XXI. GLASS-MAKING.
A chapter might well have been devoted to Thirteenth Century glass-making quite apart from the stained glass of the cathedral [{456}] windows. All over Europe some of the most wonderful specimens of colored glass we possess were made in the Thirteenth Century. Recently Mr. Frederick Rolfe has looked up for me Venetian glass, of the three centuries, the Twelfth, the Thirteenth and the Fourteenth. He says Twelfth Century glass is small in form, simple and ignorant in model, excessively rich and brilliant in colors; the artist evidently had no ideal, but the Byzantine of jewels and emeralds.
"Thirteenth Century glass is absolutely different. The specimens are pretty. The work of the Beroviero family is large and splendid in form, exquisite and sometimes elaborate in model, mostly crystal glass reticently studded with tiny colored gem-like knobs. There are also fragments of two windows pieced together, and missing parts filled with the best which modern Murano can do. These show the celebrated Beroviero Ruby glass (secret lost) of marvelous depth and brilliancy in comparison with which the modern work is merely watery. The ancient is just like a decanter of port-wine.
"Fourteenth Century returns to the wriggling ideal and exiguous form of the Twelfth Century, and fails woefully in brilliance of color. It is small and dull and undistinguished. One may find out what war or pest afflicted Murano at this epoch to explain the singular degradation."
This same curious degradation took place in the manufacture of most art objects during the Fourteenth Century. One would feel in Mr. Rolfe's words like looking for some physical cause for it. The decadence is so universal, however, that it seems not unlikely that it follows some little known human law, according to which, after man has reached a certain perfection of expression in an art or craft, there comes, in the striving after originality yet variety, an overbalancing of the judgment, a vitiation of the taste in the very luxuriance of beauty discovered that leads to decay. It is the very contradiction of the supposed progress of mankind through evolution, but it is illustrated in many phases of human history and, above all, the history of art, letters, education and the arts and crafts.