Besides precious stones, coral, and seed-pearls,
Glass,
coloured and wrought into small beads and bugles, is another of those hard materials, the presence of which we find in this collection. As now, so far back during the mediæval period, the Venetians, at the island of Murano, wrought small glass beads and bugles of all colours, as well as pastes—smalti—in every tint for mosaics, and imitations of jewels. This art, which they had learned from the Greeks, they followed with signal success; and likely is it that from Venice came the several specimens of glass—blue, like lapis lazuli—which we still see on that beautiful frontal in Westminster Abbey,[334]—the work of our countryman Peter de Ispagna,[335] the member of an old Essex family. At [No. 8276], pp. 168-9, is a piece of an orphrey for a chasuble, plentifully embroidered with glass beads and bugles, which shows how much such a style of ornament was used towards the latter end of the twelfth century, at least in Lower Germany, and some of the Italian provinces. Belonging to St. Paul’s, London, A.D. 1295, among many other amices, there was one having glass stones upon it; “amictus ... ornatus lapidibus vitreis magnis et parvis per totum in capsis argenteis deauratis, &c.”[336]
[334] Church of our Fathers, 1, p. 235.
[335] Monumenta Vetusta, vi. p. 26.
[336] Dugdale’s St. Paul’s, p. 318.
Enamel.
Another form of glass fastened by heat to gold and copper—enamel, the invention neither of Egypt, Greece, nor Italy, but of our own old Britons,[337] was extensively employed as an adornment upon textiles. Besides the examples we have given,[338] that gorgeous “chesable of red cloth of gold with orphreys before and behind set with pearls, blue, white and red, with plates of gold enamelled, wanting fifteen plates, &c.”[339] bestowed by John of Gaunt’s duchess of Lancaster, upon Lincoln Cathedral, is another instance to show how such a kind of rich ornamentation was sewed to garments, especially for church use, in such large quantities.
[337] Philostratus, Icon. L. 1. cap. 528.
[338] Church of our Fathers, t. i. p. 469.