Millefiori Glass
M. Froehner, in his introduction to the catalogue of the Charvet collection, has divided Roman glass into as many as fifteen classes. Some of these divisions are perhaps rather arbitrary, and very little success has attended any attempt made by him or by other writers on the subject to classify the vast material on a geographical basis, still less to trace the history of its development.
There is, however, one division of classical glass—we can hardly call it Roman, although most of the finer specimens may be traced back to Rome or to the tombs of Central and Southern Italy—which forms in some degree a transition from our primitive family to the true blown glass of imperial times. This is the so-called Millefiori Glass. We have, doubtless, in this a development of the ‘fused mosaics’ of the Egyptians, worked out on a larger scale, and employed for other objects than flat slabs and fragments for inlay.
In the millefiori bowls of Greco-Roman times we can distinguish two predominant types: the madrepore design in the first place, which closely imitates the pattern on a polished slab of coralline limestone, with the addition that the ground is of a deep translucent green or of a purple of subdued tone. In this class may be placed such exceptional pieces as the bowl from Crete, in the British Museum; here we have rosettes of yellow, green, and red upon an opaque ground of a rich blue. The second type is equally characteristic, but more difficult to describe. Short, loosely rolled scrolls of an opaque white float in a more or less transparent base, interspersed with a few quadrangular masses of gilt glass. It would be difficult to say what natural substance is imitated in this case—perhaps some kind of fossiliferous lumachella marble, which may have been in vogue at one time at Alexandria. We may be quite sure that the Roman glass-workers would not have failed to imitate the famous Murrhine vases, which seem to have been originally carved from a natural stone, and it is among the millefiori glasses that such imitations may probably be looked for.
These millefiori bowls are evidently built up with more or less spirally arranged fragments of glass mosaic,[[23]] the individual pieces having been probably cut from a cane of glass, itself formed by a combination of minute rods, as in the case of the Egyptian ‘fused mosaics.’ These pieces were arranged in the mould in a coil, starting from the centre, but how far, if at all, during the subsequent partial fusion, they were subjected to any blowing operation, is a moot point. In any case, the final effect is the result of an elaborate process of cutting on the wheel and subsequent polishing.
ROMAN MILLEFIORI GLASS BOWLS, IMITATING NATIVE STONES
In this millefiori glass the sections of the canes are arranged with a studied irregularity (so as, in a measure, to mask the spiral arrangement), and a further variety is given by setting up many of them obliquely to the surface. On the other hand we can seldom, perhaps never, find any trace of the distortion, which would inevitably be caused by the subsequent use of the blowing-tube. In other cases, the individual fragments may be built up of irregular longitudinal bands, so as to give the general effect of an agate breccia, as in a fine bowl at South Kensington. When the contorted bands are continuous we have another important type, founded apparently upon the endless varieties of banded agate and other native stones that have been formed by slow deposition in the hollows of rocks. One variety imitates amethystine quartz, but here, as elsewhere, rich combinations of colour, which can have no prototype among natural stones, are often introduced. We have an exceptionally beautiful example of this in certain cigar-shaped alabastra, said to have come from Sidon. Meandering bands of emerald green, powdered with gold, are divided by lines of white and deep blue. Good examples of this ‘peacock’ decoration may be found in the British Museum, at South Kensington, and in the Gréau collection.[[24]] Allied to these, and still more rare, are the little globular bottles with bands of green and gold, of which there are exquisite specimens in both our great Museums.
In the Etruscan Museum of Gregory XVI. in the Vatican, the millefiori glass is well represented by a series of bowls from Greek and Etruscan tombs. There is a choice collection of fragments of millefiori and banded glass in the British Museum,[[25]] and a still larger one in the Industrial Museum at Vienna.