VENETIAN GLASS
1. ENAMELLED LAMP. EARLY SIXTEENTH CENTURY 2. ENAMELLED GLASS CUP. FOUND IN EXCAVATIONS FOR CAMPANILE. FIFTEENTH CENTURY
To return after this long digression to our class of thinly painted enamels. We find that the use of these painted colours came in at quite an early date. I will take as typical examples a pair of goblets or wine-glasses in the British Museum, one from the Slade collection (No. 391), the other presented by the late Sir A. W. Franks. These are both conical cups of simple outline, of which the bowl passes directly into the spreading foot. The edge of this foot is turned over to form a sort of ring on the upper margin. In fact, these goblets may be taken as representatives of one of the earliest types of that long series of wine-glasses that we shall come across again and again in later days. On the first of these cups we see two figures on horseback, one waving a banner and the other holding a flag; the costume points to the end of the fifteenth century. This is a detail of some importance, for as a rule the decoration of this class of enamelled glass is confined to foliage, scrolls, and classically treated figures of sirens or satyrs.
Almost identical in shape, and decorated in a similar manner, is a little goblet, or rather fragment of a goblet, lately dug up in the Piazza of St. Mark at Venice during the excavations for the foundations of the new Campanile. ([Plate XXX.] 2). This little glass, between four and five inches in height, is of a thinnish clear metal, decorated with scrolls of a somewhat Gothic character, indicated by lines of opaque white; the other enamels are green, an opaque red, a rich yellow, and a deep as well as a turquoise blue, the latter laid on thickly. This goblet may perhaps be referred to the middle of the fifteenth century.
A still finer example of these ‘painted’ enamels is to be found in a very beautiful ewer now in the Louvre. The colours are laid on with a brush as in the previous specimens, but as we often find in later examples—and this applies equally to the French and German enamelled glass—the opaque red is here replaced by a poor brown. Within a large medallion is seen a herald riding on a griffin; the ground is covered by scale patterns and scrolls of many colours.
CHAPTER XIII
VARIETIES OF VENETIAN GLASS—EARLY LITERATURE
The history of modern glass begins, as I have said, with the famous Venetian cristallo of the sixteenth century. Many other varieties were made at this time, but it was the absolutely colourless and transparent glass, capable of being blown to extreme thinness and then worked into every variety of form, that above all established the European reputation of the Murano glass-workers. Before long, in nearly every country of Western Europe, the old methods of working were falling into disuse; and by the aid of skilled workmen who were tempted away from Murano, or, failing that, were hired from the rival glass furnaces of L’Altare, the attempt was made to imitate this clear white glass of Venice.
We have, then, in this cristallo the typical glass of Venice, and here more than in any other group, whether of earlier or of later date, we find a family of glass of which the artistic merit depends directly upon the skill of the glass-blower, rather than on that of the enameller or engraver. In the simpler and earlier specimens, an undeniable charm is derived from the extreme tenuity of the material—there is an evanescent and almost ghostly air about the ‘diaphanous, pellucid, dainty body’[[147]] of not a few of these glasses. Although entirely free from any positive colour, there is often a certain tendency to greyness in the metal, and this is increased to a misty cloudiness when the surface has been attacked by atmospheric influence, as is not unfrequently the case with glasses that have been long exposed to our damp English climate.