The building of St. Mark’s in Venice, begun in 1159, gave impetus to Italian glass manufacture. With the fall of Constantinople nearly a half-century later, many Greeks, skilled artists in glass, undoubtedly made their way to Venice and took thither the secrets of their trade. Certain it is that the early glass-workers of Venice and of Murano, where later the glass industry centered, gave curious and interested study to the old mosaics of the ancients and in due course rediscovered the art of millefiori and perfected it in a manner that would have caused the Romans to open their eyes in astonishment. We must not forget that with the ancients a crystalline glass was of great rarity, though colored glass was common enough. Thus the crystalline products of the Venetians were an achievement reserved for later centuries, and this white glass, in combination with the colored glasses was so skilfully employed by the workmen and artists of the Murano glass factories that nothing has surpassed the Venetian products in millefiori for sheer ingenuity and beauty. Often, of course, millefiori work was carried to the extreme of becoming less a thing of beauty than a tour de force. However, the collector will find interest in all pieces of the sort, and their range was enormous. The glass of Venice was famous for its extraordinary lightness and this added to its vogue. The Chaplain of Louis XIV, Réné François, amusingly warned the world that Murano was filling Europe with its fantasies of glass; but rare enough are the early specimens of Venetian manufacture, more precious now than their weight in gold.
After all, there must always remain the zest of the chase in the spirit of the true collector, without which wonderful finds would never have been made, though we need not to go to the extent of the Countess of Fiesque, a lady of Louis XIV’s court. This lady died at Fontainebleau in great poverty at an advanced age. Historians of the gossip of the day have laid her indigent circumstances at the door of the rascally man of business, but I fancy her passion for mirrors had something to do with it. When almost in need of bread she astonished her friends by purchasing an enormously expensive mirror. “I had a piece of land,” she said in extenuation, “which brought me in nothing but corn. I sold it, and the money procured this mirror. Have I not managed wonderfully to possess this beautiful glass instead of dull corn?” Doubtless the countess did manage wonderfully; contentment is a great thing!
Seven hundred years of glass-making in Venice produced an experience that was useful to the rest of Europe and finally to America. Much millefiore glass has been manufactured in the United States. The Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia is especially rich in examples of it. There are also many private collectors of millefiore glass in this country, some collecting specimens in general, others confining themselves to examples of American manufacture, while others specialize in millefiore paper-weights already referred to. The late Dr. Edwin Atlee Barber, a noted authority on American glass, gave in the Pennsylvania Museum Bulletin the following information concerning the process of its making:
The glass rods used in the preparation of modern millefiori glass are usually made in metal moulds of comparatively large size. The interior may be circular or scalloped. Into one of these moulds ropes of colored glass are arranged in the pattern desired, to which, when taken out, two workmen attach iron rods, one at each end of the mass, and draw it out until it is of the requisite slenderness. The design retains its exact proportions through the entire length and is as perfect in a rod of an eighth of an inch diameter as in the original thick cylinder. If an animal is to be represented the mould is cut into the exact shape and when the glass is released and drawn out each detail of legs, tail, ears and other parts is uniformly reproduced in solid color so that even in the tiniest representation of the figure every part appears to be perfectly formed. Sometimes a cane will be composed of many threads of various colors and designs, each of which has been formed in this manner, arranged around a central rod and welded together. When the rods are finished they are broken into small pieces, or cut into uniform lengths or into thin slices, according to the sort of paper-weights or other objects to be made. Into an iron ring the size of a paperweight a cushion of molten glass is dropped and while soft, the sections of rods are laid on the surface or stuck in it side by side in a regular pattern, the tops of the rods being pressed into a rounded or convex form. Over all more of the melted glass is poured and the surface rounded into hemispherical shape by means of concave spatula of moistened wood. The last process consists in polishing the surface of the curved top and the flat base after the ball has been again heated.
Dr. Barber was authority for the statement that the millefiore paper-weights found their way into America from St. Louis in Alsace-Lorraine (first to produce paper-weights of the sort, circa 1840) and from Baccarat in France. To the manufactories of the latter town we look for the finest of the European millefiore paper-weights. At first the filigree rods, cut or uncut, were imported; but soon American glass-workers turned their attention to the complete production, and we may mark the period of 1860 to 1875 as that of the heyday of American-made millefiori glass.
It must not be thought that all the American millefiori glass has been picked up or picked over; there is much of it remaining to reward vigilant search and the collector will find it well worth going after. Out-of-the-way villages in the East and South still secrete many such pieces, and so does the householder of the Middle West; while one finds Pacific-ward examples of the old Glass of a Thousand Flowers that had so great a popularity before the Centennial turned the country to fresh ingenuities.
CHAPTER XXVIII
ANTIQUES OF PERSIA AND OF INDIA
ONCE upon a time an old gentleman moved into the house across the street. Whence he came no one knew, no one ever came to know. His name was Kyttyle—Major Kyttyle. As midsummer marked his advent, he probably felt properly attired when he appeared on the lawn that first day, to survey his new domain, in a basket-shaped hat of straw and a suit of East-India-looking stuff. Major Kyttyle’s face was seamed and bronzed. I imagine his hair would have been as white as the snows of Dhawalaghiri had it not been as extinct as the Hippuritidæ, revealing a shining pink dome as reflecting as the pool of Anuradhapura at sunset, visible as now and then he would lift his hat to mop his brow.
Major Kyttyle’s installation was followed by the arrival of countless foreign-looking trunks and boxes and the neighborhood naturally wondered what on earth the major had in them. Mrs. Minch was of the opinion that a lone man could have no use for such a lot of truck. Mrs. Bittles ventured the opinion that Major Kyttyle might not be so “lone” after all; he might have a family and it might arrive later. “Families” usually did. Mrs. Minch only sniffed. “I can tell a bachelor anywhere,” she declared with conviction. And she could.
However, although no family came upon the scene, a whole menagerie arrived one by one, from distant parts, to keep the major company and to scandalize the town. There was a pet monkey, a poll parrot, a Persian cat, and a globe of diaphanous-tailed goldfish the like of which had never been dreamed of thereabouts and which quite put to rout the two gilded minnows owned by the Pickhams, which till then had been the only exotics in the district and had lent a certain distinction to the Pickhams to which, socially, their breeding did not entitle them.