[187] Every art, he says, must adapt itself to the country where it is practised; and so we Germans have set all kinds of knobs and rings on our glasses, so that they may be somewhat stronger and more lasting, and be more easily held in the hands of fuddled and clumsy folk (‘von vollen und ungeschicklichen Leuten’). This quotation is from one of the Lutheran pastor’s ‘sermons’ on glass (see below, p. [262]). Mathesius lived in what has been called ‘the classical age of German thirst,’ and was ever ready to gird at the failings of his contemporaries in this respect.
[188] The seventeenth-century roemer has been revived in Germany of late, and at Ehrenfeld, near Cologne, this form, as well as other old models, is skilfully if somewhat mechanically copied in both bottle-green and bluish-green glass.
[189] This later arrangement is well seen in a still-life piece in the Jones collection, signed ‘J. W. Preyer, 1854.’ Compare the carefully painted roemer in this picture—the solid foot wound round with a thin stringing—with the seventeenth-century glass in the picture by Jan van de Velde referred to below.
[190] Already in the fifteenth century the vitra Veneciana are distinguished from the Vitrum silvestrum sive montanum, otherwise wald-glas.
[191] For this district we have in the excellent work of E. von Czihak—Schlesische Gläser, Breslau, 1891—a better source of information than is available for any other of the glass-making centres of Germany or Bohemia.
[192] Published by Froben at Bâle in 1556; the dedication, however, is dated 1551.
[193] So Agricola states in the very last paragraph of his book. As this passage seems to have been sometimes misinterpreted, I will quote it in full from the original Latin edition. He mentions the various shapes that glass may be made to assume, and continues:— ‘Qualia opera multa praeclara et admiranda cum quondam biennio agerem Venetiis contemplatus sum; in primis verò anniversariis diebus festis ascensionis domenicae cùm venalia essent apportata Murano; ubi vitrariae officinae omnium celeberrimae sunt: quas vidi cum aliâs, tum maxime cum certis de causis Andream Naugerium in aedibus, quas ibi habebat, uno cum Francisco Asulano convenerim.’ From this passage it would appear that there was a great sale of Muranese glass in Venice on the feast of the Ascension (cf. above, p. [216]). Is this Naugerius, at whose house at Murano Agricola visited, to be identified with the famous poet and orator Andrea Navagero, from whose travels in Spain I have quoted on page 249?
[194] Sarepta oder Bergpostil, Nürnberg, 1562.
[195] In a contemporary vocabulary ritzle is interpreted as ‘aurum quo tingitur vitrum rubro colore.’ In a passage on Venetian glass in his early work, De Naturâ Fossilium (1546), Agricola speaks of the use of gold to colour glass of the ruddy colour of the carbuncle.
[196] I quote this passage, as it is much more to the point as regards German glass than what is to be found in Agricola, who gives us rather his theories as to the materials used by the Venetians to make their cristallo.