Before going on to speak of the glass made in Spain, it will be well to say a few words of that made in the Spanish Netherlands during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Here, as might be expected from the course of trade, the Venetian influence was early felt, and before long became predominant. In the northern provinces, on the other hand, the old Teutonic traditions, both as to form and material, continued on the whole unchanged to a much later period, so that the glass of the United Provinces will be best dealt with in connection with that of Germany.
Already in the fourteenth century the Venetian galleys brought the glass of Murano to the Flemish ports. In some cases this glass was held worthy of being mounted in silver. A goblet and an aiguière are mentioned in an inventory of 1379 as the property of Charles V. of France. These pieces are indeed described as ‘voirres blants de Flandre’: it is, however, very probable that they came in the first place from Venice.
As early as 1541 Venetian glass-workers were settled at Antwerp, but, as in France, the great invasion took place shortly after the middle of the century. It must be borne in mind that what we know of the wanderings of these gentilshommes de verre from Venice and from L’Altare is derived almost exclusively from the researches of Belgian antiquaries and archivistes. In the already quoted works of Houday, of Pinchart, and above all in the earlier and later letters of the Belgian judge, the President Schuermans, we have a wealth of information. M. Schuermans has traced these Italian glass-workers to Antwerp, to Brussels, to Namur, to Liége, Maestricht and Huy, and in the northern provinces to Bois-le-Duc, Middelburg, Haarlem, and Amsterdam. There was a great rivalry between the Muranese, who on the whole predominated at Antwerp, and the Altarists, whom we find for the most part at Liége: these were the two most important centres. The Low Countries indeed became before long a second home to these Italians, whence they wandered out again to France, England, and Spain.
While at Antwerp the true Venetian cristallo was imported free of duty, the imitations of that glass, the voirre de cristal, à la faschion de Venise, made over the French frontier at Mézières or in Germany, and often difficult to distinguish from the originals, were strictly excluded, and these fiscal regulations were enforced by the most tyrannical measures. The case is well put by Mr. Hartshorne: ‘There were,’ he says, ‘in the Low Countries in the beginning of the seventeenth century, real Venetian glasses imported from Venice, Venetian glasses legally made in the Low Countries, those illegally made, and foreign imitations of Venetian glass’ (Old English Glasses, p. 39). Apart from these varieties of cristallo glass, the old verre de fougère doubtless continued to be manufactured.
Before the end of the sixteenth century, the glass-houses of Antwerp where glass à la façon de Venise was made had acquired a European reputation. They stood quite apart from the other furnaces in France or in the Netherlands where Italians were employed. Lodovico Guicciardini, the historian of the Netherlands, speaks as early as 1567 of the ‘vassella di vetro alla Veneziana’ made in Antwerp, and in the later editions of his work (Descrizione di Tutti Paesi Bassi) some further details are given. The testimony of another Florentine, Neri, from whose little book on glass I have already quoted, is still stronger. It was at Antwerp, he tells us, not at Venice, that he had studied the processes of glass-making.
If Antwerp thus early held a commanding position in Spanish Flanders, in the Walloon country the glass-houses of Liége in the course of the seventeenth century grew to a position of even greater importance. This was due above all to the enterprise of the great firm of the De Bonhommes, who before the end of the century had almost a monopoly of the glass trade in those parts: they even established subsidiary works beyond the frontier in such places as Verdun. They were one of the first on the Continent to see the importance of the new English flint-glass; at all events it is recorded that as early as 1680 they made flint-glass à l’Anglaise,[[177]] and were thus able to withstand the Bohemian[[178]] competition which at that time was carrying everything before it.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Bohemian engraved glass was copied in both the Walloon and Flemish parts of what is now Belgium. Indeed when the latter district fell under Austrian rule early in the eighteenth century, there was naturally a tendency to encourage Bohemian methods of decoration. Specimens of this engraved glass may be seen in the museums of many Belgian towns, but I have seen nothing to equal, in spirit and high finish, the contemporary engraved glass of the United Provinces. As for the earlier cristallo made at Antwerp, say from 1550 to 1650, the difficulty is to distinguish, in the case of the specimens that have survived, the local work from that imported from Venice, and we have evidence that even at the time the native experts could not always do so.[[179]]
I must in conclusion just say one word about a source of information for the sixteenth and seventeenth century glass of the Low Countries which is for the most part wanting in the case of other countries. We have seen how little can be learned from the works of contemporary Venetian painters, of the famous glass of Murano (p. [202]). But in the north it is quite otherwise; not only in the pictures of the still-life painters, but in genre scenes, and sometimes even in paintings of a devotional character, we meet with carefully drawn examples of glass. It thus happens that the works of the Flemish and Dutch painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries throw a great deal of light upon the kinds of glass to be found both in the village alehouses and on the buffets of the wealthy. We can take note of the competition of the old heavy Teutonic forms with the Italian cristallo, a competition which continued in force during all this period.
It is, however, from a work of the Cologne school, from a picture of the early sixteenth century, now in the Louvre, representing the Last Supper,[[180]] that I will take my first example. Here on the table we see a decanter with tall neck, delicately gadrooned, of distinctly Venetian type. The drinking-glasses also are apparently of cristallo of the well-known fifteenth-century form, without stem or knop. The cup of Christ alone has a cover. But there are also on the table several cups or beakers of a deep green glass, studded with small bosses—‘prunted’ glass, in fact, of a pure Teutonic type.