CHAPTER XVI
THE GLASS OF GERMANY
The Green Glass of the Rhine and the Netherlands—Enamelled Glass
It is as a matter of practical convenience that I have chosen not to make a separate division for the ‘green glass’ of the Dutch of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Not that Holland was in any way dependent on Germany in this matter, but in the case of this, the first of the three main divisions of German glass of which I have to treat in this and the following chapters—the plain or prunted green glass—the produce of the two countries is very similar. Our second group—the family of enamelled glass, so important in Germany—is scarcely represented at all in Holland. On the other hand, in the case of our third group, the Dutch struck out a line of their own. I shall therefore treat of the engraved glass of Holland in a subsequent chapter.
It is remarkable how little is known of the nature of the glass made in Germany before the first half of the sixteenth century, when the Italian influence began to make itself felt. A few insignificant little bowls and some small flasks that have served as reliquaries have been preserved in the treasuries of German churches ([Plate XXI.]), but for our principal source of information we are dependent upon contemporary pictures. Here, however, we soon discover that it is rather to works of the early Netherlandish school that we must turn for information, and that even from this source practically nothing is to be gleaned until about the second quarter of the fifteenth century. What is then found is not of much note, small tumbler-like vessels for the most part, of thick greenish glass decorated with threadings or studs, the latter more or less of the nature of prunts. There is, however, one fifteenth-century form which is of some interest: the metal-mounted wooden cups of mazer-like form, in use at that time appear to have been copied in glass; these may be recognised by their peculiar stunted and sometimes coiled handles.[[184]]
These somewhat primitive vessels of the fifteenth century are of interest as leading the way to the first important division of German glass, the ‘Green Glass’ of Western Germany and the Netherlands.[[185]] It is worthy of note that this family of glass, essentially of local origin not only as regards the nature of the metal but also in respect of the shape and the method of decoration, only reached its full development in the course of the sixteenth century, at a time when the new cristallo was being made by Italian workmen in the same district. There must have been something like a conscious reaction in favour of the native forms and materials. As to the pronounced green colour, we know that this was held to enhance the flavour of the wine drunk from the glass; as far back as the early sixteenth century, iron and copper scale were purposely added to supplement the pale tint given by the iron contained in the impure native potash (Mathesius, Sarepta, cxciv.).
In the decoration of this green glass recourse was had to the old methods of threading, but above all to the more or less circular projections or bosses of varied forms that are found scattered over the sides. These are technically known as ‘prunts’—the nuppen of the Germans. We have had something to say of one special form of these protuberances when describing the glass of the Anglo-Saxons.[[186]] These prunts fall into two groups: the stechel-nuppen or thorned prunts, of which the old Franco-Saxon form is an extreme type; and the beeren-nuppen or berry prunts, derived possibly in the first case from the moulded reliefs of bunches of grapes that we find so often on Roman glass. A third group might perhaps be made for another classical form where the projections take the shape of a medallion—a head stamped on the surface of the prunt while it is still soft.
These nuppen had a practical use,—so Mathesius, a contemporary writer, tells us.[[187]] They were to prevent the glass from slipping between the fingers of the drinker. With a similar object—for the insertion of the fingers in this case—these prunts are sometimes reversed, forming deep pits in the sides of the vessel. There is a late example of this form at South Kensington and another in the British Museum. The stechel-nuppen may assume less aggressive forms; the points may be smoothed down while the metal is soft, and we then have merely a series of disc-like thickenings on the sides of the glass. By this means, as in the more refined Dutch roemer of the seventeenth century, effects of great beauty, due to the varying transparency of the glass, were obtained.
In colour this Rhenish glass may vary from a greenish-blue to a pale bottle-green, or again to a deep, almost black, tint of olive-green or violet. It is from glass of this description that the pale-coloured wines of the country have been drunk, perhaps without break, from late Roman times. This it is, as well as the fact that it has never been decorated with enamel, and rarely, in Germany at least, by the wheel or with the diamond, that has given to the green prunted glass of this family a position apart. I have called this glass Rhenish, inasmuch as the centre of the manufacture seems to have been around Cologne, whence some of it found its way down the river to the Low Countries, along with the wine that was drunk from it; but much green glass was, we know, made also in the Netherlands.
From the cultur-historisch point of view, perhaps the most striking claim to attention of this family of German glass lies in the fact that here we come across the one original and artistic form of wine-glass that has been developed in modern times—apart, that is, from the stemmed glass of Italian origin, about which there will be a good deal to say in a future chapter. The typical roemer—for this of course is the glass of which I am speaking—consists of three parts: a bowl of ovoid outline, shaped like the flower of a tulip; a hollow cylindrical stem, studded with mulberry-like prunts (often flattened out to discs); and a hollow conical foot, formed by coiling a rope of glass round a core of wood ([Plate XXXVII.]). Here we have the roemer in the fully developed form of the seventeenth century, as we see it in fact in the still-life pictures of the Dutch painters of the time, or again—this time in actual use—in the marksmen’s banquets (schuttersmaaltyd) of Van der Helst and Frans Hals. In the earlier forms, however, the foot is either entirely missing or is present only as a zig-zag or toothed ring of glass applied to the base of the stem. In these early examples again the broad hollow stem is not divided from the bowl by a diaphragm of glass, but forms an integral part of the cup.[[188]] On the other hand, before the end of the seventeenth century the cylindrical stem was more and more encroached upon by the spun-foot, while the coiled threading with which in earlier days the conical foot was entirely built up was, in late examples, twisted round a glass support so as to become a mere ornament[[189]] (Czihak, Schlesische Gläser, pp. 75 seq., and Hartshorne, English Glasses, pp. 66 seq.).
