should be noted that there is much—one may well say quantities—of modern maiolica to be found in the shops. Much of this is very beautiful, but the collector will soon have no trouble in distinguishing it from the old, even when the modern happens to reproduce the forms and designs of the early pieces.
CHAPTER XXVII
GLASS OF A THOUSAND FLOWERS
TIME has crumbled many a granite monument erected to the memory of monarchs of early Egyptian dynasties, but a tiny scent-bottle of yellow glass, with the name Amenophis worked upon it in blue, has come down to us from the Golden Age of the Pharaohs. King Amenophis little guessed that his fragile gift at life’s parting from his Queen Thi would survive the vicissitudes of the unguessed ages that have treated the pedestal of his Colossus at Thebes with such scant courtesy. Yet here we may hold it in the palm of a hand, a lovely trinket whose fragility has defied the boast of bronze or the strength of stone! As Pliny says, it is no easy matter to give novelty to old subjects, authority to new, to impart lustre to rusty things, light to the obscure and mysterious. Yet he who writes of antiques and curios may find the subject of old glass so wide a field in which to browse that its restraints seem few indeed and its interest of broad appeal.
The millefiori glass of yesterday and to-day offers to the collector a fascinating study. It is the “Glass of a Thousand Flowers,” a pretty name the Italians gave it centuries ago—mille, a thousand, and fiori, flowers. Don’t you remember when you were little, very little, the round, heavy glass paper-weights into which you could look like a crystal-gazer and find mysteriously embedded flower-like forms of colored glass? How you puzzled grandfather’s head, too, when you asked him questions about it. These old millefiori paper-weights—long out of fashion, alas!—were bought on faith as curiosities, and only the sophisticated age that decreed such marvels unfitting the dignity of maturity relegated them to hiding-places now for the most part forgotten. The wonderful striated marbles, the attractive “glassies” of our own Golden Age, maintained with us the tradition of attachment; and now we have once more begun to display the paper-weights of the Thousand Flowers, and antiquarians are doing such brisk business in them that manufacturers are almost encouraged to place on the market again these interesting objects of millefiori glass.
Since the time when the observing Herodotus wrote that the sacred crocodiles of Memphis wore ear-rings of melted stone, the collecting of glass has encouraged its finer development. The ancient glass-workers were proud enough to sign fine pieces, though these are excessively rare. There was, for instance, “Africanus, citizen of Carthage, artist in glass.” Nero was an ardent collector of fine pieces of glass, collecting them in his own peculiar manner, as we may infer from such anecdotes as that which has already been related of Petronius having broken a precious bowl (probably of murrhine) to atoms just before his death, to prevent the possibility of its falling into the grasp of the Emperor. So greatly was it prized at the time that its value had been placed at a sum now equivalent to $250,000! The very high prices paid to-day by museums for bits of antique glass are very likely to be far less than the same objects brought in Roman times; this, of course, refers only to glass of high artistic quality, such as would have commanded the attention of connoisseurs contemporary with its product.
“Who,” says Dr. Johnson in “The Rambler,” “when he saw the first sand or ashes by a casual intenseness of heat melted into metallic form, rugged with excrescences and crowded with impurities, would have imagined that in the shapeless lump lay concealed so many conveniences of life as would in time constitute a great part of the happiness of the world? Thus was the first artificer of glass occupied, though without his own knowledge or expectation. He was facilitating and prolonging enjoyment of light, enlarging the avenues of science and conferring the highest and most lasting pleasure; he was enabling the student to contemplate nature and the beauty to behold herself.”
We need not go into the early history of glass here, more than to say the ancients were highly skilled in the making of mosaic and millefiori glass, their products inspiring the millefiori glass of the Venetians and their followers in Europe and America. One cannot do better than to quote here M. A. Wallace-Dunlop’s “Glass in the Old World,” a most interesting and instructive work, unfortunately long out of print. In this volume the author says:
No method of glass working has probably excited more attention than the wonderfully minute mosaics found scattered over the world both in beads and amulets. Old writers have exhausted their ingenuity in conjecturing the secret of their manufacture. Many of them are far too minute for human eyes to have executed, but like many other marvels the explanation is simple when once discovered. They were made (and are now successfully imitated in Murano) by arranging long slender glass rods of various colors so as to form a pattern, a picture, or the letters of a name, and then fusing them together and while still warm the rod or cane so formed could be drawn out to almost any length, the pattern becoming perhaps microscopically small, but always retaining its distinctiveness. A tube of glass treated in the same manner never loses a minute hole in the middle. Thin slices cut off such a rod would present on each side (face) the exact picture (just as the pattern appears when slicing a cucumber) or pattern originally arranged. When this idea had been once suggested, thousands of patterns could have been invented, and slices from these rods placed in liquid blue or other colored glass, and cast in a mould and ground into shape, gave rise to the endless combinations of Greek or Roman workers—The Millefiori glass of the Venetian republic was simply a revival of this old industry.... Under the Ptolemies the Egyptians acquired a rare perfection in mosaic! We have, so far as I know, no Roman mosaic or millefiori glass antedating the reign of Augustus. It is in the Augustan age that we first learn the name of a mosaic glass artist, Proculus of Perinthus, to whom the Alexandrian merchants erected a statue.