[127] The Consolato dell’ Arte was yearly elected on Christmas Day amid great festivities. In the statutes of the Arte Vitrea, drawn up or revised in 1495, we have apparently the earliest documentary evidence for these glass-works. These statutes are given in full in Bordoni’s L’Arte Vetraria in Altare, Savona, 1884.
[128] The results are perhaps best summed up in the memoir contributed in 1872 by Cecchetti to the Reale Instituto Veneto. See also the Monographia della Vetraria Veneziana, the combined work of Zanetti, Cecchetti, and others, drawn up upon the occasion of the Viennese Exhibition of 1873. Vicenzo Zanetti, in his account of the Museo Civico at Murano, gives a list of more than three hundred works (including manuscripts, drawings, and pamphlets) treating upon Venetian glass.
[129] A possible exception has been found in a document of the year 1090, in which a certain citizen adds the word fiolarius to his name. This word, which in the Venetian tongue generally takes the form friolaro, is of some importance to us. In Dante the word fiala is used for a wine-bottle: ‘il vin della sua fiala,’ Par. x. 88.
[130] As early as 1175 it is mentioned that the Venetians had certain privileges in the Daciones de Vitro at Tyre.
[131] Ayas, Tripoli, Tyre, and Acre remained under Frankish rule during the greater part of the thirteenth century. Acre, the last to fall, was taken by the Saracens in 1291.
[132] My point is that in this beautiful cup the scheme of decoration is essentially French, while the technique of both glass and enamels points to a Saracenic place of origin.
[133] They have been analysed by Cecchetti in the paper quoted above.
[134] This word was the source of much embarrassment to Merret, the translator of Neri’s little manual on glass, of which I shall have more to say further on. Quite regardless of the context, he throughout his translation rendered the words ‘canne di conterie’—that is to say, the glass rods from which the beads were made—as ‘rails for counting houses’!
[135] The term ‘bead’ was early transferred from the ‘bid’ or prayer to the small spherical bodies strung on a cord by which these prayers were counted, and before the end of the fourteenth century the word was already used in a secular sense also.
[136] These canne are described as ‘de vero [vetro] commun, Christallini et colorade de diversi sorti.’