Venetian Influence in Germany
We must now turn again to the glass of Venice, and consider how far and in what direction its influence can be traced upon that made in the north. This much we know—that in the fifteenth century, and perhaps earlier, the Venetian glass was largely imported into Germany, and this not only on the backs of hawkers, for the large Venetian firms had agencies in many German cities.[[190]] There were at that time depôts of the Venetian merchants at such comparatively remote places as the Silesian towns of Görlitz and Breslau, and early in the fifteenth century the Italian glass was sold in the market-place of Vienna. At this time, however, we are unable to trace any influence these importations may have had upon the local German glass—of this last, indeed, practically nothing is known. It would seem that it was not until the sixteenth century was well advanced that any attempt was made in Germany to compete with the Venetian cristallo. Like the mediæval glass of France and England, the earlier German glass was doubtless a mere household ware, of all descriptions the least likely to be preserved.
It was in Southern Germany—in Switzerland and Swabia, and still more in the wealthy towns of Augsburg, Regensburg, and Nuremberg—that the Italian influence, in the matter of glass as in the other departments of the arts, was most strongly felt. As early as 1531 the town council of Nuremberg granted a subsidy to promote the introduction of the Venetian methods of making glass. We are told that Augustin Hirschvogel (d. 1560), a member of the well-known family of glass-stainers, some of whom we shall meet again before long, was interested in the question, and, according to one account, he learned the secrets of the art at Murano. In any case, there exist specimens of what is undoubtedly German glass, decorated with coats-of-arms of local families, both the shapes and the enamelling of which carry us back to the Venetian enamelled glass of the early sixteenth century. Good examples of this ware may be found in the richly enamelled pilgrims’ flasks, of which there are examples in the Germanic Museum at Nuremberg and in the British Museum. In such specimens the Italian influence is seen not only in the beadings and the gilding, but in the nature of the metal itself. How strong this southern influence was in these parts in the second half of the sixteenth century we may see in the work of the contemporary goldsmiths. In the case of glass, however, the purely Italian forms seem to have been early abandoned, and the same may be said of the style of the enamels employed in the decoration.
Of a later time than these South German examples of enamelled ware are the even more definite copies of the sixteenth-century glass of Venice that were made in the neighbourhood of Cologne. Here we have deliberate imitations of the Italian models—tall-stemmed glasses of thin cristallo with wide-winged handles, the latter often of deep blue metal. There is a row of these flügel-gläser, as the Germans call them, arranged on an upper shelf in the British Museum; some of these may perhaps be referred to the glass-house at Dessau, where Italians were employed between 1679 and 1686, but as a whole such glasses must be of a somewhat earlier date than this. In any case, we must regard these flügel-gläser as exotic growths, which lie quite apart from the two great German groups of the seventeenth century—I mean, of course, the enamelled and the engraved glass.
In fact, the real influence of the new cristallo of Venice was exerted in another direction. People who had seen this clear white glass were no longer content with the thick heavy metal of varying hues of green, blue, and yellow, often full of bubbles and defects. Already early in the sixteenth century in various parts of Germany attempts were made to introduce the Venetian methods of working, above all the Venetian materials. Now the Germans of that day were a practical people, already well ahead in many of the technical arts, above all in those relating to mining, to the smelting of metals, and to the arts du feu generally. After a moment of hesitation, instead of merely copying the formulas that they learned from the Italians, they adapted them to the conditions of their own country, and thus were soon able, in the central mountain districts among a population of miners and woodmen, to establish a glass industry quite independent of foreign aid. In France, on the other hand, and still more in England, up to the end of the seventeenth century, whatever glass of artistic character was produced was made for the most part by foreign workmen, and to some extent with foreign materials. Perhaps the most striking instance of the independent line taken by the German glass-workers may be found in the continued use of potash made from the beechwoods of their forests, and with this alkali they were soon able to produce a glass as brilliant and colourless as the soda-made cristallo of the south.
So far we have only got to the fringe of our subject; for the green glass of the Rhine and Holland can in no way be regarded as characteristic of German glass as a whole. Such glass I would rather class as Lotharingian, using that term for that central land that is neither French nor quite German. In so doing I am of course treading on delicate ground; but I am prepared to maintain that it is rather in a heavily enamelled willkomm-humpen of plain cylindrical form from Saxony or Franconia than in a prunted roemer of green glass that we have a really characteristic type of the glass of Germany.
And this brings us to the question, to how much of this Central German glass the term Bohemian may be fairly applied? This at least may be safely said, that the expression ‘German glass from the Bohemian frontier’ would cover nearly the whole of it. What it is essential to remember is that with the exception of a small section of the engraved glass we have little to do with Prague and the Czecs of the central plateau of Bohemia. As a whole this glass was made by German-speaking people dwelling on either side of the mountains which gird Bohemia to the north-east, the north-west, and the south-west, and divide that kingdom from Silesia, from Saxony, and from Bavaria respectively. Of all these districts it may be said that wherever the pines and beeches of the wooded slopes provided both fuel for the furnaces and (from their ashes) the indispensable potash, wherever, too, from the hillsides a pure white sand could be extracted, and finally, wherever in the mountain streams a source of power for cutting the wood or grinding the glass was at hand, there a glass furnace would sooner or later be established.
Starting from the gorge of the Elbe above Dresden, to the east a complicated system of mountains covers the frontiers of Bohemia and Silesia. In the valleys that run down on either side glass has been made from the fourteenth century, if not before. It must not be forgotten that until it was seized by Frederick the Great in the eighteenth century Silesia had long been a dependence of the crown of Bohemia.[[191]]
To the west, beyond the gorge of the Elbe, the high plateau of Misnia falls abruptly on the Bohemian side, forming the Erzgebirge. Although for the glass of this district, the classical land of mining and metallurgy, we have no modern work to fall back upon, yet in the sixteenth century it produced two important writers on metallurgy and mining—Georg Agricola, the learned professor of chemistry, and the Lutheran divine Mathesius. Both of these writers have something to say upon the contemporary processes of glass-making.
At the western extremity of the Erzgebirge, on the one hand the Fichtelgebirge forms a link joining those mountains to the Thüringer Wald—these are both essentially German forest districts where much glass was made; on the other hand the Böhmer Wald runs south-east to the Danube. On the southern slopes of the latter range was made much of the glass that supplied the rich Franconian and Bavarian cities.
And the mention of these towns brings us to this difficult question: How far was the enamelling and the engraving of the finer specimens carried out in the mountain valleys where the glass was made, and how far in the workshops of the cities to which the undecorated glass had been transported?
For the northern districts at least Herr von Czihak has brought forward much evidence to show that the artists in the local towns carried back to the mountain furnaces, to be there fired, the glass that they had painted with enamel colours, and that even the finer kinds of engraving were done in the upland villages where water-power was abundant. This was certainly the case in later days in the famous centre of glass-engraving that grew up at Warmbrunn, in the Hirschberg district of Silesia. On the other hand much glass was, it would seem, enamelled in Dresden, and in the south the finer work both of the enameller and the glass-engraver was probably executed in the studio of the artist—at Nuremberg, for instance, or in other Franconian or Swabian towns.
For the German glass of the sixteenth century we have fortunately the two already mentioned contemporary writers, both of them Saxons by birth—Georg Agricola and Johann Mathesius. Agricola, it is true, ‘the founder of the sciences of mineralogy and metallurgy,’ in his famous work De Re Metallica,[[192]] devotes only a few pages at the end of his last chapter to the subject of glass; but here may be found the first accurate drawing of a glass furnace that has come down to us. Agricola mentions that he had passed two years at Venice, and had seen much of the glass-working when there.[[193]] Indeed, what he says of the materials, of the source of the alkali above all, seems to have relation to the Italian rather than to the German glass.
GERMAN GLASS FURNACE
SIXTEENTH CENTURY. FROM AGRICOLA
But this is not the case with the furnaces, which he describes and illustrates. Agricola distinguishes three separate ovens: the fritting oven; the main oven, where the glass is melted in pots; and an annealing oven for slowly cooling the glass. These ovens, however, may be combined in various ways in smaller works, reducing the number to two or even to one. The fritting oven is a detached building of beehive shape, which is also used for annealing the pots. The main oven, eight feet in height and ten feet in diameter, is of a similar outline. The wood is burned on the floor of a lower chamber, without any grating of firebars; the flame passes through into an upper chamber, around which are arranged eight pots, each two feet in height, with a working-hole in front of each pot. From the back of this chamber a passage opens which conveys the heated gases to the quadrangular annealing oven.
Surely so much information has rarely been compressed into one print as we find in the main illustration to this part of Agricola’s text ([Plate XXXVIII.]). Here at one working-hole (fenestrella) we see a workman gathering the glass at the end of his fistula or blowing-iron, another is shaping the gathering upon the marver at his foot, a third is vigorously blowing the paraison to the required size, and a fourth is swinging another round his head. On the ground lie scattered moulds of various forms, and here, too, we may discover the forceps (pucella) used in shaping the glass. To the right, in the foreground, lies a large wooden case closely packed with glass vessels of various shapes: we can distinguish, I think, bottles, alembics, and some prunted cylinders, which may well be the Krautstrünke of Mathesius. Above, to the right, the itinerant hawker marches off with a fresh supply of glass of all shapes arranged in an open-work crate strapped on his back. Finally, to the left, in a little office, the master discusses business with a customer over a foaming glass of beer—this last a truly German trait.
Our other source of information for the German glass of the sixteenth century is found, of all places in the world, in a collection of so-called sermons written by the friend, table-companion, and biographer of Luther—Johann Mathesius (1504-1565). Mathesius, after leaving Wittenberg, settled as pastor at Joachimsthal, a famous mining centre on the southern slopes of the Erzgebirge. These Sermons for Miners[[194]] are a strange mixture of what to us seem fantastic analogies drawn from the Bible, with matter of an eminently practical nature relating to the crafts and occupations of his audience. The title of his fifteenth sermon will give some idea of how he treats the subject:—‘Of glass and the making of glass, and passages where it is mentioned in the Holy Writings, and how we may thereby call to mind both the fragility of our present bodies and the clearness and brilliancy of our bodies in the future state.’
A careful perusal of what both these writers have to say on the manufacture of glass leaves the general impression that in the first half of the sixteenth century Germany had not made much progress in that art. It is to Venice, in the first place, and then to Antwerp, that Mathesius turns for brilliant examples. At Murano, he tells us, they can actually make panes of glass ‘through which from one’s room one can see all that is passing in the street.’ So too, he says, it is in that town and in Antwerp that is made the finest schmelzglas of all colours used by the goldsmith—above all the mysterious ritzkel.[[195]]
‘Now,’ says Mathesius, ‘we come to the German glass-houses. Some have their own sand, others pound white quartz and pebbles. They make use of the ashes of oak, maple, beech, and pine; the ashes of the fir and of the willow turn out good work, but from their fatty nature yield glass that is not so white. Native salt is added also to the sand and ashes, but the Polish rock-salt is more advantageous. Many buy up broken glass and make with it the best work.’[[196]] If you wish, continues Mathesius, to obtain white and pure glass, it is essential to use only well dried wood, for green wood makes the glass opaque and blackish. The metal should be cooled more than once and remelted, the glass-gall being carefully skimmed off each time. If you propose to make fair and pure glass, ‘neither bubbly, feathery, cloudy, dull, stony, or gritty,’ prepare your frit carefully by rabbling and turning over the mixture of sand, potash, and salt on the floor of the first furnace, in the same way as metallic ores are treated ‘when they are roasted by the valuable new process.’ (Whatever this may have been, it was an illustration that would appeal to his audience of miners.) When the mixture begins to sinter together, the stuff should be shovelled into cold water. The frit thus prepared is then placed in the melting-pots and gradually heated.
There then follows a careful account of the various processes involved in the blowing and shaping of the vessel: of this I will only remark that there is no mention in it of the use of the shears for trimming the rough edges of the glass—technically an important point.