In Southern Germany the Venetian influence was not only more early felt, but, what is of greater importance, it continued in play for a longer time, being continually renewed by fresh importations of the Italian glass. The art-loving dukes of Bavaria, Albrecht V. and his successor Wilhelm V., in the second half of the sixteenth century, did much to promote the manufacture of glass on improved methods. Strangely enough, however, we find that it was from Antwerp, not from Italy, that the assistance came in the first case; and it was to compete with Italian glass imported from Venice by way of Antwerp that Bernhart Schwarz, a glass-maker of the latter town, erected a furnace—at Landshut, on the Isar. Scarpaggiato, the Venetian, who came later, was engaged, in the first place, to make window-glass and mirrors. He is stated, however, to have been a master of the art of making vasi a reticelli and a ritorti of both white and coloured glass.
At Hall, near Innsbruck, some remarkable imitations of Venetian glass were made in the third quarter of the sixteenth century. In the Imperial Museum at Vienna there are many specimens of this Tyrolese glass, much of it scratched with the diamond and heavily gilt. There may be seen a goblet made by the art-loving Archduke Ferdinand, the husband of Philippine Welser.
As I have already said, it was in the towns of South Germany—Swabian and Ducal Bavarian—as well as in Switzerland, that the new art of painting window-glass with enamel colours was carried to the highest perfection, and we can trace the influence of this school of painters upon the decoration of the enamelled beakers preserved in the museums of Zürich, Munich, Augsburg, and other South German and Swiss cities. But it is to the Franconian Nuremberg, which, though further to the north, fell under the same influences, that we must turn to find the most brilliant work of this southern school. Here we come upon the family of the Hirschvogels, so many of whom during the course of the seventeenth century were famed as designers of glass for windows, and we have evidence from documents that have been preserved that the younger members at least of the family painted on drinking-glasses with enamel colours (Friedrich, Alt-Deutsche Gläser, p. 157).
It is chiefly on the ground of the coats-of-arms found on a few examples that we are enabled to attribute to Nuremberg artists a variety of enamelled glass which differs in many respects from the heavily painted humpen and pass glasses of which I have been speaking. In the British Museum may be seen certain tall cylindrical beakers which may be taken as examples of this South German glass. The metal is colourless but somewhat grey, and, as in the northern glasses, a delicate scale pattern of gold with scattered pearls of enamel forms a ring below the upper margin. But now we find the gold used freely in the rest of the decoration also, replacing the coarse yellow enamel of the northern beakers. The colours are purer and more effectively combined, and we see among them a green of good quality. In the case of the two beakers from the Slade collection in the British Museum, the figure of Jacob Praun on one glass, on the other that of his wife, stand detached in the field; there is no other decoration apart from the heraldic bearings of this Nuremberg family (these are on the other side of the glass) and the above-mentioned gold band. I may add that the Nuremberg enamellers showed a superlative skill in the treatment of these elaborate coats-of-arms backed with fluttering mantlings.
Of the larger humpen and pass glasses painted with allegorical or sometimes comic subjects, we have no good examples in our English collections. A beaker in the Germanic Museum at Nuremberg, showing the ten ages of man in as many compartments, is an exceptionally good example of such work. The drawing and composition of the subjects on these larger South German glasses are carefully carried out—the colouring, however, is generally poor; in the later examples, indeed, it tends to pass over to the monochrome or grisaille class, of which I must say a word before finishing with these enamelled wares.
The school of grisaille painters on drinking-glasses, founded towards the middle of the seventeenth century by Johann Schaper, is in many ways closely associated with the contemporary engravers on glass. Like the latter, the grisaille painters followed the pseudo-classical, the ‘Italianising’ style, rather than the old German traditions. Schaper, who came from Harburg on the Elbe, settled in Nuremberg in 1640, and died there in 1670. His manner of work, founded on copper-plate engravings, was much admired at the time, and he is in the next century mentioned among the famous artists of Nuremberg by Doppelmayr in his Nachricht von den Nürnbergischen Künstlern. Schaper, he says, ‘auf die Trinkgläser ... gar delicat mahlte,’ burning in his work afterwards so successfully that he surpassed all his contemporaries. He painted—round the sides of small tumblers and wine-glasses, for the most part—landscapes, figures, and heraldic bearings, either in black or a warm sepia, signing his work with his initials. There are some small examples of the glass enamelled by him at South Kensington. The large goblet in the British Museum (Slade, No. 860), painted with a cavalry combat, is of a considerably later date, but it shows that Schaper’s influence continued into the eighteenth century; in this case, however, the grisaille is heightened in places by touches of colour. The tall pass-glass (Slade, No. 859), painted with an elaborate procession celebrating the birth of a Bavarian prince, belongs, on the other hand, to quite another school. It is dated 1662, and Schaper’s influence had probably not reached Munich by that time.
Painted and Gilt Glass
Before passing on to the many-sided subject of engraved and cut glass, a word must be said of certain applications to glass of painting and gilding which were much in favour in Germany in the seventeenth century. I have here to deal with a miscellaneous class of objects; indeed the chief connecting-link between them is the fact that the decoration is in no case fixed by fire.
Single sheets of glass may be simply painted at the back, and ‘fixed’ by means of a transparent varnish. Such plates, painted with Biblical or allegorical subjects, may be seen let into the panels of the elaborately carved and inlaid cabinets of the time. It cannot be said that the effect of this pausch glas Malerei, as it is sometimes called in Germany, is very satisfactory. It is indeed merely a debased variety of what used to be known in France as verre églomisé; the term fixé peint has also been used for work of this kind.
The gilding that was so plentifully applied to the German engraved glass of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was fixed by a ‘cold’ process, by simply attaching the gold-leaf by means of a varnish. For the most part it is only when applied to the sunk part of an incavo decoration that this gilding has survived.