After the end of the third century the East begins once more to assert itself. The spread of the Christian religion, the transference of the capital of the empire to Constantinople, and again the advance of the barbaric tribes, were all important factors in this movement. As far as our northern lands are concerned, the importance of this last factor as an orientalising influence has perhaps not been sufficiently recognised. We think of this advance chiefly as a descent of Germanic tribes from the north upon Italy. But this last movement was only a side issue—the general progress was from East to West. We know now that for whatever culture these tribes brought with them at the time of their advance, they were at least as much indebted to the early civilisations of Western Asia as to that of Greece and Rome. It was only with the fringe of this latter civilisation, and that comparatively lately, that they had come into contact. In a measure we may look upon the influence of what we call classical civilisation as merely a temporary interruption, a breaking in upon the old established route by which the peoples, and still more the produce, of the East reached Western Europe. This is what gives that Oriental nuance, often so difficult to define, to so much of our Western European art of the early Middle Ages,[[59]] up to the time when the Roman culture, under the lead of the Western Church, asserted itself once more.

So in the somewhat miscellaneous assortment of glass from many lands, and often of uncertain date, that we treat of in this chapter, it is this new wave of Oriental influence working upon the now decadent Roman types which gives in some measure a common note to objects otherwise so divergent.

In another way the spread of the new religion had an even more direct and practical bearing on our subject-matter. If between the fourth and thirteenth century—between the later Gallo-Roman glass and the enamelled glass of the Saracens—there is in our collections a gap representing nearly a thousand years, only sparingly filled up by a few rare examples, the immediate cause is to be found in the abandonment of the practice of cremation, and of the habit of burying objects of value with the deceased. Fortunately for us, however, there was at first one important exception to this rule, and to this exception we owe the survival of so many specimens of a family of glass which is essentially both Christian and Roman, a family which should therefore rightly find its place at the commencement of the present chapter.

[PLATE X]

GILT GLASS OF THE CEMETERIES
1. FROM COLOGNE. 2 AND 3. FROM ROME

The Gilt Glass of the Cemeteries is, indeed, strictly Roman, both in provenance and in its artistic and technical relationships. The essential character of this early Christian glass depends upon the inclusion of a foil of thin gold between two plates of glass united by fusion. This is the principle of the decoration of the two bowls from Canosa that I have already described, and, indeed, in the technical difficulties overcome, and still more in artistic merit, these bowls far excel any later work of this class. As it is, the interest of these vetri a fondi d’oro, as the Italians call them, depends rather upon the fact that they constitute one of the earliest records of the art of the primitive Church, than upon any especial merit they may possess as examples of glass.[[60]]

It is now well known that nearly all these little discs of glass have formed the base of tazza-shaped bowls, or of cups of conical form. Most of them have been extracted from the plaster in which they were embedded at the sides of the loculi, where in the passages of the catacombs the corpses were deposited. There is also a class of smaller medallions or studs, covered with thick lenticular glass, which were inserted round the body of a glass cup; in a few rare examples, chiefly from Cologne, the medallions remain in their original position on the cup ([Pl. X.]). These studs are sometimes of blue glass, and we are then reminded of a style of decoration in use in earlier times—blue bosses or ribs, appliqués or fused into the body of the bowl.

Apart from a few remarkable specimens found beneath some of the old churches of Cologne, as at St. Ursula and St. Severinus, these gilt glasses come almost exclusively from the catacombs of Rome. The Roman collections naturally contain the most numerous specimens; in the British Museum, however, may be seen an important and typical series, illustrating most of the points of interest.

In the preparation of these vetri a fondi d’oro, the gold leaf was laid down upon the glass with some gum or varnish; the superfluous gold was then scraped away, and the internal lines of the draperies accentuated with a sharp metallic point; a covering of glass was then superimposed. So far all are agreed; but as to the actual process by which the two sheets of glass were united, there is some difference of opinion. The problem had already appealed to Heraclius, the writer of some barbarous hexameters treating De Coloribus et Artibus Romanorum. Heraclius was probably a monk living at Rome, perhaps about the end of the tenth century. The fifth of his little didactic poems is inscribed ‘De fialis auro decoratis.’ In this he tells us how he produced some small cups of pure glass, smeared them with gum with a brush, and then proceeded to lay down on them leaves of gold. On the gold leaf, when dry, he inscribed birds, men, lions, as it pleased his fancy. ‘Finally,’ says Heraclius, ‘I fitted over the surface, glass rendered thin by a skilful blast of the fire; but when the glass had yielded equally to the heat, it united itself admirably to the phials as a thin sheet.’[[61]]