GERMAN LATE MEDIÆVAL GLASS
1. PRUNTED CUP FOR HOLDING RELICS 2. WAX COVER TO THE SAME, WITH SEAL
In the royal inventories of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, above all in those of Charles V. and of his brothers the Dukes of Anjou, Berry, and Burgundy, where there is any mention of vessels of glass, it is almost without exception of verre de Damas or of verre à la façon de Damas that we hear. Quite an exception is the goblet de voirre blanc de Flandre, garny d’argent, that we find in an inventory of the possessions of Charles V., taken in 1379. Notwithstanding this, it is evident that the French kings at this time took much interest in the manufacture of glass. When hunting in the forests around Paris, they would turn aside to visit the furnace of one of these local makers of verre de fougère who already claimed the privileges of gentlemen. Thus early in the reign of Charles VI. we find an entry of a payment ‘pour don fait par lui aux voirriers, près de la forest de Chevreuse, où le roy estait alez veoir faire les voirres.’ This was at the beginning of the fifteenth century; later on, as we shall see, both King René and Louis XI. were patrons of the glass-makers; and yet it is doubtful if we have in our collections any examples of French glass which can be attributed to as early a period as the reign even of the latter king.
GERMAN LATE MEDIÆVAL GLASS
1. CUP WITH PRUNTS 2. CUP WITH CONICAL COVER, FOR RELICS
Of glass made in Germany before, say, the end of the fifteenth century, we know even less than of the contemporary production in France. Theophilus, it is true, tells us of the manufacture of sheets of glass from cylindrical manchons, and this was probably until the seventeenth century a specially German process; he describes, too, the manufacture of blown glass of simple forms. But from his time, or at least from the time of the pseudo-Heraclius a little later, to that of Georg Agricola in the sixteenth century, when we find the glass industry taking an important place in many parts of Germany, there is little direct evidence on the subject to bring forward.[[98]] Apart, however, from a few insignificant little bottles, used as reliquaries (Plates [XX.] and [XXI.]), nothing survives from this time. On the other hand, when in the fifteenth century we come again upon evidences of contemporary glass in Germany and Holland, as above all in the pictures of the early Netherlandish and of the Cologne schools, we find a distinct form of goblet already established, the prototype, it would seem, of a famous shape that was able to hold its own at the time of the invasion of Italian glass in the sixteenth century. There is nothing in France, still less in England, corresponding to the römer and its various kindred forms.
In one application of glass the Germans appear early to have acquired some skill. We may perhaps regard the thirteenth century as the time when the use of glass for mirrors of any size first became general; this may account for the frequent references to them in the literature of the time. As far back as 1250, the great Dominican encyclopædist, Vincent de Beauvais, states that the best mirrors are made from glass and lead (ex vitro et plumbo). A spiegel-glas is mentioned by a German writer as early as the end of the twelfth century, and by the end of the next century the mirror provided a frequent metaphor for the poets of the time. Thus Dante, in two passages in the Divina Commedia, speaks of ‘a leaded mirror.’ In the Paradiso (ii. 89) Beatrice declares that the rays of the sun are reflected from the moon—
‘Come color torna per vetro