[177] It seems to me, however, very doubtful whether flint-glass was at this time necessarily glass of lead. I return to the point in the chapter on English glass.
[178] I use the term Bohemian, here as elsewhere, for brevity’s sake. The more correct expression would be—the frontier lands of Germany and Bohemia. This will be made clear in the following chapter.
[179] So in the important collection of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs at Brussels, especially strong in examples of ‘winged’ beakers, little attempt is made to separate the Venetian from the home-made specimens.
[180] Attributed to the painter known as ‘The Master of the Death of the Virgin.’ In other works of this painter, who was working during the first thirty or forty years of the sixteenth century, we find examples of cristallo of large size and advanced technique.
[181] I do not know why this essentially Teutonic form is described in the official catalogue as a ‘Venetian green glass goblet.’
[182] Riaño, The Industrial Arts of Spain. The little that we know, on the documentary side, of Spanish glass is derived for the most part from this work, one of the South Kensington handbooks. This may be supplemented by the information collected shortly before his death by the Baron Charles Davillier, which has filtered out through various channels; some of it may be found in M. Gerspach’s work on glass (pp. 100-105). M. Schuermans also has not forgotten Spain in his records of the wandering Italian glass-makers (Bulletin xxix., pp. 133-147).
[183] In 1324 the glass-makers were ordered to remove their furnaces from the inside of the town (Riaño, p. 234).
[184] A surviving vessel of this shape, as well as some examples taken from pictures by Bouts and by the so-called Mostaert, is illustrated by Mr. Hartshorne (Old English Glasses, p. 64). Other similar bowls were to be found in the Thewald collection (dispersed at Cologne, October 1903): in Germany such vessels are known as halbe Wurzelbecher. The form was imitated also at Venice, as we may see in a bowl, in this case duplicated, in the Waddesdon Room in the British Museum.
[185] Quite a number of little vessels of this dark green glass, ornamented with prunts and quillings of various forms, have been dredged up from the Scheldt at Antwerp, or found in the excavation of new docks. They may be studied in the museum now established in the Steen.
[186] The term prunt should perhaps be restricted to those cases where the ‘blob’ is sufficiently large and hot to melt away the subjacent glass. When this is not the case, unless we adopt the German word Warze or wart, the term ‘stud’ applies better. If again the ‘blob’ of hot glass is merely dropped on the surface it may be termed a ‘tear.’