I have said that these Italian glass-workers carried their new methods all through Western Europe, but, as we shall see, their permanent influence was not the same in each case. In Germany it was in a measure but a passing fashion—neither the Italian designs nor the Italian methods of manufacture ever became prevalent. The wald-glas, in an improved form certainly, held its own, and indeed before the end of the next century was threatening the supremacy of its Venetian rival.
In France, on the other hand, the victory was in a manner complete; the old verre de fougère, it is true, long survived, but in an acknowledged position of inferiority. In the Netherlands the case was more complicated; for while on the one hand at Antwerp and at Liége the typical Venetian cristallo was more successfully imitated than elsewhere out of Italy, on the other hand, in many places in the Low Countries, the old green glass continued to be made, and the old shapes, above all the essentially Teutonic roemer, never fell out of favour. It so happens indeed that for the best renderings of examples of both these schools of glass we must go to the works of the Dutch and Flemish painters, rather than to the contemporary pictures of either Germany or Italy. This is an interesting point about which I shall have something more to say later on.
As regards Spain, the Italian influence became on the whole predominant, but here the question is complicated by the existence, in Catalonia at least, of a school of enamelled glass of which the Venetian origin is by no means certain, and this school was already well developed before the end of the fifteenth century. Finally, in the case of our own country, the Venetian emigrants who came for the most part by way of the Low Countries, had soon to divide the hitherto almost free field with glass-workers from Normandy and Lorraine.
It is only of late years that the full significance of this emigration of glass-workers from Murano and from L’Altare has been recognised. A distinguished Belgian antiquary, M. Schuermans, President of the Cour d’Appel at Liége, about the year 1880—following in this in the steps of his countryman the late M. Alexandre Pinchart, and in a measure also in those of M. Houdoy (Verrerie à la façon de Venise, Paris, 1873)—began a systematic investigation of the subject, and during a period of ten years, from 1883 to 1892, contributed to the pages of a learned periodical published at Brussels (Bulletin des Commissions Royales de l’Art et de l’Industrie) a series of letters—for so M. Schuermans modestly called them, though they were in fact so many treatises, extending some of them to more than a hundred pages—packed full with the results of his researches. One of the most curious sources of information M. Schuermans found in the reports sent from the Venetian embassies and agencies in France and elsewhere to the Council of Ten at Venice. It was not the least important duty of the diplomatic agents of the Republic to trace out the fugitive Muranese glass-workers, to endeavour to induce them, by threats or promises, to return to their homes, and if unsuccessful in this, to denounce them to the authorities in Venice, who might then proceed to throw into prison the unhappy families of these recalcitrant workmen. In extreme cases there are hints of more drastic measures in dealing with the traitors themselves—for so they were regarded—but I do not think that any instance of assassination has been definitely made out for the time of which we are now speaking. It is certainly strange that the only known cases of such judicial murders occurred at Vienna as late as the eighteenth century. The story was told long ago by Daru in his Histoire de Venise (Pièces Justificatives), and I do not know that it has ever been refuted.
Not that these extreme measures were at all times carried out with equal energy. At times, for political or other reasons, little restraint appears to have been put upon the wandering forth of the Muranese glass-workers; while at others the Council of Ten seems to have regarded the question as one of the utmost moment, aroused perhaps by reports that seemed to prove that the glass monopoly of the state was endangered. This was the case at the end of the fifteenth century, again towards the middle of the seventeenth, and more especially at the end of that century, when the Venetians began to find their industry seriously threatened by their German rivals.
In the sixteenth century, as a contemporary writer puts it, ‘Tous les rois et princes désiraient et affectaient avoir en leurs royaumes cette science’: that is to say, the knowledge of the methods of preparing the true cristallo. To obtain this knowledge from Murano was difficult and even dangerous. What wonder, then, that recourse was had to the Consuls of the glass-workers’ guild at L’Altare? These officials seem to have been always ready to negotiate for the supply to foreign princes, or even to private individuals—if the requisite payment was forthcoming—of one or more of their skilled gentleman glass-workers.[[165]] But in this case, too, a keen eye was kept upon these men: they were bound by the strictest oaths to practise their craft, when in foreign lands, with the greatest secrecy; above all they were forbidden to take any apprentices from the people among whom they were working. In France, where so many of these Altarists settled, these restrictions were the cause of constant friction, but so successfully were they as a rule enforced, that we find that, in the case of more than one centre of the new industry, it was necessary during a period of at least a century to have recourse from time to time to the original source at L’Altare, to replace the Italian workmen who had died or wandered off to other towns. For like their rivals from Murano, these Altarists were always on the move. We are reminded in this of the wandering porcelain ‘arcanists’ of the eighteenth century, who carried from one German court to another the secrets of their craft. To give but a single example; M. Schuermans has traced one of these gentilshommes de verre in migrations that led him successively to London, Liége, Maestricht, Rouen, and Paris.
In what respect, if in any, did the glass manufactured by these ‘licensed’ craftsmen from L’Altare, differ from that made by their rivals the ‘outlaws’ from Murano? This is a question that we are not in a position to answer. That there was some difference in style of working, and not merely in the technical excellence of the glass, would seem to be proved by the expression ‘à la façon d’Altare,’ or ‘ad uso d’Altare,’ so often applied to it. There is no doubt that the glass made ‘à la façon de Venise’ was, on the whole, regarded as of greater excellence, and that in the impossibility of obtaining workmen from Murano, the resort to the Consuls at L’Altare was in a measure a pis aller. We must not, however, as has sometimes been done, look upon the craftsmen from the latter town as incapable of producing anything of artistic merit. On the contrary, they not only turned out a true cristallo, but much of the enamelled glass that was so successfully made in France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came in all probability from furnaces worked by Altarists.
In fact, our ignorance on this point affords an excellent example of a difficulty that is met with again and again in this history of ours,—the difficulty, I mean, of controlling our literary material by means of the scanty examples of glass that have come down to us. It would require a large shelf in a library to hold all the bulky volumes dealing with the history of French glass that have of late years been published, works that are due above all to the local patriotism and the industry of provincial investigators. For books of this kind, the fashion was set as long ago as 1864 by M. Benjamin Fillon in his L’Art du Verre chez les Poitevins. Since then have appeared not mere brochures, but in many cases portly volumes tracing the history of the manufacture in Normandy, Picardy, Lorraine, Nevers, Lyons, and Provence. M. Schuermans has devoted to France a long letter, chiefly concerned with the settlements of Altarist workmen (op. cit., vol. xxxi.). And yet not only are specimens of glass, undoubtedly French, of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries comparatively rare, but in very few cases can anything more than a guess be made as to the provinces to which these specimens are to be attributed. Such attributions indeed, when attempted, have for the most part had to be based either upon the armorial bearings forming part of the enamelled decoration, or again upon the localities where the glasses have been found—and these are criteria that fail in most cases.
Among the many anomalies that we encounter in the course of this inquiry—and surely in no kindred branch of art history are so many met with—there is nothing more surprising than the numerous important ‘developments’ of glass of one kind or another, for which we may search in vain a rational explanation—unless, indeed, it is the corresponding fact of the unexplained barrenness of certain periods and countries where such poverty would have been the least expected. One source of this apparent caprice in the presence or absence of glass of artistic merit at times and at places where the contrary might have been looked for, may be found, perhaps, in the fact that although, since Roman days at all events, the making of glass has always been an important industry, it is an industry that has only incidentally come into connection with the æsthetic movements of the time.[[166]] Some such explanation may perhaps be given for the comparatively subordinate place taken by France in the history of artistic glass, at least until quite recent days. In one department of the vitreous arts the French occupied no doubt for a time the premier place—the stained glass of their cathedrals is acknowledged to be the finest in Europe. But in our branch of the manufacture, a branch for which, curiously enough, the French alone have provided a name—la verrerie—that nation has never occupied a prominent position. Since Roman times, the first place as producers of glass vessels of artistic importance has been held in succession by Byzantine Greeks, by Saracens, by Venetians, by Germans, and for a moment by the English. It is only quite of late, since the commencement of the last quarter of the nineteenth century in fact, that any claim for such a position could be made for the French. And yet, in spite of this, the literature of that special subdivision of the arts du feu with which we are here concerned is especially a French one, and this is true not only for the technical and industrial side of the subject, but for the artistic and historical in an even greater degree.
I have spoken of the determined way in which these wandering Italians kept themselves apart from the native workmen, so that the secrets of their craft were preserved through more than one generation. In time, however, in France at any rate, not a few of these Italian craftsmen became sedentary, and not the least curious result of the recent researches by French and Belgian archivistes has been to show how certain well-known families of glass-makers from L’Altare settled down in various parts of France, where their representatives may now be found, many of them still engaged in the same work. So that, thanks to these investigations, the Saroldi of L’Altare have been provided with distant cousins in the Sarode family of Poitou; in similar manner the Ferri are represented by the Ferry of Provence, great glass-masters at the present day; the Massari by the Massary of Lorraine; and the Bormioli by the Bormiolles of Normandy and the Nivernais. All these four families were admitted long since to the noblesse of France[[167]] (Schuermans, Letter XI., 1892).