widely distant sources. The tombs now fail us, and we are thrown back for the most part upon the treasures and relics preserved in the churches of Italy, France, and Germany. Such objects represent but one aspect of the glass produced at the time: they reflect above all the skill now acquired in staining glass so as to imitate precious stones. We shall see later that there has been preserved an interesting literary record bearing especially on such imitations. The alchemists now begin to come into touch with the glass-workers—a connection that has been maintained even to quite recent times. The Jews, too, were early occupied with the manufacture of coloured pastes, and their interest in the subject has continued, as we know, up to the present day.
It would be impossible to neglect the importance of Constantinople when treating of the art of the early mediæval—the so-called dark ages. But so far as glass, in our narrower sense of the word, is concerned, there is little that can be definitely attributed to that city. For us, however, the interest of the Greek Empire lies in the fact that we have in it a common middle term with which to correlate the art of the Copts in Egypt, of the Sassanians in Persia, and at a later time, in some measure, that of the early Saracen dynasties and even of the Anglo-Saxons and the Franks in the north. At two widely separated periods the influence of Constantinople has been more directly felt. The first centres round Justinian in the sixth century; we are brought at that time into relation with the Copts and the Sassanian rulers of Persia. The other is the time of the great revival of Byzantine power in the tenth century, when, chiefly through alliances with the emperors of the Saxon house, the renewed art of the Greeks spread through Germany and even reached, not for the first time indeed, the shores of England.
The great work, no doubt, of the Byzantines in the domain of glass is to be found in the manufacture of the mosaics with which they lined the walls of their churches, and when we hear that glass was made at Thessalonica, and again that one of the gates of the capital was named after the adjacent glass-works, it is of this branch of the art that we must first think.[[66]] Byzantine artists travelled to Cordova on the one hand, and to Damascus on the other, to work in mosaic for Mohammedan masters; we find them, too, at Rome, at Ravenna, and at Aachen. No doubt these musivi took with them, at first at least, the materials with which they built up their pictures.
For the use of coloured glass in the windows of churches, we may probably find a similar origin. In Justinian’s great church glass was not used for mosaics only; there were windows filled with stained glass, some of which may even now be in place. In the seventh century we hear of Greek workmen summoned to France for such work, just as from Merovingian France, as Bede tells us, Benedict Biscop obtained, a little later, skilled craftsmen to make the glass for his new church at Monk Wearmouth.
1
2
3
HANGING LAMPS OF SCULPTURED GLASS
BYZANTINE. FROM TREASURY OF ST. MARK’S
In the ode that Paul the Silentiary wrote for the opening ceremony at St. Sophia (563 A.D.), he speaks of silver discs, hanging from chains and pierced to receive vessels of ‘fire-wrought’ glass, shaped like the butt of a spear (οὐρίαχος) (Lethaby’s Santa Sophia, p. 50 seq.).[[67]]
We have here in these lamps what is probably the first mention of a new use for our material—one which became before long, for a time, the dominant one. In the ‘spear-butt’ shaped lamps of St. Sophia we may see the prototypes of the conical oil-cups of the Saracens.
Glass, however, was never held in great honour in the ceremonies of the Christian Church. Chalices and patens of glass are indeed mentioned in the Liber Pontificalis as in use at the end of the second century: St. Jerome writes of ‘the Lord’s blood being borne in a vessel of glass,’ and some early miracles have reference to the making good of glass that had been broken. Of a ninth-century saint we are told that his Eucharistic vessels were first of wood, then of glass, and finally of pewter! In later times the use of so fragile a material fell out of use, and was even forbidden by the Church.
In shape it would seem that these early chalices resembled the Greek cantharus. Of this form is what is perhaps the oldest example of a metal chalice that has survived—the cup found at Gourdon, now in the Bibliothèque Nationale. We have, or rather had, another example of this type in the golden chalice inlaid with jewels which was formerly preserved at Monza. In fact, this form is especially characteristic of early Byzantine art; we see such vases represented over and over again on marble reliefs and mosaics. Now in the British Museum there are two vases, distinctly of this cantharus shape; they are of blue, somewhat bubbly glass, with fluted body: one which is perfect was found at Amiens ([Plate XII.]); the other, from the Slade collection, has lost its handles. These vases may well date from the sixth century, and they may very probably have served as chalices.
Let us now turn to some of the rare specimens of early glass to be found in the treasuries of churches, chiefly in the north of Italy.
At Rome, in the church of St. Anastasia, is a bowl of opaque glass, with ornaments in relief, mounted on a metal foot. This claims to be the chalice used by St. Jerome.
More famous is the sacro catino preserved in the cathedral of St. Lorenzo at Genoa. There is no reason to doubt the story that this bowl fell to the share of a Genoese when the town of Cæsarea was sacked by the Crusaders in the year 1101. It seems to have suffered no diminution in sanctity from a want of uniformity in the tradition as to its earlier history.[[68]] The sacro catino is a shallow hexagonal bowl with feet and handles; the slight ornaments on the surface are finished with a tool. It was carried off to Paris during the revolutionary war, and then discovered to be not an emerald, as had been always maintained, but a piece of admirably tinted glass, containing, however, a few air-bubbles. The bowl was broken before its return to Genoa, and the pieces are now united by a filigree mounting of gold.
VASE OF BLUE GLASS, PROBABLY A CHALICE
ABOUT FIFTH CENTURY, A.D.
It is claimed for the famous treasures preserved in the royal basilica at Monza, that they date from the time of Theodolinda, Queen of the Lombards (589-625 A.D.). Among them is a cup of a deep blue material which is stated to be a sapphire. It is almost three inches in diameter, and Mr. Nesbitt, who examined it, failed to discover any air-bubbles. If, however, as is probable, this cup is of glass, it gives evidence of the technical skill of the craftsman who made it. In the same treasury are a number of little flasks in which were preserved the oil exuding from the bodies of martyrs—whether these flasks came originally from Rome or from Palestine, I am unable to say. In any case they closely resemble certain little bottles said to be of Coptic origin, found in Upper Egypt. There are some very similar flasks, claiming to date from the sixth century, in the treasury of St. Croix at Poitiers.
But it is to the treasury of St. Mark at Venice that we must go to find what is by far the largest collection of Byzantine glass in existence. The tradition that refers this collection as a whole to the time of the fourth crusade, when in the year 1204 Constantinople was subjected to a systematic pillage by the combined forces of the Venetians and the Franks, is doubtless in the main true. But long before this the Venetians had been in close commercial relations with the Greek capital. The nucleus of the Pala D’Oro, undoubtedly a Byzantine work, dates from the last years of the tenth century. On the other hand, there are some objects in the treasury of considerably later date than the twelfth century. As the little that we know of the glass of the Byzantines is mainly founded upon this collection, I will extract from Passini’s great work[[69]] a complete list of the examples of glass that it contains.
I. Among a series of ten chalices of which the metal mountings bear inscriptions in Greek relating to the consecration of the holy wine, is a hemispherical cup of common glass, some 5 inches in height, studded with conical points, and another of clear glass with an arcading in low relief (xxxi. 76 and 77). In the same series is a bowl of green glass, decorated with four quaint animals rudely carved in low relief (xlv. 99).
II. Among a set of so-called chalices, without inscriptions or symbols, we find—1st, A vase of plain blown glass of greyish colour, 71⁄2 inches in height; it is without ornament, but is richly mounted in filigree and jewels (l. 116). 2nd, A bowl of plain glass, some 6 inches in height; at the base is a series of circular button-like projections with a stud in the centre of each (xlii. 87). 3rd, A cup of clear glass (some 6 in. high); the surface is decorated by a series of shield-like projections similar to those on the last (xl. 79). 4th, Another cup of coarse glass (5 in. high) is not illustrated in Passini’s work.
III. Among a series of so-called patens of various materials we find four of glass—1st, A plate-like paten of greenish glass (7 in. diam.), the outside incised with a number of small circular depressions (xlix. 109). 2nd, A paten of milky-white semi-transparent glass with shaped margin (9 in. diam.); not illustrated. 3rd, An unmounted shallow dish or bowl of plain glass (14 in. diam.) shaped like the pan of a balance; eight ringed discs, standing out in relief from the surface, surround a central circular shield; between are facetted, pointed projections[[70]] (lix. 110a) ([Plate XI.] 3). 4th, A smaller pan-like paten or hanging lamp similar to the above (10 in. diam.) is not illustrated.
GLASS VESSEL CARVED IN LOW RELIEF AND MOUNTED AS A ‘FALSE’ EWER
PROBABLY EARLY SARACENIC
IV. Lamps—1st, A vessel in the shape of a balance-pan, mounted as a lamp, and hung by three chains (liv. 125). We are reminded by this of the lamps that hung in St. Sophia, as described by Paul the Silentiary (p. [97]). The decoration of discs and facetted points is almost identical with III. 3. The inscription in Greek on the silver rim maybe rendered: ‘✠ Saint Pantaleone, help your slave Zachariah, Archbishop of Iberia! Amen!’ This connection with Iberia (Georgia) is of the greatest interest as bearing upon the origin of this family of glass ([Plate XI.] 1). 2nd, A bucket-shaped lamp of plain glass hanging from three chains (hgt. 6 in.) (liv. 124). 3rd, An ellipsoid hanging lamp of common glass (chief diam. 8 in.). On the exterior, projecting in high relief, are carved shells, fishes, and other animals. From the silver rim project six cloisons which formerly held jewels; one alone remains, an oval paste of opaque blue. Above project eight little cylindrical sockets, as if to contain candles (liv. 123).
V. Amphora-shaped vessels—1st, A cylindrical vase of common glass, with rich mounting (total height, 20 in.) (xxxvi. 65). 2nd, A pear-shaped vase, set with a false metal spout to resemble an ampulla or cruet; the mounting is of Oriental character. The glass is carved with a design containing two long-horned rams among a conventional leaf pattern (the glass alone 4 in. high) (li. 115) ([Plate XIII.]). 3rd, An unmounted vase of common glass, with handles (10 in. diam.). 4th, An unmounted conical vase of common glass with conical neck, carved in low relief with three conventionalised four-legged monsters with tendril-like limbs and bodies (hgt. 5 in.) (xl. 80).[[71]]
VI. Situlæ, or bucket-shaped vases, 1st, A situla of clear glass of a violet tint. The design—somewhat rudely cut with a wheel—consists of a series of figures, with pastoral and Bacchic emblems. The decoration is similar in style to the engraved work found on some late Roman glass from the Rhine district (hgt. 8 in.) (liii. 121). 2nd, The famous situla that I have already described when treating of the diatretum glass (p. [72]). The Canonico Passini thinks that the rings of glass have been fitted on subsequently, and that is the impression that I formed when examining the vase (hgt. II in.) (liii. 122). ([Plate XIV.])
VII. The vase enamelled with classical medallions which has already been described in connection with the enamelled glass of the Romans (p. [66]). Although, as I have said, the figures are purely classical in style, yet the scroll-work reminds one of the decoration on Coptic bowls and fragments brought from Egypt (xl. 78, and xli. 82).
VIII. There remains the turquoise basin, richly mounted in gold and gems, presented in 1472 by the Shah of Persia to the Signoria of Venice. The only ornament is a conventionalised hare carved in low relief on each of the five compartments that divide the sides. On the base is a brief dedication in Arabic to Allah. As to the material of this vase, all I can say is that it is carved; this is seen by the light reflected on the somewhat unctuous surface; it is therefore not porcelain or other ceramic ware, as some have thought. The slightly waxy lustre is in favour of its being a natural stone of the turquoise order. Some, however, have held this dish to be of a glass paste, on the ground of the minute bubbles on the translucent edge; but the existence of these bubbles is denied by others, and I myself failed to discover them (hgt. II in.) (liii. 122).
I have dwelt in some detail on this little-known Byzantine glass at St. Mark’s, for it is, as a group, of unique interest for our history, throwing light on so many obscure problems.
SITULA OF LATE ROMAN OR BYZANTINE GLASS
DIATRETUM WORK
We may obtain some slight hints as to the commoner kinds of glass in use by the Byzantine Greeks from the illustrations of contemporary manuscripts. I will give an instance of frequent occurrence. The Evangelist who on the opening page is represented seated at his desk engaged in writing his gospel, dips his pen into a little flask of clear glass, of cylindrical body and straight neck. This is a simple form, easily turned out by the blowing-tube, without the use of the pontil. We may trace it all through the Middle Ages, and a flask very similar in shape is still used in the laboratory of the chemist.
Apart from the more or less conventional rendering of the human figure—and this is what we usually think of in connection with Byzantine painting—we find two tendencies in the minor arts of the time; one classical, carrying on the old Greco-Roman tradition, the other Oriental in motive and feeling. For more than three hundred years the frontiers of the Roman and Sassanian empires were continually fluctuating, and in this border region, which included Armenia, Georgia, Western Persia, and the upper waters of the Tigris and the Euphrates, there were at this time many flourishing centres of industry. It was probably in some of these lands, rather than in Constantinople itself, that we may look for the home of the school of carving in rock crystal and in glass that we associate vaguely with the Lower Empire.[[72]] Nor did the Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries make at once any great changes in the arts of these districts. It was through these lands probably that so many Oriental motives filtered through to the west, not only to Constantinople, but to the north and west coasts of the Black Sea also, and thence through Poland and Hungary to Germany. Nowhere is this Oriental influence better seen than in the vases of rock crystal and other hard stones preserved in the treasuries of our Western churches, nor can we separate these vases from the even rarer objects carved in glass. The carving on the so-called Hedwig glasses is, as we shall see, executed in an allied if somewhat degenerate style; some of these glasses can be traced back to the borderlands of Poland.
Of the glass in use among the Persians and the other subjects of the Sassanian empire (which lasted from the end of the third to the beginning of the seventh century) we know practically nothing. Doubtless many examples of Sassanian glass have been turned up during the gigantic explorations around Nineveh, Babylon, and Susa, but till quite lately little attention has been paid to objects of so comparatively late a date. In the Louvre are some fragments of glass lately brought from Susa. One piece calls for mention here. This is a large fragment of thick clear glass which has formed the half of a shallow circular dish, about fourteen inches in diameter. There are some eight or nine shallow circular depressions cut out from the sides, with a stud rising in counter-relief from the centre of each. We are at once reminded of certain ‘balance-pan’ hanging lamps in the treasury at Venice—in fact, this fragment from Susa must have formed part of a vessel almost identical with these.
But our one undoubted example of Sassanian glass forms part of a bowl now in the Bibliothèque Nationale. This famous vessel was long preserved in the treasury of the Abbey of St. Denis; as in the case of an enamelled cup preserved at Chartres, it was claimed for it that it had been a present from Harun-ar-Rashid to Charlemagne. The body of this bowl consists of a framework of gold, the openings of which are filled with rosettes of rock crystal and glass. The central medallion of rock crystal is carved to represent a king seated on his throne; for this reason the vessel was formerly known as the ‘Cup of Solomon.’ The seated king has, however, now been identified as Khosroes II. (Kosrou Parviz), one of the last of the Sassanian monarchs (590-628). The rosettes of glass and the lozenges between them are white, emerald-green, and purple, and the colours are still brilliant. M. de Longperier, who first identified the subject of the central medallion, has brought forward passages from early Arab writers in which mention is made of glass drinking-cups in use in the court of the Sassanian kings.
The question, however, of the origin of the enamelled glass of the Saracens—one of the most burning ones in the history of glass—receives no light from this quarter. Nor is the problem much advanced if we turn to Egypt to study the interesting middle period between the first introduction of Christianity and the Mohammedan conquest. It is only quite lately that the exploration of Coptic tombs has thrown some quite unexpected light on the culture of these long-neglected centuries. Not a little glass has been found, chiefly in fragments, and of these the date can only be inferred from the style of the decoration. The use of thin opaque ‘painted’ enamels, quite different from the brilliant jewel-like enamels of the Saracens, seems to have been much in vogue in Egypt at this time. What has been found is not very accessible so far, nor has much been done in the way of classification. A small collection, derived chiefly, I think, from the excavations at Achmin in Upper Egypt, has lately been purchased by the Victoria and Albert Museum (from M. Richard). The little bottles of various simple shapes call to mind those preserved in the treasuries of certain European churches (see above, p. [99]). One slim spindle-shaped vessel reminds one a little of the vase with Greek inscription found in the South-Saxon cemetery near Worthing (p. [107]). Among the fragments is one delicately painted in thin enamels in Egypto-Roman manner—we see a flying bird and the stalks and seed-vessels of the lotus; others are decorated with entrelacs of Byzantine character, also in a thin opaque enamel; but on the majority of these fragments the subject and the design are thoroughly Saracenic. Some ribbed bowls (in shape identical with those from the later Celtic tombs of North Italy) have been added lately to the British Museum collection; they come from Upper Egypt; the scroll-like decoration in a manganese brown enamel is of distinctly Byzantine character. Though these ribbed bowls may possibly be of later date, they at any rate carry on the tradition of pre-Arab times.
Those who have visited the natron lakes of Lower Egypt (three days’ journey to the south-west of Cairo), declare that there is evidence that the brine and the saline deposits have been worked more or less continuously from Roman times. The natron is still extracted from the lakes by the fellahin in the dry season. The impure sub-carbonate of soda forms a cake beneath the coating of common salt, and lies also upon the ground around. Near the village of Zakook fragments have been found that point to the existence of glass-works in former days—this is indeed probably the site of the town of Nitria. A French traveller of the eighteenth century speaks of seeing near here ‘trois verreries abandonnées’ (Voyages en Égypte par le Sieur Granger, 1745). Indeed the ruins of three conical buildings are still to be seen; the stones are fused on the edges, and plentiful scoriæ of common green glass lie around. Some of the enamelled lamps of Saracenic style, now so much prized by collectors, may perhaps have come from monasteries in this neighbourhood. There are besides these a few lamps (as that from Siti Mariam, reproduced in the late Mr. Butler’s Coptic Churches of Egypt) which are of quite a distinct character. These lamps are set round with blue bosses and little plaques; there is, however, no ground for attributing any great antiquity to such work.
CHAPTER VI
GLASS FROM ANGLO-SAXON AND FRANKISH TOMBS.
THE SO-CALLED HEDWIG GLASSES
We must now turn to the Germanic tribes of the north. Thanks to the late conversion of these tribes to Christianity, we have in the objects found in their graves a comparatively rich store of information, up to as late a date as the sixth and seventh centuries.
A few rare specimens of glass of an essentially Byzantine character have been found in these pagan cemeteries. The most remarkable, perhaps, is the tall, somewhat spindle-shaped vase discovered in 1894 in a South-Saxon cemetery at the foot of the South Downs, some five miles to the west of Worthing.[[73]] The design which encircles the body of this vase has been engraved somewhat summarily with the wheel; we see a hound pursuing two hares—formal fern-like fronds rise between. The Greek inscription round the top in large letters is similarly cut; the expression ✠ Ο ΥΓΙΕΝΩΝ ΧΡΩ may be regarded as equivalent to the Latin Utere feliciter—‘May the draught do you good!’ In this little vase we have perhaps the latest example of classical glass of sepulchral origin.
The glass of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors must be considered in connection with that found in the graves of kindred tribes on the Continent. Of these, the most important are the Frankish people who dwelt for some time before their conversion to Christianity in the district between the Rhine and the Ardennes. It is here, more especially in the middle valley of the Meuse, about Namur and Liége, that the most important finds have been made; the more elaborate examples, at any rate, of this Franko-Saxon[[74]] glass were possibly manufactured in this district.
Now the importance for us of this glass from pagan cemeteries lies in the fact that in it we have the latest important and independent group of glass of which anything is known, until we come to the Saracenic enamelled ware of the thirteenth century. In England, indeed, the gap extends to a much later period; but in the case of Western Germany there is some reason to believe that the Frankish fashions and traditions of glass-making were carried on without any break during the Middle Ages—that, in fact, in this early mediæval glass may be found a link between the glass of Roman times and that in use in the Rhine district up to the time when the influence of the Renaissance first asserted itself. In Southern and Western France, on the other hand, although the glass-workers may in places have carried on the old workings, what they made was of no artistic importance. We have in this case nothing equivalent to the outcome of the renewed interest taken in the material by the northern chieftains—the verre à fougère was a product of the woods and heaths.
The Oriental influence—the distinguishing feature in all the glass of which I have treated in the last chapter—is not so pronounced in the glass of the Franko-Saxon peoples as in their jewellery and metal-work. In these we find the mark of influences that had their source in the East at two if not three widely separated periods. As for the earliest of these, it is not only pre-Roman but probably pre-Hellenic: its relations are rather with Asiatic than classical lands. The brooches and buckles inlaid with garnets, and the quaint animal forms with which the metal designs are built up, take us back perhaps to an earlier Asiatic civilisation which is best represented in the Persia of Achæmenid times.[[75]] The second of these periods of Oriental influence is to be associated with the introduction of the Christian religion. Again, at a still later time some of the older Oriental motives crept in in a modified form with the pagan Danes and even with the Normans.
1. BEADS WITH APPLIQUÉ DECORATION GREEK OR PHŒNICIAN. ABOUT SIXTH CENTURY. B.C.
2. CHEVRON BEADS, FORMED FROM SOLID RODS
PROBABLY VENETIAN
3, 4 & 5. MISCELLANEOUS BEADS, FROM FRANKISH AND OTHER TOMBS IN RHINE AND MOSELLE DISTRICT
EARLY MEDIÆVAL
As far as glass is concerned, it is in the beads that we see most clearly the return to the older fashions. Of these Franko-Saxon beads the British Museum has a great store, not only from English graves but from those of the Franks and other Germanic tribes on the Continent. Now these beads differ entirely from those found in Celtic and Roman tombs. Of these last, the dominant type—and we must confine ourselves to this—is of a turquoise or deep blue, generally more or less transparent, and they are often longitudinally ribbed. In a collection of Germanic beads, on the other hand, the prevailing colours are red and yellow, of ochry tints; they are almost invariably quite opaque, and the patterns are mostly built up on the surface in a way that reminds us of the primitive glass of the Eastern Mediterranean ([Plate XV.] 3). A herring-bone pattern of fine lines is very characteristic, and the delicacy of the designs on some of the beads from Allemanic graves in Switzerland and elsewhere rivals that of the highly finished work of the Egyptians.
Of this early Germanic glass generally, we may say that the greatest interest lies in the types that depart most from the Roman glass which preceded it, and on which it is of course as a whole founded. In some cases the northern influence is only seen in a certain barbaric magnificence—as in the examples from Germanic graves in Italy, lately added to the collection in the Glass Room at the British Museum. Here we see for the first time the drinking-horn of the north; this fine specimen, trumpet-ended and fluted with long gadroons, is of a deep blue glass wound round with white threads. Of similar origin is the rhyton, of moulded glass of a rich amber colour, which lies beside it. It may be noted that this form too, in spite of its classical associations, was originally, as the name implies, derived from the horn of some animal. It is not impossible that these vessels were made by local Italian glass-workers to the order of the barbarians, on the occasion of the burial of one of their leaders.
These are, however, only local accidental finds. With the glass used by, or at least buried with the bodies of, our Anglo-Saxon ancestors during the two centuries that followed their arrival in England, we have a fairly intimate acquaintance; as I have said, it differs little from the contemporary or in some cases rather earlier Frankish glass of the Rhine, Moselle, and Meuse districts.
That glass was made in the south of Britain in Roman times there is every reason to believe, and we look in Kent for the most probable place for its manufacture, somewhere, perhaps, not far from the estuary of the Medway (cf. p. [86]). It is the Kentish graves again that have yielded the largest quantity of Anglo-Saxon glass, as well as the greatest varieties of forms. It is noticeable, however, that specimens of what is the most remarkable and characteristic type of Anglo-Saxon glass have been found in many other parts of the country. I refer of course to the horns and conical cups decorated with long pendulous lobes or ‘prunts.’ These drinking-cups have been found, apart from the Kentish examples, in Durham, Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Cambridgeshire, and in the upper Thames valley. Individual prunts (these ‘thorned bosses’ are more substantial than the thin surrounding glass) have occasionally turned up in excavations in London and elsewhere. Abroad, precisely similar vessels have been taken from Frankish graves in the Rhine provinces. It is more remarkable that several cups so ornamented have been found in Illyria, in the Narenta Valley. Mr. Arthur Evans traces these ‘thorn-bossed beakers’ to the graves of Ostrogothic chiefs, and thinks that their fragility may be taken as a proof of local manufacture (Archæologia, vol. xlviii. pp. 75-84). On the other hand, the high technical skill required in the blowing of such glasses has led most antiquaries to regard our English examples as of Continental origin, not improbably from the Rhine or Meuse country.
PRUNTED BEAKER, FROM ANGLO-SAXON BURIAL MOUND
TAPLOW
Mr. Hartshorne (Old English Glasses, p. 119) has attempted to reconstitute the steps by which these ‘thorn-bossed beakers’ were made. He thinks that after the vessel had been blown from a ‘gathering,’ lumps of molten glass were applied one by one to the sides. ‘The hot liquid metal acting upon the thin cooled sides of the object caused it to give way successively at the points of attachment under renewed pressure by blowing. The concavities thus formed extended into the bodies of the prunts, the projecting points of which, being seized by the pucella, were rapidly drawn forward to a tail and attached to the outside of the glass lower down,’ This, of course, was before the vessel had been removed from the blowing-iron, and Mr. Hartshorne finds in this fact a reason for the prunts in this early glass always drooping downwards, while the somewhat similar stachelnuppen, or ‘blobs,’ on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century German glasses, added as they were after the transference of the vessel to the pontil, invariably point upwards. ‘The whole of the pendant lobes,’ continues Mr. Hartshorne, ‘having been thus put on and quilled and ornamented, as some examples show, the pontil was attached to the base, the blowing-iron wetted off the other end, and the closed bulb being softened at the mouth of the pot, presently became an open cup; the mouth of the glass was now sheared, widened, and finished, the stringing of the upper end of the vase usually forming part of the final operation.’
The tall conical cup of olive-green glass in the British Museum, found a few years ago with so many fine specimens of Anglo-Saxon metal-work and inlaid jewellery, in a tumulus opened by Mr. Grenfell, at Taplow on the Thames, may be taken as an example in which these processes may be followed ([Pl. XVI.]). The quilling or toothing along the side of the prunts is very similar to that often seen at the point of attachment of the handle on Roman vases.[[76]]
Now these prunted beakers are of interest for two reasons. In the first place, we cannot find any Roman prototype for the long drooping tears of glass. Again, the fact of the wide distribution of almost identical pieces would point to the necessity of throwing back the date of origin for some considerable time. But at what point in their wanderings did these Germanic tribes acquire this remarkable skill in the handling of glass? The fact that these processes were known to the Ostrogoths in the fifth or sixth century makes an Oriental origin for this system of decoration not unlikely. In any case, this type of prunted surface seems to have had a special attraction for the Germanic peoples, for we can hardly doubt that from these old thorn-bossed beakers and horns, by continuous tradition, the stachelnuppen on the krautstrunk and the roemer of the sixteenth century were derived.
Much more numerous in the Anglo-Saxon tombs are—1st, the little bottles of simple form often stringed spirally round the neck (or in other cases the stringing may be applied to form rude gadroons and other patterns on the body); and 2nd, the small wide-mouthed and footless cups, often of bell-like section. These were held in the palm of the hand while drinking, as we may see in contemporary manuscripts and perhaps in the Bayeux tapestry.[[77]] They are true tumblers in the original sense of the word, in that they have no foot and will not stand upright. A very similar form is common in Merovingian graves.
DRINKING CUPS FROM ANGLO-SAXON GRAVES
The tall, conical, trumpet-shaped cups are often carefully made and of considerable artistic merit ([Plate XVII.]); the sides are sometimes gadrooned and fluted, and threadings of glass of various colours are applied to them. On a fine specimen found in the cemetery of the South Saxons near Worthing, the stringing has been ‘dragged’ to form graceful festoons or chevrons, calling to mind the patterns on the primitive glass of the Eastern Mediterranean.
The simpler forms—the little bottles and cups—may well have been made in some of our southern counties, perhaps in the very glass-houses abandoned by the Romans; at any rate in Kent, the Jutish graves from which so much of this glass has been derived are, as I have said, intimately associated with the earlier Romano-British cemeteries. On the other hand, for the north of England, we have the distinct statement made by Bede, in his Historia Ecclesiastica, that at the end of the seventh century the glass-workers who were brought over from Gaul taught to the natives not only the making of glass for windows, but also of glass ‘for the lamps in use in the church, and for vessels for other various and not ignoble uses.’ So again a little later, in the middle of the eighth century, Cuthbert of Jarrow, writing this time to the Bishop of Mainz, says: ‘If you have any man in your diocese who is skilful in the making of glass, I pray you send him to me, ... seeing that of that art we are ignorant and without resource.’ That at this later period Cuthbert should have had to send all the way to Mainz is, I think, a point of some significance.
The ensuing centuries are the most barren in the whole history of glass. We know that in France the glass-workers returned to the woods to manufacture in large quantities the verre à fougère—common glass for domestic use, which does not seem to have come into any close relation with the artistic movements of the time. Here before long all interest was centred in the manufacture of stained glass for the windows of the churches, and this art became of supreme importance with the rapid development of the new architecture in the twelfth century. Whether we in England at so early a date manufactured glass to any extent on either of these lines is, I am afraid, still a disputed point.
It was in Germany, and especially in the intermediate tract that for a time existed as an independent kingdom—in Lotharingia, I mean—that the old traditions seem to have held their ground most firmly. To Germany from time to time during the Middle Ages came new waves of influence from the East, by various and sometimes very circuitous paths,—in Charlemagne’s time by way of Ravenna and Rome, more directly from Constantinople in the tenth century, when Otto the Great married his son to the grand-daughter of the Greek Emperor. About the same time we hear of Greek craftsmen at work in German monasteries, as at Reichenau on the lower Lake of Constance, where, by the way, a great slab of bluish-green glass, traditionally of Byzantine origin, is still preserved.[[78]]
GLASS CUP, CARVED IN HIGH RELIEF
GERMAN OR ORIENTAL. TWELFTH OR THIRTEENTH CENTURY
But it was probably by more remote paths, through Poland and other Slavonic lands to the east,[[79]] that the designs on the only specimens of mediæval glass still existing in Germany that show distinctly oriental motives[[80]]—if indeed the glasses are not themselves Oriental—found their way westward. I refer to the rare carved goblets, about which so much has been written in Germany. The glass of these little cylindrical cups—they vary in height from three to five inches—is of a yellowish-green or brownish tint, at times indeed nearly colourless; it contains many bubbles. These so-called Hedwig glasses are carved in high relief on the outside: as many as nine examples have been described by Von Czihak (Schlesische Gläser, p. 184 seq.), but of these only two can in any way be brought into connection with St. Hedwig.[[81]]
The carving upon these glasses is deeply cut, but excessively rude. They bear the mark of a large coarse wheel, applied for the most part in two directions more or less at right angles to one another, and little attempt has been made to round off the edges and angles. We see in the decoration—figures of lions, griffins or eagles, as well as formal leaf-like patterns—motives that are essentially Oriental; indeed we are taken back rather to the Persia of Sassanian times than to Constantinople. What is above all noticeable is the extreme degeneracy of these motives; on some examples, as on the Halberstadt glass, the design has become a meaningless pattern. This, as in the case of other similar breakings up of design,[[82]] would point to the copying and recopying by a semi-barbarous people of a subject the original significance of which had been lost. In any case, we may see in these little beakers the last examples of a dying art. Some of them may be traced back, on the ground of their mounting, to the fourteenth, perhaps to the thirteenth, century, but the glasses themselves may well be considerably older. The important point to remember is that during the later Middle Ages the carving of glass was quite unknown in Europe, and that the art of employing the lapidary’s wheel as a cutting instrument appears to have been lost. Indeed we do not meet with carved glass again in any form until the beginning of the seventeenth century, and then the rapid development of the art by the Lehmanns and the Schwanharts at Prague is acknowledged to have depended upon technical processes learned from Italian carvers of rock crystal.
I will now enumerate the most characteristic of these carved glasses, basing my description in part upon the careful account given by Von Czihak in his Schlesische Gläser.
1. In the Museum of Silesian Antiquities at Breslau. The design consists of a vase, surmounted by a crescent and star; on either side heraldic lions, each surmounted by a small three-cornered shield, beyond them a conventionalised tree; the whole most rudely cut. (Figured by Von Czihak.)
2. In the treasury of the Cathedral at Cracow. Lions and shields as above, and eagle ‘displayed.’ It is claimed for these two glasses that they were used by St. Hedwig.
3. In the Germanic Museum at Nuremberg. Two lions ‘passant’ in the same direction; small shields as above and a griffin ([Plate XVIII.]).
4. In the Rijks Museum at Amsterdam. Eagle ‘displayed,’ two lions and triangular shields. This glass was formerly an heirloom in the Nassau-Orange family. On the base is engraved ‘Alsz diesz glas war alt tausend Jahr, es Pfalzgraff Ludwig Philipszen Werehret war—1643.’ (Figured by Hartshorne and by Garnier.)
The above four examples closely resemble one another; in each case the design is relieved upon a scalloped back, something like the linen-fold of late Gothic wood-panelling.
5. In the Cathedral treasury at Minden. The glass is of a pale honey tint. The design is formed of a lion with a shield containing a triangle, an eagle displayed and a ‘tree of life,’ somewhat similar to that on No. 1. The elements of the design are arranged stiffly with a wide field between. (Figured by Von Czihak.)
6. Formerly in the Cathedral at Halberstadt, now in Berlin, in private hands. Of greenish glass, only three and a half inches in height. Design—two lions and triangular shield.
7. In the Cathedral Treasury at Halberstadt. The design on this little glass has degenerated into a meaningless juxtaposition of bosses, bars, and fretted bands. (Figured by Von Czihak.)
This appears to exhaust the list of these little carved glass beakers. There is nothing in the treasury of St. Mark’s that can distinctly be classed with them; on the other hand, the ‘voirre taille d’un esgle, d’un griffon et d’une double couronne,’ mentioned in the inventory of the possessions of Charles the Bold of Burgundy, may well have been a cup of this class (Laborde, Les Ducs de Bourgogne, ii. No. 2753).
CHAPTER VII
MEDIÆVAL TREATISES ON GLASS
In a general way, it may be said of the Oriental glass that penetrated into Europe in the early Middle Ages, that the type is given by carvings in rock crystal. We can point to no example of sculptured glass that can be compared to the magnificent vases carved out of that mineral that we may see in the Louvre or in the treasury of St. Mark’s. I should be inclined to place the district where this branch of glyptic art flourished, whether we consider works of rock crystal or of glass, somewhere in what may be called Upper Western Asia—in Armenia, Georgia, or Western Persia—and to refer many of the extant examples to a date rather before than after the Arab conquest. But all this, of course, is pure conjecture.
Of quite another type was the glass made, it would seem without interruption during all this period, in various parts of Syria. The industry appears by this time to have passed in great measure into the hands of the Jews. Benjamin of Tudela in the twelfth century found Jewish glass-makers at Antioch and at Tyre. It was they, apparently, who carried on the old traditions in the manufacture of artificial pastes, coloured to imitate precious stones. The fusible glass containing lead of which such pastes were made had indeed been from an early date associated with the Jews—‘Vitrum plumbeum, Judæum scilicet,’ says Heraclius. The demand for such work must have increased immensely with the prevailing fashion of incrusting reliquaries, the covers of books, and various personal ornaments with large coloured jewels, real or false (generally the latter), cut en cabochon.
It is chiefly in connection with such work that there arose a curious literature, if that term may be used for the barbarous treatises in question. Already in Roman times we hear of writings that describe the manufacture of artificial gems: Pliny says that he purposely abstains from mentioning the names of these works—he would not help to spread so objectionable an industry. But at that time and even later it was in Egypt that treatises of the kind chiefly originated. The mysteries of glass-making were there early associated with more dangerous arts. It is mainly to writers on magic—white or even black—and to those on alchemy that we must turn to find the earliest examples of those strange recipes for the manufacture, and especially the colouring, of glass, of which I shall have more to say later on. This connection between the arts of the glass-maker and of the alchemist arose from many causes, some of them obscure. For example, the vessels used in the experiments of the alchemists were from an early date made of glass. Again, the strange changes of colour observed when glass was stained by copper or by gold were regarded as steps to the great discovery itself. So that from the days of the Ptolemies in Egypt, if not from an earlier date, down to the time of the German alchemists and Rosicrucians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we find along with the grotesque and cryptic formulas for the preparation of gold an almost continuous chain of recipes, equally absurd for the most part, for the colouring of glass. In addition to this, many of these treatises, although professing to deal with the general problem of the transmutation of matter, are in reality concerned with the more practical questions of making plausible imitations of gold, silver, and precious stones—they are, in fact, handbooks for the fraudulent goldsmith.
This is especially the case with the earliest example of the class that has come down to us, the famous papyrus of Leyden, which alone has survived the destruction that the Roman law again and again attempted to enforce in the case of all books of magic. M. Berthelot, whom I follow for these early writers,[[83]] calls this papyrus the working notes of an ‘artisan faussaire et d’un magicien charlatan.’ This little work, found long ago at Thebes, is a Greek manuscript of the third century; it contains, however, little or nothing about glass, and is of interest merely as an early specimen of this class of composition.
Other Greek treatises of a similar character, which are either lost or survive only in extracts or translations, are attributed to Zosimus, a writer of the third century, who had a section on glass; to Synesius, a Cyrenaic bishop (400 A.D.), married, and half a pagan; and to Olympiodorus, a priest of Isis, who in the sixth century kept up some of the Hellenic traditions. The late Byzantine scholiasts drew up summaries of these treatises and of many others; an important manuscript of this class at Venice gives a list of fifty-two such works. But these Byzantine summaries are of little value to us; all grip of fact is completely lost in the mystical jargon of the school.
Of much greater interest are the many series of practical formulas written in Latin, beginning with the Compositiones ad Tingenda, known to us from a manuscript of the eighth century. Here we find a section upon the colouring of artificial stones, their gilding and polishing, and upon the colouring of glass generally—how it is rendered milky by means of tin, red by cinnabar (?), by litharge (?), and by a substance called calcocecaumenon, the latter word doubtless a corruption of the Greek equivalent of the æs æstum, or burnt bronze, the well-known mediæval source of an opaque red. Further on recipes are given for other colours to be applied as varnishes. There is also a chapter on the making of glass and some summary account of glass-furnaces, interesting solely as the earliest example of the many such descriptions that have come down to us. In fact, all these writers copied one from the other, summarising or amplifying. The same recipes, more or less intelligently expressed, turn up again and again: we can trace them in Theophilus, and even in such comparatively modern writers as Neri and Kunckel.
A later treatise, the Mappæ clavicula (ninth or tenth century), follows closely upon the Compositiones. As regards glass, we find headings—for that is unfortunately all that remains of this section—on unbreakable glass, on the soldering of glass, on the art of tracing trees and fruits of all kinds upon a flask, on an indelible manner of painting on glass, and finally, three sections on the fabrication of pearls.
I have already discussed one of the recipes of Heraclius (or Eraclius) when describing the cemetery glasses. All that we know of this writer is that he was a monk, and that he probably wrote in Rome, not later than the tenth century. The twenty-one little sections that make up his two books are written in hexameters, and treat of The Colours and Arts of the Romans. A third and much larger book in prose, that is found in some manuscripts, is of a considerably later date and of quite a different nature.[[84]] I will now briefly summarise what the true Heraclius has to say about glass in his two metrical books.
In the third section we are told that earthenware may be glazed with a preparation of pounded Roman glass, mixed with water and gum and then carefully refired. The fourth section—De Sculpturâ Vitri—describes a method by which glass may be first softened by smearing it with a mixture of fat worms and vinegar, sprinkled over with the blood of a fasting goat that had been fed with ivy; the glass may then be cut with a hard stone called pirites. This association of goat’s blood and ivy occurs more than once in the old recipes; for these strange ingredients there may have been originally a cryptic interpretation, but we should perhaps rather take the pretended necessity of their employment as a sign that the art of cutting glass had been lost. Then in section v. follows the account of the writer’s attempt at imitating the gilt glass of the catacombs, which I have already analysed (p. [92]). The description of the manner of cutting (secari) the cristallum in section xii. is more practical; we are told of a plate of lead mounted on iron, over which a certain hard powder is sprinkled. But here, too, the virtue of goat’s blood is not forgotten; by its means the diamond may be made to yield to iron. In section xiv. a process is described by which Roman glass may be melted and cast into moulds of chalk to form ‘fair shining gems.’ Heraclius has been called an ignorant quack, but he well represents the views of his time. Compared with him, Theophilus, who wrote in the north of Germany some hundred or two hundred years later, seems almost a modern.
More important to us than any of these Western sources of information before the time of Theophilus, are certain Syriac manuscripts preserved in the British Museum and at Cambridge. For our knowledge of the contents of these I am again indebted to M. Berthelot (La Chimie au Moyen Age, vol. ii.). In the sixth and seventh centuries Syria had taken a commanding position, both commercially and artistically. The trade between the west and the east, when not interrupted by the wars between the Greeks and the Sassanians, passed through Antioch, and after the Arab conquest the seat of the Caliphs was for a time at Damascus, a Syrian town. In the history of glass, from the very earliest times down to the Middle Ages, Syria, as represented by the coast towns at least, has vied with Egypt for the premier position; the two countries have always been closely connected, and at more than one time they were under the same ruler. When we come to study the glorious Saracenic glass of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, we shall find that Syria has perhaps a better claim than Egypt to be regarded as the original seat of the manufacture.
These Syriac and Arabo-Syriac manuscripts (the later sections are chiefly in Arabic) form part of the material from which the Arabs learned the arts of the Greeks. They claim for the most part to be translations from Greek, above all Alexandrian Greek, writers, from Zosimus and especially from the pseudo-Democritus. They deal with alchemy, that is to say with ‘applied chemistry’ and the subsidiary arts. There is, perhaps, more of local knowledge and practical experience in them than appears at first sight, or than M. Berthelot seems to allow: it was the fashion then to sail under the colours of the great men of old.
Beside some scattered references to the subject in other places, we find in the thirteenth section of the second part of the British Museum manuscript a chapter devoted entirely to glass—it can hardly be earlier than the ninth century. To make glass, we are told, add ten parts of alkali to ten of sand, grill the mixture in an oven till it is ‘clean as pure wool.’ Here we have the preliminary fritting described. Heat in a crucible till the substance can be drawn out like gum, ‘then make of it what you will—cups, bottles, boxes—as the Lord may permit.’ If the vessels thus made tend to split during the manufacture, ‘lay upon them a thread of melted glass. Shape the head and other parts, then put back the vessels in the furnace to reheat, and withdraw them gradually [that is to say, anneal the glass carefully as a final process].... If you wish the glass to be white, throw in some female magnesia [i.e. oxide of manganese, see p. [77]], if blue, add four mithgals of burnt antimony.’ The method of ‘cleansing’ glass by means of manganese had doubtless been handed down from Roman times, and the ‘burnt antimony’ is probably to be interpreted as a roasted ore of cobalt. For producing other colours, mention is made of various substances, but I am unable to give any reasonable interpretation of this part; we hear of tin, lead, and borax—the preparation of a fusible enamel would seem to be implied. Finally, we are told—‘Do what is to be done, according to the will of the Lord Sabaoth!’
There follows on this what is perhaps the earliest extant description of a glass furnace. ‘The furnace of the glass-makers should have six compartments, of which three are disposed in stories one above the other.... The lower compartment should be deep, in it is the fire; that of the middle story has an opening in front of the central chambers—these last should be equal, disposed on the sides and not in the centre (?), so that the fire from below may rise towards the central region where the glass is and heat and melt the materials. The upper compartment, which is vaulted, is arranged so as uniformly to roof over the middle story; it is used to cool the vessels after their manufacture.’[[85]] We have also the description of a smaller furnace, which is perhaps that in which the more fusible glass for enamels and minor objects of verroterie was melted. Finally, an oven with a floor of brick-earth is mentioned, for fritting the sand and alkali. In spite of much that is obscure in this description, we can trace in it the general type of furnace which, doubtless handed down from Roman times, has survived in places with few important changes to the present day.
MEDIÆVAL GLASS FURNACE
FROM AN ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPT OF RABANUS MAURUS
And here I may call attention to a contemporary drawing of a mediæval glass furnace—a source of information as unique as it is unexpected. This is to be found in a manuscript of an encyclopædic work, De Originibus Rerum, compiled by Rabanus Maurus, one of the earliest of the schoolmen. Rabanus lived in the Benedictine monastery of Fulda, in the first half of the ninth century. The manuscript in question, which is attributed to the year 1023, has been carefully reproduced by the monks of Monte Cassino where it is preserved. The full-paged miniature is to be found in a chapter headed De Vitro; I can, however, discover nothing in the text that throws any light on our subject. In the illustration we see to the left a nearly naked workman who holds a mass of some green material, perhaps the frit; another man is blowing through a tube what is probably meant for the unfinished cup; to the left a chalice-like vessel, perhaps the model, is depicted. Notice, too, in the pediment of the roof (probably to be regarded as the annealing oven) a cup with a knob for stem, and hemispherical foot. Cups of a similar form, apparently in these cases of metal, are found in other illustrations of the manuscript ([Plate XIX.]).
M. Berthelot has reproduced in his earlier work (La Chimie des Anciens) several rough pen-sketches of the apparatus used by the mediæval alchemists, taken from the St. Mark’s manuscript mentioned above. These drawings help us in a measure to understand the important place taken by glass vessels of various forms in the researches of these early experimental workers. Still more interesting are the illustrations in the Syriac manuscript from which I have just quoted; in these, the modern chemist may recognise many familiar forms. The glass vessels have chiefly reference to processes of distillation. The most important is the alembic, a form easily made; the neck of a long pendulous paraison has only to be heated on one side near the base, when it falls over of itself to assume the well-known shape. We see also flasks, standing in water or sand baths, within which various substances are digesting; in other cases the contents are volatilising into the turban-shaped aludels placed above them.[[86]]
But in all this strange literature, which, starting from the banks of the Nile in the first centuries of our era, spread over the Byzantine empire and was so eagerly absorbed by the first Arab conquerors, the interest in glass is only of a secondary nature,—the great question was the transmutation of matter and the consequent preparation of gold. Glass, as I have said, was of importance chiefly as a means to that end.
It was far otherwise with the writer whose work we must now examine. Theophilus, the author of the Schedula Diversarum Artium, was, it would seem, a monk in the monastery of Helmershausen, not far from Paderborn, in the old Saxon land. The earliest manuscript of his work probably dates from the twelfth century; it is preserved in the famous library at Wolfenbüttel. The treatise itself may perhaps be referred to the end of the eleventh or to the beginning of the next century; but in spite of this early date the style of the book is modern compared with the mediæval compilations we have lately been considering. That the German monk Rugerus, or Rogherus, should have assumed the Greek name Theophilus is itself a significant fact. He was, it would seem, a hard-working goldsmith and a ‘skilled artificer’ in many branches of the arts. He drew his inspiration from the Byzantine East on the one hand, and on the other from the younger civilisation that was beginning to centre in the new kingdom that was growing up in and around the Isle de France. To these sources we must perhaps add the older Cluniac tradition: from Tuscan artists also he had something to learn.[[87]]
‘Theophilus, an humble priest, servant of the servants of God, addresses his words to all who desire by the practical work of their hands and by the pleasing meditation of what is new, to put aside and trample under foot all sloth of mind and wandering of spirit....’ In this book they will find ‘all that Greece possesses in the way of divers colours and mixtures, all that Tuscany knows of the working of enamels [electrorum operositate] or of niello [nigellum], all that Arabia has to show of works ductile, fusible, or chased, all the many vases and sculptured gems and ivory that Italy adorns with gold, all that France prizes in costly variety of windows, all that in gold, silver, copper and iron or in subtle working of wood and stone is extolled by inventive [sollers] Germany.’ We are here in a healthy northern atmosphere, far removed from the shuffling statements and ambiguous formulas of the oriental alchemists.[[88]]
The second book of the Schedula is concerned exclusively with glass, but most of the thirty-one sections deal with the preparation of stained glass for windows. In a curious passage to be found in the prologue of this book, Theophilus tells us that he has ‘approached the atrium of the Holy Wisdom [Agiæ Sophiæ] and beheld the cellula adorned with every variety of divers colours, showing the nature and use of each.’[[89]]
The first chapter treats of the construction of the glass furnace, and enters at once into practical details. A German writer (A. Friedrich, Alt-Deutsche Gläser) has illustrated the furnaces of Theophilus by means of a diagram, and attempts to show how they differ from those described by the pseudo-Heraclius. All we can say is, that while the furnace of the later writer consisted distinctly of three parts—the main furnace with the glass pots in the centre, the fritting oven on one side, and the annealing oven on the other—in the earlier type of Theophilus there is no separate building for the fritting, which, it would seem, was done on the roof of the main furnace. In both cases the ovens form a compact group, heated by one fire. In the earlier furnace there were as many as eight pots, with corresponding openings, but these pots were probably much smaller than those of the thirteenth-century oven.
We must now turn to the materials from which, according to Theophilus, the glass was prepared. Beechwood logs are dried and burned, and the ashes are carefully collected so as to be free from earth. Two parts of these ashes are mixed with one part of clean sand.[[90]] The mixture is roasted on an upper hearth and stirred with an iron trowel, so that it may not liquefy, for the space of a night and day. Note here that the ashes of the beechwood are used directly without any previous lixiviation; such ashes would contain, besides some alumina, more or less lime and silica, and these substances would pass into the glass. The glass pots are conical in form, curved inwards round the mouth, and they have a small lip. They are filled with the frit in the evening, and for the whole night a fire of dried logs is kept burning.
There follows what is probably our earliest account of the process by which the gathering on the blowing-iron is converted either into a sheet of glass or into a hollow glass vessel. In the first case the fistula or blowing-iron is dipped into the molten metal and turned round so that a mass of glass gathers on it. You blow gently through the tube, beating the glass at times against a flat stone that stands by the furnace.[[91]] You heat again the end of the long vesicle of glass, and with a piece of wood open out the aperture which now appears at the extremity to the full width of the glass tube. We have here a somewhat primitive method of forming a cylindrical manchon. The cylinder is now reheated in what is apparently a separate oven—the dilating oven; it is slit lengthways and opened out with an iron forceps and a piece of wood. When the glass has been smoothed out into sheets it is taken to the annealing oven, where the sheets are ranged on end against the wall and gradually cooled. It is somewhat of a surprise to find this ‘cylinder process’ for making a sheet of glass described by Theophilus, while not a word is said of the older process of ‘flashing’ or ‘spinning.’ There is some reason to believe that the knowledge of the former process was never lost in Germany. It was, however, only in the seventeenth or eighteenth century that the preparation of crown glass by means of cylinders came into general use in other parts of Europe.
Theophilus proceeds in the tenth section to describe how a vase of glass is prepared, and we have here again our earliest description of the process by which the gathering on the blowing-iron is manipulated so as this time to become a hollow vessel. In this case, he tells us, after blowing out your gathering of glass, instead of making an opening at the further end as in the case of the preparation of cylinders, you separate the bulb from the rod with a stick of moistened wood, and make the rod adhere to the lower end of the glass.[[92]] After reheating the glass, you now, with a piece of wood, widen and shape as you desire the opening where the tube was first attached. The foot is then shaped and hollowed. (If this foot is to be regarded as a separate piece, it is not quite clear how it is attached to the vessel.) The handles are fastened on by means of a string of glass taken from the pot with a slender rod of iron, and by similar means the surface may finally be decorated with threadings of glass. Theophilus then describes how a simple flask with a long neck may be prepared by swinging the bulb over your head, and then, as it cools, letting it hang down from the end of the tube; the vessel is then separated by a piece of moist wood; in this case no second rod is needed. No mention is made of the use of shears for cutting the semi-molten glass; they are replaced in a measure by shaping tools of wood.
In the twelfth section we are told of the remains of glass mosaics of various colours found in old pagan buildings, and how from these little cubes enamels are made to be set in gold, silver, and copper. In like manner it is by means of fragments of divers little vessels (vascula)—sapphire, purple, or green—that the French colour the costly glass so admired in their windows. This is a statement of no little interest.
Section xiii. treats of the manner in which the Greeks decorate the glass cups made from ‘sapphire stones’ with gold and silver leaf, covering the foil with a layer of very fusible colourless enamel. The passage is obscure, and I can only say in passing that I do not think that the process described can be identified with that adopted by the makers of the Roman cemetery glass. In the next section is described the Greek method of decorating glass vessels with the same colours—green, red, and white—that are used in the cloisonné enamels (electra). With these colours laid on pretty thickly, as well as with a preparation of gold, ground in a mill, they paint birds and beasts or little rosettes and knots in circles.[[93]] The Greeks make also bowls of purple and light blue, and flasks with longish necks, twisting around them threads of white glass, of which too the handles are made.
It may be inferred from these two sections that Theophilus probably regarded all the artistically coloured and enamelled vessels of his time as of Byzantine origin. He knows nothing about the constituents of the fusible enamels. The pseudo-Heraclius, on the other hand, has a chapter (viii.) telling how glass is made from lead (calcined previously to a powder) and how such glass is coloured. In another section the same writer refers to the ‘plumbeum vitrum Judæum scilicet,’ which is ground on a slab and used as an enamel to paint on glass.
Most of the remaining sections of Theophilus’s second book are concerned with the preparation of coloured glass for windows, but the last of all, ‘On Rings,’[[94]] describes carefully a method of making articles of verroterie with a small furnace and little crucibles. Lead is here mentioned casually as a constituent of the glass, and this, I think, is the only reference to this substance to be found in Theophilus’s chapter on glass. Here as elsewhere we may note that the word sapphirus is used as the equivalent of a blue glass paste (coloured probably by cobalt), and that it is referred to as a material that is at hand already prepared. Such cakes or slabs appear to have been an article of commerce from a period of remote antiquity. Something not unlike them has been found in Babylonian excavations (p. [40]). Similar cakes of coloured glass are still exported to China from the Bohemian glassworks.
CHAPTER VIII
GLASS OF THE LATER MIDDLE AGES IN WESTERN EUROPE
One of the chief glories of the later Middle Ages in Western Europe is undoubtedly to be found in the stained glass windows of the churches. Theophilus early in the twelfth century had already made himself master of this art, which he regarded as essentially a French one. The preparation of these vitraux involved a knowledge of the process either of spinning the molten paraison or of opening out the cylinder of glass, both comparatively late developments of the art of glass-blowing. In the staining of the glass we know from extant specimens what splendid results were obtained.
The composition of the window-glass of the thirteenth century is in some ways remarkable. It contained as much as from 8 to 10 per cent. of alumina, which we must regard as replacing in a measure the silica, for this constituent falls to as low as 56 per cent., and we can hardly otherwise account for the high percentage of the other bases—14 per cent. of lime, 17 per cent. of potash, and often 3 or 4 per cent. of iron. The result was a tough, somewhat horny glass, hard to work in consequence of the short duration of the viscous stage during the cooling. This was one reason for the smallness of the gatherings, and the modest dimensions of the resultant discs. On the other hand, such glass resists the action of the atmosphere better than any made nowadays, and the large amount of potash present probably promoted the brilliancy of the colours. From the earliest times the blue colouring was given by cobalt, and this was never of a richer and purer tint than in the twelfth century; already in the thirteenth copper was added to correct a tendency to purple. The famous ruby red, which became rarer after the thirteenth century until in the seventeenth the secret was entirely lost, was produced by the partial reduction of a small quantity of suboxide of copper, but in this case the colour is only developed on reheating the glass. The more purplish tint given by a somewhat similar treatment with gold was not known to the mediæval glass-maker.[[95]] Manganese was of course the source of the purple—the colour was used for flesh-tints in the twelfth century! The green was made by a mixture of the æs ustum or copper scale with a native oxide of iron, the latter often known as ferretto—of this the best came from Spain. Finally, the yellow was given either by the sesqui-oxide of iron kept well oxidised by the presence of bin-oxide of manganese, or (where the surroundings favoured a reducing action) by a mixture of sulphur and some sooty material which probably yielded an alkaline sulphide. But in the older glass the yellow colour was never very brilliant; at a later time a fine yellow was obtained by a cementation process from silver, which was applied as a chloride or a sulphide to the surface of the glass.
If I trespass beyond my limits to give this rapid summary of what is known of the colours of mediæval window-glass, it is because much of it will be found applicable to the contemporary Oriental enamelled ware and to the later Venetian glass.
In view of the high technical skill thus shown in the colouring and working of the material, nothing is more remarkable than the almost total absence from our collections of any glass, using that word in the narrower sense, that we can classify as Gothic. We know, indeed, that during these centuries much glass was made in France, Germany, and Italy. But for one reason or another the material was not in favour for objects that had any claim to be regarded as works of art. And yet during all this time the few rare specimens of sculptured glass brought from Constantinople, or of enamelled glass from Egypt and Damascus, were highly prized, and it might well be thought that the skill and knowledge to rival these examples were not wanting in the West. Such was not the case, however; the monasteries had ceased to be centres of practical art industry,[[96]] and the glass-makers had retired from the towns to the depths of the forests, where under the patronage of the local seigneur they built their glass-houses, moving on from one spot to another as the fuel became scarce.
On the condition of delivering yearly to their feudal lord a specified number of vessels, these glass masters appear to have been freed from further imposts, and indeed they soon began to claim special privileges. In France some of these grants or contracts have been preserved in local archives, and in them we have a source of information lacking in other Western countries. Perhaps the most significant of these patents is that granted in 1338 to a certain Guionet. The Dauphin of the Viennois conceded to this maître de verrerie the right of taking wood when it suited him from parts of the forest of Chamborant, on condition that the said Guionet should furnish him yearly, for the use of the prince’s household, with the following pieces of glass:—240 beakers with feet, known as hanaps; 144 amphoræ, 432 urinalia, 144 large basins, 72 plates, 72 plates without borders, 144 pots, 144 water vessels, 60 gottefles, 12 salt-cellars, 240 lamps, 72 chandeliers, 12 large cups, 12 small barils, 6 large vessels for transporting wine, and one nef. This was certainly an ample yearly supply even for a princely household. The practical, not to say homely, nature of most of the objects requisitioned is obvious. The gottefle, we should add, has been thought to correspond with the later German gutraf; it was in that case a vase with a long twisted neck, sometimes double, like a Persian sprinkler; it was perhaps used for oil.[[97]] The nef, no doubt, was an imitation in glass of the well-known centre-pieces of silver in the form of a ship. The little baril is a form handed down from Roman times. In Provence, as early as the year 1316, we find mention in the inventory of the property of the Countess Mahaut D’Artois of ‘Grant planté de pots de voirre et de voirres d’Aubigny et de Provence et d’autres païs et de diverses couleurs et bocaux et bariz’ (Hartshorne, p. 88).
We see by this how little ground there is for giving the credit of the introduction of the manufacture of glass into France to King René. We shall find, however, later on, that this great patron of the arts was one of the earliest to take an interest in the Venetian glass of the early renaissance, and to bring the Italian workmen into France.
The word verre, or in the earlier form voirre or vouarre, was used vaguely in France even in mediæval times for any cup from which wine was drunk. This usage alone might be brought forward as a proof of the general prevalence of glass vessels at an early time. Modern French writers on glass cannot always escape the awkward expression ‘un verre de verre.’ In England, where the use of the word glass in this sense probably came in somewhat later, we find more than once in inventories of the fourteenth century the quaint combination, ‘un verre de glass.’ In France, however, the more frequent expression was ‘un verre de fougère,’ literally ‘a glass of bracken,’ and we have here a double metonymy. This association of bracken and glass may be frequently noticed in the old French writers.
Long after the introduction of the cristallo from Italy, there were many in France who preferred to drink from the old greenish glass; like the Germans of to-day, they declared that the wine tasted better. Even Boileau, late in the seventeenth century, talks of a man holding ‘un verre de vin qui rit dans la fougère.’
We see then what an important place bracken, feucheria ad faciendum vitrum, played in the old glass-works of France. Now glass made from fern-ashes must of necessity be of a very inferior quality, more so probably than that made from the beechwood ashes used from of old in Germany. The passage to the new methods would here be much more revolutionary than in the case of the latter country. This consideration may help to explain the fact that while the manufacture of potash glass survived and adapted itself to the new methods in Germany, it became in time quite extinct in France.
The chronicles and romances of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries have been carefully searched by French scholars to find references to glass. Some ambiguity arises from the vague use of the word verre, to which I have already referred. But when Joinville tells us how the Comte d’Eu, in a moment of expansion, ‘dressait sa bible le long de nostre table et nous brissoit nos pots et nos vouerres,’ we can probably accept the latter vessels as verres de verre.
GERMAN LATE MEDIÆVAL GLASS
1. PRUNTED CUP FOR HOLDING RELICS 2. WAX COVER TO THE SAME, WITH SEAL
In the royal inventories of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, above all in those of Charles V. and of his brothers the Dukes of Anjou, Berry, and Burgundy, where there is any mention of vessels of glass, it is almost without exception of verre de Damas or of verre à la façon de Damas that we hear. Quite an exception is the goblet de voirre blanc de Flandre, garny d’argent, that we find in an inventory of the possessions of Charles V., taken in 1379. Notwithstanding this, it is evident that the French kings at this time took much interest in the manufacture of glass. When hunting in the forests around Paris, they would turn aside to visit the furnace of one of these local makers of verre de fougère who already claimed the privileges of gentlemen. Thus early in the reign of Charles VI. we find an entry of a payment ‘pour don fait par lui aux voirriers, près de la forest de Chevreuse, où le roy estait alez veoir faire les voirres.’ This was at the beginning of the fifteenth century; later on, as we shall see, both King René and Louis XI. were patrons of the glass-makers; and yet it is doubtful if we have in our collections any examples of French glass which can be attributed to as early a period as the reign even of the latter king.
GERMAN LATE MEDIÆVAL GLASS
1. CUP WITH PRUNTS 2. CUP WITH CONICAL COVER, FOR RELICS
Of glass made in Germany before, say, the end of the fifteenth century, we know even less than of the contemporary production in France. Theophilus, it is true, tells us of the manufacture of sheets of glass from cylindrical manchons, and this was probably until the seventeenth century a specially German process; he describes, too, the manufacture of blown glass of simple forms. But from his time, or at least from the time of the pseudo-Heraclius a little later, to that of Georg Agricola in the sixteenth century, when we find the glass industry taking an important place in many parts of Germany, there is little direct evidence on the subject to bring forward.[[98]] Apart, however, from a few insignificant little bottles, used as reliquaries (Plates [XX.] and [XXI.]), nothing survives from this time. On the other hand, when in the fifteenth century we come again upon evidences of contemporary glass in Germany and Holland, as above all in the pictures of the early Netherlandish and of the Cologne schools, we find a distinct form of goblet already established, the prototype, it would seem, of a famous shape that was able to hold its own at the time of the invasion of Italian glass in the sixteenth century. There is nothing in France, still less in England, corresponding to the römer and its various kindred forms.
In one application of glass the Germans appear early to have acquired some skill. We may perhaps regard the thirteenth century as the time when the use of glass for mirrors of any size first became general; this may account for the frequent references to them in the literature of the time. As far back as 1250, the great Dominican encyclopædist, Vincent de Beauvais, states that the best mirrors are made from glass and lead (ex vitro et plumbo). A spiegel-glas is mentioned by a German writer as early as the end of the twelfth century, and by the end of the next century the mirror provided a frequent metaphor for the poets of the time. Thus Dante, in two passages in the Divina Commedia, speaks of ‘a leaded mirror.’ In the Paradiso (ii. 89) Beatrice declares that the rays of the sun are reflected from the moon—
‘Come color torna per vetro
Lo qual diretro a sè piombo nasconde’;
and in the twenty-third book of the Inferno (25-26) Virgil says to the poet, ‘S’io fossi d’impiombato vetro—I should not more quickly receive your image than now my mind receives your thoughts.’ This double reference would seem to point to a recent discovery that had attracted Dante’s attention.
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries it would appear that although the German mirror-makers had to import the clear crystalline ‘metal’ from Venice, the Venetians attempted in vain to make mirrors on the German system. The difficulty, perhaps, was to prepare flat and even sheets of glass of any size, and this difficulty the Germans may have surmounted by means of the cylinder process described by Theophilus.
The Nuremberg mirrors, however, so famous at a later time, were of a different type. They were of spherical outline, cut directly from the paraison of the glass-blower; into this paraison a mixture of ‘piombo, stagno, marchesita d’argento e tartaro’ had been introduced before the vesicle was quite cool—so at least a contemporary Italian writer asserts. Such mirrors were set in painted wooden frames with broad margins. An example of one of these may perhaps be seen in Jan van Eyck’s famous interior in the National Gallery.
If now we turn to England, the record is even more meagre. Mr. Hartshorne, who has industriously brought together every reference he could find to glass[[99]] in this country during the Middle Ages, is fain to confess that he cannot point to a single example of what is undoubtedly English glass made between the Norman Conquest and the time of our Tudor kings. References to its use in contemporary writers are much rarer than in France. The cuppa vitrea, which in 1244 Henry III. sent to his goldsmith, Edward of Westminster, directing him to remove the glass foot, to replace it by one of silver, and to mount the whole in silver-gilt, was probably of Oriental origin; nor can we even claim for certain as English the two humbler vessels belonging at a later time to his son, Edward I.[[100]]
As to the three ‘verrers’ of Colchester who paid taxes about the year 1300, the distinction between vitrier and verrier does not seem to have been as sharp then as it is now; they may well have been makers of glass windows. It is more significant to find in Henry III.’s day a Laurence Vitrearius holding land at Chiddingfold in Surrey, still in the time of Elizabeth a centre for the manufacture of the native glass made of fern-ash and sand. Again, William le Verir of the same place is mentioned in a deed of 1301. But perhaps the strongest case is that of John Glasewrythe of Staffordshire, who in 1380 had a grant of house and land at Shuerwode, Kirdford,[[101]] and there made ‘brodeglass and vessel’—that is to say, window-glass and hollow ware (Nesbitt, South Kensington Catalogue, and Hartshorne, p. 132, etc.).
I reserve what I have to say of the mediæval glass of Italy—of the early Altarists and Muranists—until I have described the enamelled Saracenic glass which in some measure influenced it.
But before turning again to the East, I must not omit to mention certain applications of glass that found favour in Western Europe during the later Middle Ages; indeed, apart from the coloured windows, such objects constitute the only genre of glass that can distinctly be classed as Gothic. I group together here various devices by means of which a design or pattern was applied to the back of a small sheet of glass—in gold for the most part, but other colours were sometimes used. The plaque thus decorated was either fixed into a piece of furniture, or simply backed with some impervious material. In this somewhat indefinite group is included, on the one hand, what is in fact a kind of thin mosaic; on the other, something that passed into the variety of painted glass known in later times as verre églomisé. What distinguishes all this class of decoration is that neither the colour nor the backing is fixed by any furnace process—it is scarcely to be regarded as an art du feu, and thus lies somewhat outside our subject.
Of the so-called Cosmati mosaics, where the little triangular pieces of glass are inlaid in marble or wood, we have a good example in the thirteenth-century shrine of the Confessor in Westminster Abbey. At the same period a more elaborate means of decoration was obtained by painting the backs of little plaques of glass with gold and colours, and fixing them on the panels of pulpits, on the frames of the painted reredos, or even on secular furniture. I have seen examples of church furniture thus decorated at Aachen and in the Norman churches of Southern Italy—a pulpit at Bitonto in Apulia is a remarkable example. But we need not go far to find a still finer specimen of such work: the Gothic framework of the retabulum that formerly was placed in front of the high altar in Westminster Abbey[[102]] is decorated with bosses of glass paste cut or cast en cabochon, with casts of antique gems, and, above all, with little plaques of blue and purple glass backed with silver foil. On the upper surface of these glass plaques a design in gold, consisting of small medallions with animals and twining branches, stands out in low relief. The pattern, says Viollet-Le Duc (Dictionnaire du Mobilier français, i. 338), was first painted on the glass with a mixture of red ochre, wax and turpentine, and over this, before it was dry, gold leaf was laid, the gold adhering only to the soft ground. The effect of this external decoration is heightened by the shadow which it throws upon the silver foil beneath.
In other examples, the pattern is painted in various colours under the glass, and a leaf of gold, pasted beneath the more or less transparent pigments, shows through here and there. In all these instances the crude colour of the gold is lowered in places by coatings of varnish.
But plates of glass, somewhat similarly decorated, may play an even more important part in the decoration of the backs of altars, especially on the spandrels in the lower arcades of the reredos. The decoration now becomes pictorial, and is often most carefully executed. Or, again, such a little glass picture may be detached and mounted in a frame to form a pax or baiser-de-paix, a bijou reliquary, or other small devotional object. In such cases the gold is applied to the back of the glass by weak gum, and the design traced with a pointed instrument somewhat in the manner of the catacomb glasses. The effect may be heightened in various ways by additional touches of pigment on the draperies, or by a glazing of colour for the flesh-tints; the colours are worked up with a resinous body, and silver foil in little plates and spangles is added in places; finally, over the back is laid a piece of tinfoil, and this is folded over the edges (M. Alfred André, quoted by M. Molinier, Spitzer Catalogue, vol. iii. p. 54). The back of the plate is generally found to be protected by a kind of pitchy varnish; to fix this some application of heat was doubtless necessary, but in no case, I think, is the gold design in this late mediæval work enclosed between pieces of glass which have been subsequently fused together.[[103]]
We are here concerned only with the Gothic examples of this class of work, and of these the majority appear to come from the north of Italy—they are probably of Milanese or Venetian origin. There is often in these early Italian plaques a coloured backing under the gold, generally of a bright red, but sometimes of green or black, and this backing shows through in places. In the case of a very beautiful example formerly in the Spitzer collection, the design was drawn upon the central portion of a plate of flashed glass; although this medallion is only 51⁄2 inches in diameter, there is a distinct boss in the centre. That such a defective piece should have been chosen for this delicate work would go to prove the rarity of sheets of glass with even surface at this time.
In later days more colour was used in the decoration, but such work as the magnificent baiser-de-paix in the Louvre, which came from the chapel of the order of the St. Esprit, does not fall within our present limit of time.
The late Marquis Emanuele D’Azeglio devoted himself to collecting specimens of gilt and painted glass of all ages and countries. This collection, unique of its kind, he bequeathed to his native town of Turin, where it is now exhibited in the Museo Civico. In some of the earlier pieces, especially on one of Byzantine character—perhaps Muranese work of the end of the thirteenth century—the gold is laid down upon glass of very irregular thickness. There are a few examples of Gothic work of this character in the British Museum, at South Kensington, and in the collection of Mr. Salting.
CHAPTER IX
THE ENAMELLED GLASS OF THE SARACENS
I have here to deal with a singularly restricted family of glass—that made in the Saracenic East during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. This enamelled glass is important for more than one reason. It is undoubtedly, as a group, the most magnificent and decorative that we meet with in the whole course of our history. Technically, again, the interest of the group is supreme, for this application of solid enamels, translucent or transparent, to the surface of glass, was a new departure, and it preceded, as far as we know, the use of any material of the kind in the decoration of porcelain and fayence. The Romans and the Byzantine Greeks, it is true, decorated their glass at times with thin washes of opaque paints, but we have no definite proof that they ever applied fusible lead enamels in this way.
There is every reason to believe that this method of decoration was not in any general use in the East before the thirteenth century. But if we are still quite in the dark as to the origin of the art, it may be some consolation to remember that barely thirty years ago the few rare pieces of Saracenic glass that had reached us were classed as Venetian. It is only quite lately that this important ware has met with due recognition.
No doubt much of the sculptured and engraved glass, that we have for convenience of arrangement dwelt upon in the last chapter, is of Saracenic origin; I do not, however, remember any instance of an Arabic inscription being found on such vessels, but on the deeply carved vases of rock crystal that seem to have formed the models that these engraved glasses closely followed, in more than one case tall cufic characters form part of the decoration. I will only point to the magnificent crystal vase which bears the name of an early Fatimi caliph (975-996 A.D.), preserved in the treasury of St. Mark’s.
Apart from that in daily use among the people, we may, however, look upon the glass made during the first four or five centuries of Arab domination as on the whole following in the wake of the carvings in hard stone, above all in rock crystal, then so much in vogue. During the whole of this period the Saracens had hardly developed any well characterised art of their own: they followed in this, as in so many other matters, the traditions of the countries in which they dwelt. At this period their art was at best but a mingling of Byzantine and Sassanian elements. But before the end of the twelfth century a great change had come about, and during the course of the next century there had arisen a definite style—one that has remained ever since the type of what we know as Saracenic art. It would be impossible to dissociate this change from that which took place in the West about the same time. But the Gothic art that sprung up in the land of the Franks was but one phase of a continuous evolution, while the wonderful outburst that had in the main its centre in Cairo, became either locally stereotyped or shared the decay and neglect that overtook other branches of Mussulman civilisation.
So far as the art of glass is concerned, we may note in the thirteenth century a strange contrast between the East and the West. For while in both lands the material was applied essentially to supply a scheme of colour in decoration, in the West its use was restricted to the stained glass in the windows of churches; in the East the source of colour was obtained from translucent enamels applied to the surface of glass lamps and vases. The Saracens, in the stained glass of their windows, merely followed in the old Byzantine lines; the pierced framework of plaster, filled in with fragments of coloured glass, is but a development of the marble chassis of the Romans and the later Greeks. In the West, on the other hand, the art of building up pictures by means of segments of glass was rapidly developed, while the ‘hollow ware,’ the verrerie in daily use, had, as we have seen, received little attention, and it was reserved to the few precious pieces of enamelled glass brought from the Holy Land to find a place along with the plate and jewellery in the inventories of princes.
The fabulous wealth accumulated by the Fatimi caliphs of Egypt (908-1171 A.D.) became proverbial in later days. Makrisi, writing about the year 1400, quotes from an older writer the description of the treasure-house of the Khalifah Mustansir Billah. This building was sacked and burned with all its contents during a military riot between Turkish and Soudanese troops in 1062. Here among the vast accumulation of Oriental wealth were, it is stated, many thousand vases of rock crystal and others of sardonyx. We hear also at this time (but not in the list of these treasures) of glass mirrors in filigree frames, and of vessels of glass ornamented with figures and foliage. How the decoration in this last case was given we are not told, but the reference is probably to carvings in relief: at any rate it would, I think, be an anachronism to look for enamelled glass in this connection.
There is, however, one application of glass that we can definitely associate with these heretic caliphs, but this is scarcely an artistic one. The little coin-like discs of glass stamped with an inscription in Arabic had their prototypes in Roman times; a few rare examples have been found with the heads of Roman emperors and letterings in Latin. Among the Saracens these coin-like discs continued in use as late as the fifteenth century. In all cases, I think, they come from Egypt. The glass discs of the Fatimi period are, however, the most abundant and these are of special interest, as they bear the name of the ruler, while those of the later Memlook times have only private inscriptions. The glass varies from an amber tone to a dark bottle-green, but many are quite opaque and of a purplish black. As these little discs are of uniform weights, corresponding to parts and multiples of the gold dinar and the silver dirhem, they were at one time regarded as coins; they are now, however, recognised as weights, but essentially weights for weighing coins. Indeed a contemporary Arab writer (985 A.D.) distinctly states that in his day in Egypt they used money weights of glass; and an Arab traveller of the time mentions incidentally that such weights have this advantage, that they cannot be readily increased or decreased. The inscription occupies generally the whole surface, but a few of them bear a rough design—a ‘seal of Solomon’ or a rosette. Larger weights of glass are rare, but some of a cylindrical form weighing more than a pound may be seen in the British Museum. In Dr. Petrie’s Egyptian collection at University College is a large mass of black glass with a solid ring handle, the whole some four inches in height. This is probably a weight, but its date is uncertain.
On the whole, the art of the Fatimi caliphs who had their capital at Cairo (Misr) was still under Byzantine influence. The change of style that we have dwelt upon is rather to be associated with the Kurdish and Turkish Emirs, who, ruling first in Upper Syria and Mesopotamia, finally overwhelmed the effeminate and heretic Fatimi dynasty. To find the country where the new style arose we must look not to Egypt, but to the tract of land lying along the frontier of the Byzantine and Sassanian empires, from Tabriz to the north, by Mosul to Bagdad and Bassorah. The old Persian and Sassanian elements here doubtless prevailed over the Byzantine tradition; but the word Persian must not be applied to the new art, for the Turkish element was perhaps as important as the Iranian. It was under the Memlook sultans, almost all of them Turks by birth, that the great mosques that gave to mediæval Cairo its special cachet were erected. As for the artists themselves, though a few may have come from the Persian borderland, they were, for the most part, of the old stock of the land, and many were doubtless Christians.
In the towns of the Syrian coast, the change of mastership did not interfere with the work of the glass furnaces. We have seen in the Syriac manuscripts how fragments of Arabic are interlarded with the old indigenous dialect in passages treating upon the manufacture of glass. Around Hebron the manufacture of glass on primitive lines was carried on through the Middle Ages: a German pilgrim of the fifteenth century speaks of the many furnaces in which the ‘black glass’ was melted: the industry is indeed even now not extinct. There is one form of early Arab glass which we may perhaps associate with this centre. Certain long nail-shaped bottles, square in section and pointed at the base, have sometimes been classed with the old primitive glass of Egypt and Phœnicia, on the ground probably of the ‘dragged’ decoration of white on a black base found on some of them. But Franks was undoubtedly right in attributing these elongated flasks—they are sometimes of considerable size—to Saracenic times.[[104]]
William of Tyre says that the glass of his native town was exported to all countries, and Benjamin of Tudela, the Spanish Rabbi, praises the beauty of the glass vases there made. There were, he tells us, four hundred Jewish glass-makers and shipowners in Tyre, and in other cities of the coast the glass industry was in the hands of the Jews. This was about the middle of the twelfth century. The Jews long before that time had, it would seem, a monopoly of glass made with lead. It was to them, then, that the first enamellers must have gone for their materials. An Arab writer distinguishes among the exports from Sour (Tyre) both objects of verroterie and glass vessels worked on the wheel.[[105]] Of the glass-works of Tripoli, one of the last towns held by the Franks, I shall have something to say in a future chapter.
Just as in the case of the glass found in Egyptian and in early Greek tombs, so now with the enamelled glass of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, we are once more brought face to face with the question as to where it was made—in Syria or in Egypt. Syria was at this time again under rulers who had their capital in Egypt; there are indeed few important periods in Egyptian history when this has not been the case. Alexandria, it is true, had fallen from its old position,[[106]] but it is distinctly recorded that glass was made in the fourteenth century at Mansourah, the recently founded ‘town of victory,’ above Damietta. At many places in Upper Egypt, especially at Achmin, fragments, most of them, but not all, to be referred to Saracenic times, have been found. But on the whole the evidence for a Syrian origin for this enamelled ware is much stronger,—I say the origin, because it is just in the case of those rare pieces to which an early date can be ascribed that we can be certain of an Asiatic provenance.
The enamelled glass of the Saracens forms, as I have said, a compact group. The specimens that we have of it are all, or nearly all, handsome pieces, worthy, apart from their archæological interest, of a conspicuous place in our museums or on the shelves of the most fastidious amateur. Their number is strictly limited—indeed Herr Schmoranz has drawn up a careful list which claims to contain every known example.[[107]] Thanks in great measure to the researches of this expert, we are able now to make a rough general division of this glass into two classes:—
1st. Vases, goblets, and basins of many forms, brought for the most part from Syria. The bulk of the enamelled glass in this division appears to date from the thirteenth century. Several famous pieces have for centuries been preserved in the treasuries of Western churches. For these it is claimed that they have been brought back from the Holy Land by crusaders and pilgrims—filled, some of them, with earth taken from Bethlehem or other holy spots.
2nd. Lamps, obtained almost without exception from mosques in Cairo. These lamps belong, as a class, to the fourteenth century. Only of recent years has much attention been given to them; they were almost unknown to the older collectors.[[108]] The supply appears, however, to be already exhausted. The decoration on these lamps is on the whole more broadly treated, with less detail and finish, than that found on the vases and goblets of our first class.
The glass itself is in all cases remarkable for the number of minute bubbles contained in it; in some of the lamps these bubbles are so numerous that the material is barely to be classed as transparent. In colour the glass varies from a pronounced bottle-green to an amber tint; it is more rarely of a greyish white. The size of many of the lamps and bowls must have necessitated the use of large melting-pots as well as considerable skill in blowing and manipulation. The irregular form so often to be observed in both lamps and vases is more likely to be the result of a partial collapse during the melting on of the enamels, than of any defect in the original piece as it came from the glass-blower’s hands.
In composition, to judge from the analysis of a fragment of a Cairene lamp made by Dr. Linke of Vienna (Schmoranz, p. 42), this Saracenic glass is essentially a normal soda-lime silicate with 69 per cent. of silica, 15·4 per cent. of alkali, and 8·6 per cent. of lime, thus far resembling the ordinary Roman type. The specimen examined, however, contained in addition to the lime as much as 4 per cent. of magnesia. As Dr. Linke points out, the presence of this last base would hinder the complete fluidity of the glass in the pots and make it difficult to get rid of the bubbles. But whether the presence of this earth in a single specimen is in itself sufficient to prove the non-Egyptian origin of these lamps as a class is another question. The fact that nearly one per cent. of manganese was found in this glass is of interest, as it shows that some attempt had been made to ‘cleanse’ the metal.
As regards the enamels on this Saracenic glass, we find that, with one important exception, they resemble generally in composition and character those employed at a later date by the Chinese in the decoration of their porcelain[[109]]—we have a readily fusible flux containing much lead coloured by various metallic oxides. The opaque red is given by oxide of iron, the green by oxide of copper, and the yellow by antimonic acid. The presence of this last substance is of interest: Dr. Percy found antimony in the glaze of Assyrian bricks, and I have taken for granted that it is the source of the yellow in the primitive glass of Egypt. The opaque colours, including the white, are probably produced by the addition of a little oxide of tin to the flux; Dr. Linke, however, does not seem to have found that metal in his analysis.
It is when we come to the blue, the dominant colour in this scheme of decoration, that a surprise awaits us. This colour, we should almost have taken for granted, would be derived from cobalt, for it is now recognised that at this time the use of that substance in the painting of earthenware (under the glaze) was prevalent in Western Asia. Dr. Linke, however, declares ‘that even the most subtle re-agents failed to discover any trace’ of either cobalt or copper in the blue enamel. For the grounds upon which he was able to attribute the origin of this fine blue to minute fragments of lapis lazuli, only partially dissolved in the flux, we must refer to the German chemist’s report. Now as ultramarine, the colouring matter of this mineral, contains a considerable amount of sulphur, some of it in an unoxidised state, it could not be used in combination with a flux containing lead, and indeed an analysis of the blue enamel proved it to be essentially of the same composition as the glass of the lamps; it contained, however, as much as 24 per cent of alkali, and this excess would ensure a slightly greater fusibility. It will be observed that the thick blue enamel on this Saracenic glass has considerable translucency as seen by transmitted light, but that the surface is always dull. In the British Museum is an admirably executed imitation of one of these mosque lamps, made as long ago as 1867 by M. Brocard of Paris. The blue, in this case cobalt, differs little in hue from that on the old lamps that stand beside it. It is, however, somewhat cruder in effect, and the surface is quite glassy.[[110]]
FLASK OF ENAMELLED GLASS
PROBABLY SYRIAN OR MESOPOTAMIAN. ABOUT 1300 A.D.
I come now to the scheme of decoration of this Saracenic glass. The important point to bear in mind is that the gold has for the most part disappeared from the surface. This gilding, however, played originally a most important part in the decoration. The fine lines of opaque red now so prominent were originally drawn with a free hand upon a detailed pattern of gold, with the object of accentuating the design. This gold brocading, when it is preserved, is of great beauty, especially that found upon the older pieces. Examine carefully the tall-necked bottle in the Slade collection: the body is covered with a fine arabesque of red lines, the pattern being made up of long-necked birds among foliage, and this appears poor in effect compared with the bands of rich enamel on the shoulder and neck. The effect, however, was very different at first when these dull red lines were carried over a rich ground of gold, of which traces only now remain here and there.
The gold, then, was applied first—at an early stage in the development of this family of glass it was perhaps the only decoration; the outline was then accentuated by means of red lines, and the coloured enamels then laid on in thick masses. We cannot say whether the colours were all melted on at one firing, for we know nothing in this case of the practical arrangements of the muffle-stove. On the exquisitely enamelled bottle from Würzburg in the British Museum ([Plate XXII.]), perhaps technically the most superb specimen of this class of decoration that has come down to us, the pinkish tint of the red and the manner in which it is gradated into the white, call to mind the use of the rouge d’or on Chinese porcelain of the eighteenth century; the green also of the conventional foliage is here shaded into the opaque white. The blue ground of the central medallion is of a brilliant turquoise, quite unapproached in other examples; the surface, however, of this blue enamel is in this case glassy and quite unlike the dead surface that we see on the mosque lamps. Are we to regard this opaque turquoise enamel as also based upon lapis lazuli, or rather as a soda-copper silicate?
As to the motives of the enamelled decoration—if figure subjects are absent from the mosque lamps, they are of frequent occurrence on the bottles and goblets: there we have polo-players and falconers mounted on horses, yellow, pink, and white; seated figures drinking and feasting or playing on musical instruments—always the same jovial, round-faced type; in only one instance have I noticed an elderly man with a beard. We sometimes find a frieze with dogs chasing stags and hares, or it may be a row of conventional lions. Birds are still more frequent—flying geese, as in the background of the hunting scenes, or long-necked herons forming part of the ornamental design of the field. Certain quaint little fishes with big heads and long fins, always of the same form, are not uncommon on the vases and cups; they are sometimes arranged herring-bone fashion; in one case, indeed, these little fishes are found on a mosque lamp.
But the more conspicuous part of the decoration is formed by bands of tall cufic[[111]] letters and by flowers, more or less schematised. Apart from a fleur-de-lis, which occurs chiefly in medallions, the most important flower is the Oriental lotus. This flower as it appears relieved on a blue ground in the later mosque lamps is identical in drawing with the lotus that we see so frequently in Indian and Chinese art. It is often combined with what at first sight appears to be another flower, treated en rosette, with an involucre of six oval and six triangular petals, and an indication of a seed-vessel in the centre; but this again may perhaps be only the same lotus-flower seen full-face. In some cases, as on certain mosque lamps, these flowers, broadly treated, form the sole decoration; but more often the floral design passes into the formal schematised patterns so characteristic of Arab art at this time.
SARACENIC ENAMELLED GLASS
THIRTEENTH CENTURY
The medallions that interrupt the broad bands are an essential part of the decoration; they are filled sometimes with inscriptions, generally in this case in the nashki or running script, or more often with certain badges, which are of much interest in connection with the heraldry, if it can be so called, of the day. These badges are derived from the most divergent sources: there is one simple design that resembles the cartouche of an old Egyptian king—it has even been read as ‘Lord of the Upper and Lower Country’ (a good example may be found on a bottle at South Kensington). Another badge takes the form of a strange bird with long tail-feathers, undoubtedly derived from the imperial phœnix of China; any hesitation as to the origin of this design is removed on observing in the field certain little curly clouds, an essentially Chinese motive. A sword, a pair of polo-sticks, or still more often a cup, charged upon a fesse or band which divides the medallion, are badges of more local origin. The same may probably be said of the eagle variously displayed, which in one example, in the British Museum, occurs exceptionally upon an ovoid shield. In some cases the Memlook sultans and emirs adopted ‘canting badges’ based upon their Turki names; as, for example, the well-known duck of the Sultan Kelaoun. The identification, however, of the owner, or the date of a vase or lamp from these badges alone, is, in the absence of an inscription, a somewhat hazardous proceeding.
It is a curious fact that we have only two instances of a signature of an artist in all this series of enamelled glass. On a lamp from the Mannheim collection, now, I think, belonging to Mr. Pierpont Morgan, an inscription in running characters on the foot has been read: ‘Work of the poor slave Ali, son of Mohammed Ar Ramaki (?), God protect him’ (Schmoranz, p. 67). It is the same Ali, apparently, who signs his name on another lamp described by Artin Pasha.
I should say at once that these mosque lamps are more properly of the nature of lanterns—the lamp itself was suspended inside them. I do not know, however, of any example of these little internal lamps in our European collections, unless it be one of gilt green glass now at South Kensington ([Plate XXIV.] 2). This lamp, however, is somewhat large for the position assigned to it, and it certainly resembles those sometimes found in Coptic churches.
These large lamps or lanterns were suspended by chains from the roof or from the arcades of the mosque. From the Sultan Hassan mosque alone have come twenty-one glass lamps, now in the Arab Museum at Cairo, and there are others from the same source in our home collections. The effect in the mosque when these lamps were all lighted must have rivalled the illumination of St. Sophia, described by Paul the Silentiary (p. [97]). We must not forget another essential part of the Arab lamp: this is the little sphere from which the smaller chains that pass to the handles of the lamp radiate. In private houses—for the general arrangement is the same in them—this globe may be replaced by an ostrich egg. In the mosques these spheres are of metal or of glass; we have only two specimens of the latter material in European collections—one of amber-yellow glass in the British Museum ([Plate XXVII.] 2), a second, larger and ovoid in shape, at South Kensington. There are three others, one of blue glass, in the Arab Museum at Cairo.
A similar method of suspending the lamps was in use in Byzantine churches, and something of the sort may still be seen in St. Mark’s. In the pictures of the Venetian painters of the later fifteenth century—of Bellini, and Cima, and Carpaccio—the lamps, of a strictly Oriental or Byzantine type, that hang from the niches that form the background to their enthroned Madonnas, well illustrate this arrangement.[[112]]
SMALL MOSQUE LAMP OF CLEAR WHITE GLASS
PROBABLY SYRIAN, FOURTEENTH CENTURY
OIL VESSEL, PROBABLY FOR SUSPENSION IN ENAMELLED LAMP
SARACENIC, FOURTEENTH CENTURY
It may be said generally of the Saracenic enamelled glass as of the unadorned glass of the Byzantines that preceded it, that the lamp in one shape or another is the master form—no longer the wine-cup, as among the Romans. It would be an interesting study, were the thing possible, to trace the steps by which the later arrangement of an outer lantern of glass grew out of the simpler Byzantine or Sassanian prototype. But it must be remembered that these gorgeous mosque lamps or lanterns are quite a specialised form; they are only found, as far as we know, in Egypt and Syria, and they belong essentially to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The typical Oriental glass lamp is of quite a different type—a little cup in the shape of a truncated cone, from four to six inches in height. This is a form that is generally in use in the East at the present day. Such a vessel constitutes the essential part both of the street lanterns (the conical cup in this case passes through an aperture in the base) and of the coronas of lights by which the larger rooms are illuminated. In the latter case the cups pass through apertures in a ring or disc of wood or metal, which is itself suspended, often from an ostrich egg, in the way already described.
The little vessels are filled halfway up with water, upon which the oil floats; the wick passes up through a tube which is fixed at the bottom in various ways. I have before me a cup of this description brought from an old house in Cairo; it is of very thin, tough, greenish glass; the ‘kick’ at the bottom is pushed deeply in and is open at the apex. This opening has been sealed up with some hard pitchy substance, into which the little glass tube (of later date apparently) that carries the wick has been fixed. In another type of these cup or beaker lamps the base ends in a blunt point which is prolonged by one or more knops, so as to resemble the stem of a wine-glass without the foot.[[113]] This is the form that, as I have already mentioned, is so often represented, suspended from the roof in the altar-pieces of the Venetian painters. Such lamps are generally elaborately mounted in metal.
But the other form, the truncated cone (the ‘spear-butt’ of Paul the Silentiary), was in use in Italy at an earlier date. In the chapel of the Arena at Padua is a careful wall-painting of an elaborate compound corona or lantern built up with hoops of metal to resemble a large bird-cage. The little lamps of plain glass fitted into this framework are of two shapes; one resembles the truncated-cone cup just described, while the other may be compared to a mosque lamp with the foot removed and the body prolonged to a point. I do not know if this painting is contemporary with the famous frescoes of Giotto that cover the adjacent walls, but to judge from the Gothic framework that surrounds it, it cannot well be later than the fourteenth century.
This conical cup, then, was widely employed in the later Middle Ages for suspended lamps. It had quite replaced the balance-pan form of lamp support of early Byzantine days, some specimens of which, preserved in St. Mark’s treasury, we have already described: such pans, we should add, probably supported little standing lamps, more or less of the well-known classical form. But both these and the conical cups may possibly at times have held candles, an essentially Oriental means of illumination.[[114]]
We must now return to our enamelled glass, and consider a remarkable series of little beakers very similar in size and outline to the lamps of truncated conical form that we have been dwelling upon. Many of these have now passed, from the treasuries of churches and convents in which they had been long preserved, into various local museums. Round more than one of them a legend has grown up—the very names by which they are known are picturesque and suggestive—St. Hedwig’s beaker, the glass of Charlemagne, the goblet of the Eight Priests, and nearer home the famous Luck of Eden Hall. Such cups are to be found from the confines of Poland to our own rude border country; indeed, the enamelled beakers of this simple form have, for one reason or another, been chiefly preserved in northern lands: of late years, however, a few further examples have been brought from Syria and Egypt. No doubt the general tradition that these cups have been carried back from the Holy Land by crusaders and pilgrims is well founded. It is possible that some of them may, like the carved glasses, have travelled by northern routes rather than by the Mediterranean.
We see, it is true, a beaker of somewhat similar form in the hands of the wine-bibbers, in the illustrations to the manuscripts of contemporary poets, and even pictured on our enamelled glasses themselves.[[115]] There is, however, one point to be noted in many of the beakers in our collections, that makes it difficult to believe that they have ever been actually used as wine-cups. I refer to the remarkable construction of the base. This point had been overlooked by previous writers on the subject, even by Schmoranz in his great work. It was first pointed out by Mr. C. H. Read in a paper read before the Society of Antiquaries (Archæologia, vol. lviii. p. 217). To use Mr. Read’s words in speaking of one of these vessels: ‘The goblet is provided with a foot-rim that has been separately made and fixed on the base. The bottom of the vessel has been pushed up inwards, in the fashion to be found in a champagne bottle, but it has a peculiar feature in that the actual centre, the apex of the cone thus formed, is reflected downwards, apparently leaving a small hole through the bottom of the glass which is only closed by the fixing on of the added foot. This feature appears to be common in these Oriental goblets, and as far as my experience goes, is not found in any of European make.’ Such an arrangement would surely have one practical disadvantage if the cup had been used as a drinking-vessel—the liquid would lodge between the false bottom and the foot, so that it would be almost impossible to clean out the cup, and this is a point that would especially appeal to a Mohammedan. On the other hand, this open ‘kick’ would be admirably adapted to the introduction of a wick[[116]] if the vessel before the soldering on of the ring at the base had been used as a lamp. I should myself be inclined to think that the little cups in question, sold perhaps by Jewish dealers at Aleppo or at one of the Syrian ports to wandering pilgrims before their return from the Holy Land, were never intended for any practical use. The peculiarity of the form may have been a result of the prevailing use to which such vessels were put in their own country, or at least a survival of such a use. I should add, that for such a suggestion—it is nothing more—I am alone responsible.
CHAPTER X
THE ENAMELLED GLASS OF THE SARACENS—continued
I will now pass in review some of the more famous specimens of Saracenic glass.
Of the ‘Goblet of the Eight Priests,’ now in the museum at Douai (figured in Gerspach, p. 107), we have an earlier record than in other cases. It was bequeathed by one Marguerite Mallet, early in the fourteenth century, along with other property, for the endowment of that number of chantry priests. The case of cuir bouilli in which the goblet is preserved is a remarkable specimen of the French art of that time. The inscription on this cup is unfortunately now illegible.
For the ‘Glass of Charlemagne,’ which has passed from the treasury of an abbey near Chartres to the museum of that town, it is claimed that it was presented by Harun-ar-Rashid to the great Emperor. M. Schefer many years ago made this cup the starting-point of a special memoir, in which he collected a mass of information from Arab sources. This essay may perhaps be regarded as the earliest example of any intelligent interest in this class of Oriental glass.
The ‘Luck of Eden Hall,’ long preserved in the home of the Musgrave family, has acquired a certain factitious celebrity from a legend that has served as the theme of more than one ballad, none, however, of any great antiquity.[[117]] Like the Douai cup, it is preserved in a leathern case—in this instance not of earlier date than the beginning of the fifteenth century. The ‘Luck’ is figured in Lysons’s Magna Britannia, vol. iv.
These three goblets form a compact group. In all of them the decoration is simple, consisting chiefly of interlaced bands or straps forming geometrical patterns. There are no figures of men or animals, and the colouring is for the most part confined to blue and gold. We may, perhaps, attribute these glasses to the beginning rather than the end of the thirteenth century.
Probably of as early a date is the goblet preserved at Breslau (there is a photograph of it in Von Czihak’s Schlesische Gläser). Here there is no ornament apart from some fine arabesques of gold. This cup has long been associated with St. Hedwig, but it must not be confused with other so-called ‘Hedwig glasses,’ which, as we have seen, are carved in the manner of rock crystal.
I now come to a more elaborately enamelled group, in the decoration of which the human figure plays an important part.
In the Grüne Gewölbe at Dresden are two beakers or hanaps of this class, set in rich silver-gilt mountings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Round one of these cylindrical beakers runs a spirited frieze, with polo-players, mounted on brown, white, and yellow horses; above is a cufic inscription in gold on a blue ground ([Plate XXV.]). On the other beaker, probably the earlier of the two, we see a group of brilliantly clad turbaned figures seated by a flowing stream—the water is naïvely rendered by a meandering line of blue enamel; the background is formed by a flight of aquatic birds. On both these glasses, beside the usual gamut of colours—gold, blue, red, green, yellow, and opaque white—we find some mixed brownish tints.
SARACENIC ENAMELLED GLASS
CIRCA 1300. GERMAN METAL MOUNTING OF SIXTEENTH CENTURY
Somewhat taller than these Dresden hanaps is the beaker at Wilhelmshöhe (it is some nine inches in height). The decoration—an al fresco wine-party with musicians—calls to mind one of the groups of figures on the Würzburg flask. Somewhat similar is the beaker preserved in the picture gallery at Cassel, but the enamels on this are distinctly poorer.
A beautiful beaker of this class came to the British Museum with the Waddesdon collection. It stands upon a French-Gothic mounting of the fourteenth century. We see a prince seated on his throne, with attendants on either side. The glass is colourless and clear, and among the enamels a palish green, applied as a thin wash, should be noted.[[118]]
Since then another goblet of this class has been acquired by the British Museum. This cup is said to have been dug up in the neighbourhood of Aleppo. The glass is much decayed, in this forming an exception to the other goblets of the class. The design includes two conventional palm-trees, whose trunks are built up of a series of nodes.[[119]]
On a goblet from Coptos, in the same collection, a number of little fish in grisaille or dull red constitute the sole decoration. There is a fragment of glass similarly decorated at South Kensington, which came, I think, from Achmin. We find the same little fishes again on a cup of glass, described as a godet à l’huile, lately added to the Louvre collection.
These examples practically exhaust the list of the lamp-shaped goblets of undoubted Oriental origin. But it would be impossible at this point to pass over the absolutely unique cup from the Adrian Hope collection, decorated with a seated figure of the Virgin. This goblet is now in the British Museum, and it is there described as Venetian of the thirteenth century ([Plate I.]). The glass, somewhat thick and slightly greenish in hue, with a few drawn bubbles, in no way differs from that of the beakers already described.[[120]] So of the shape and of the quality and colours of the enamel. The slight ‘kick,’ however, at the base is normal: that is to say, there is no aperture (see above, p. [159]); the cup, therefore, needs no rim or stand. As regards the decoration, we find, in addition to the usual colours, an inscription in Gothic lettering, now quite black, but originally executed in silver. I shall return to this cup in the next chapter. I mention it here as I am inclined to find for it an Oriental provenance.
I have dwelt at perhaps disproportionate length on this special type of goblet. We have here, however, a group from a historical point of view, of exceptional interest.
A small damaged goblet of cylindrical shape at South Kensington forms a transition to the group of larger beakers. It bears a series of medallions of blue enamel containing a curious design—a bird of prey seizing a duck. The cylindrical goblets with projecting collars do not present any special point for remark. There is some reason for regarding the quaint little flasks, with narrow swelling necks, as an early type. There are two of this class at South Kensington; in both cases the glass is much decomposed. Better preserved is the little bottle with the red eagle figured in Schmoranz (Plate vii.); the evidence, however, for the early date (1217) given to it is not quite conclusive.
It is not known at what time the large pilgrim’s bottle in the Domschatz of St. Stephan at Vienna was brought from the Holy Land (Schmoranz, Plate iv.). Much of the surface is left undecorated, and the glass is whitened by the chalky earth with which it is still filled. This earth is reputed to have come from Bethlehem, and to be stained with the blood of the Holy Innocents. The main design of musicians, seated beneath a conventional tree beside a stream (represented by a blue meander), calls to mind the decoration of one of the Dresden beakers. Near in style to this flask is the quaintly shaped pilgrim’s bottle in the British Museum, that was long in the possession of a noble family at Würzburg. I have already spoken of the superlative quality of the enamel on this remarkable example of Saracenic glass.
In the cathedral at Vienna is another enamelled vase (Schmoranz, Plate xiii.). This graceful amphora-shaped vessel follows exactly on the lines of the water jars of earthenware still in use on the coasts of the Mediterranean. The blood-stained earth that it once contained is gone, but the seal of attestation remains—strong evidence that the bottle was purchased at Bethlehem by the German pilgrim who brought it home. The blue is of a poor greyish tint, and the enamels on the whole low in tone, but the interlaced geometrical design is not the less decorative.
The little jug (Schmoranz, Pl. xxx.) now in the hands of one of the Rothschild family in Paris, was purchased at the Hamilton sale for £2730; in the catalogue it was described as a specimen of Venetian glass! The enamels are brilliant and well preserved—polo-players, mounted on horses of various colours, surround the body. A curious feature is a collar of wood round the base of the neck, kept in place by a series of claw-shaped projections.
The larger bottles with tall necks form a class by themselves; they are often remarkable for the delicacy of the decoration. On the neck of a tall and richly enamelled example in the museum at Vienna (Schmoranz, Pls. vi. and vii.) we find a distinctly Chinese motive:—in addition to the well-known phœnix may be seen a curious development of the cloud pattern, in the shape of four many-coloured bars. There is a fine example of these long-necked bottles at South Kensington and another in the British Museum. The first is remarkable in combining on the same piece motives from many sources—the Chinese phœnix, the so-called Egyptian hieroglyph, together with birds and animals in many styles ([Plate XXIII.]).
The bowls and dishes form a more miscellaneous group. These we may regard as essentially ‘table ware.’ In Persian manuscripts—in the illustrations to Hariri’s tales, for instance—we see such vessels piled up with fruits and cakes.
The shallow plate belonging to Lord Rothschild is perhaps the oldest example of this class in our collections. The medallions, skilfully filled with groups of lions attacking deer and with other similar subjects, are distinctly Byzantine, or some would say Sassanian, in character.
An interest of another kind may be found in a pair of dishes, one bowl-shaped, the other in the form of a tazza mounted on a tall foot, which have long stood side by side in the Cluny Museum at Paris. These are undoubtedly specimens of enamelled Saracenic glass, both probably dating from the fourteenth century, the bowl, however, somewhat earlier than the tazza. This latter vessel is decorated with a gold arabesque combined with the thick translucent blue enamel and the red lines so characteristic of Saracenic glass. A label, however, still proclaims this tazza to be ‘Style Arabo-Venitien, XVme siècle.’ On the other hand, no less an authority than Labarte (Histoire des Arts Industriels, iv. p. 546), it is true as long ago as 1864, found in this tazza an example of one of the processes of enamelling described by Theophilus, and on this ground deliberately declared it to be a Byzantine work. On the basis of a vague inscription found on the companion piece—the deep bowl—a whole theory of the Egyptian or Byzantine-Egyptian origin of this enamelled glass has been built up by a German writer (Carl Friedrich, Die Alt-Deutschen Gläser).
There is in the British Museum a large deep bowl with a gigantic cufic inscription in blue, overlaid with scrolls of white enamel. The coarsely executed but effective decoration calls to mind that on some of the Cairene mosque lamps. This bowl is known to have come from Damietta, and it may perhaps supply an argument for those who find the origin of some of the enamelled glass in the neighbouring town of Mansourah, where glass-works are known to have existed (Lane-Poole, Arab Art, p. 209).
We have finally a class of high-footed bowls with lids; of these, unfortunately, no undamaged example is known; the nearest approach is perhaps the bowl with a perfect lid but defective foot in the British Museum. The decoration in this case is of great interest. The medallions in the field, with fleurs-de-lis, Chinese phœnixes, and quaint monster-sphinxes and griffins, should be especially noted.