[147] James Howell, Epistolæ Ho-elianæ.
[148] This vessel appears to be sometimes filled, not with water, but with moist sand or earth.
[149] In the Louvre, the nymph of Giorgione’s ‘Fête Champêtre’ holds a jug of glass of graceful form over the well to the left, and in Titian’s ‘Supper at Emmaus’ in the same gallery, the twisting lines that surround a decanter with tall neck and handles, suggest a decoration with latticinio.
[150] The quotation is from the Appendix to Vicenzo Cervio’s Il Trinciante, Venice, 1593.
[151] ‘Ma quando particolarmente se voglion’ far vetri bianchi di smalto vi s’aggiunge calcina di stagno e questo si chiama latticinio del quale si fanno opere diverse sopra i vasi di christallo’ (Garzoni, Piazza Universale, 1585, p. 550).
[152] But in the earlier writers this name is given rather to the imitations of agate—what was afterwards known as schmelz (cf. p. [218]).
[153] A similar effect is obtained nowadays by means of a salt of uranium, but as is so often the case in the modern handling of old decorative systems, the opalescence is generally overdone.
[154] Laborde, Les Émaux au Louvre, Part II. No. 498, and the same author’s Les Ducs de Bourgogne (Archives of Lille).
[155] In the museum at Murano is, or was, a similar plaque thus described by Zanetti, ‘Una grossa piastra col busto incavato del Doge Andrea Gritti fra le initiali A. G.; secolo XVI.’ (Il Museo Civico-Vetrario di Murano, 1881).
[156] By the eighteenth century, however, they had adopted the German system. The President De Brosses, in one of the admirable letters that he wrote from Italy (1739), when describing the manufacture of mirrors at Murano, gives a vivid account of the cylinder process.