[137] Note in this connection the recent discovery of ‘chevron’ beads at Treviso, referred to below.
[138] Something like the apparatus used for roasting coffee, it would seem. I do not attempt to give any explanation of the two rival processes—a spiedo (on a broach or spit) and a ferracia. That attempted by Mr. Nesbitt (South Kensington Glass, p. civ.) is not satisfactory.
[139] It is not, I think, generally known that beads were made in the east of London, early in the last century, by this process—by dropping off the glass upon a revolving spit or rod of iron (Hartshorne, p. 106).
[140] According to Dr. Petrie’s interpretation (see above, [Chapter II.]). It is difficult to understand how the elaborate beads found in Etruscan and Greek tombs—those with satyr masks especially—were built up without the use of the blow-pipe.
[141] Now preserved in the local museum at Treviso, where I lately had an opportunity of examining them. Nothing was found with them except a few small rods of coloured glass. It has been suggested that this was a contraband store, at some time destroyed by fire; but the fragments are in no case fused together. This parti-coloured glass, we may note, would be of little value for ‘cullet,’ and defective beads would therefore be thrown away.
[142] A fine specimen has found its way into the collection of Egyptian antiquities in the British Museum.
[143] The term ‘Aggri’ should, perhaps, be reserved for large beads, of which the colours extend right through the mass, but the term is not very definitely used in the African trade.
[144] Some of this enamelled glass no doubt dates from the early years of the next century. On the other hand, some of the thin white glass of capricious forms described in the next chapter may have been made before the year 1500. Apart from the generally vague ground of shape and style of decoration, there is no means of fixing the date of Venetian glass, so that in the absence of costumed figures or of coats of arms we are often very much in the dark on this point.
[145] I have seen, however, in a fourteenth-century manuscript, glasses with well developed stems carefully depicted.
[146] It was on the strength of the armour borne by this figure that M. Labarte attributed this cup to the early part of the fifteenth century. I may note that this goblet, as well as the one of green glass mentioned below, was bought in Italy for a small sum by M. Debruge Duménil, one of the earliest systematic collectors of Venetian glass. The elaborate catalogue of his collection, made very shortly after his death in 1847, by his son-in-law Jules Labarte, is a valuable record of the Italian art of the Renaissance.