Footnotes:
[103] “Jam vero et per Gallias Hispaniasque simili modo harenæ temperantur.”—Pliny, Bk. xxxvi; Chap. 66.
The chief centres of glass-making were Tarragona, several towns of Betica (Andalusia), and the Balearic Islands.
[104] The distinction which Riaño attempts to draw between glass and glass paste is unsatisfactory. He remarks, too, that the manufacture of glass may have existed in Spain at an earlier period than the last three centuries, but continues: “The earliest mention of glass-works in Spain will be found in Pliny, who, while explaining the proceedings which were employed in this industry, says that glass was made in a similar manner in France and Spain.”
[105] Rico y Sinobas, Del Vidrio y de sus artifices en España (Almanaque del Museo de la Industria, 1870).
[106] Oliver, Granada y sus monumentos árabes.
[107] The inventory (a.d. 1560) of the Dukes of Alburquerque mentions “a white box with four small bottles of Valencia glass containing ointment for the hands.” Other objects specified in this inventory are “a large glass cup, with two lizards for handles, and two more lizards on the cover”; “three glass cocoanuts, partly coloured and with gold blown into them, together with their covers”; and “a large glass cup, of Barcelona, blown with gold.” The value of these cups, if they existed now, would not be less than two or three hundred pounds apiece.
[108] Before this time, however, Aymerich had written, in or about the year 1100, that sixty large windows in Santiago cathedral were closed by glass, which probably was coloured. We also hear of Francisco Socoma, who made or fitted windows of coloured glass at Palma, in the island of Majorca, in 1380, and of Guillermo de Collivella, who, in 1391, fitted at Lerida the glass which had been coloured for the cathedral of that town by Juan de San-Amat.
[109] Documentos Inéditos para la Historia de las Bellas Artes en España, p. 282 et seq.
[110] In the monastery of Miraflores, near this city, the queen of Ferdinand the Catholic built, at her expense, a rich pantheon to guard the ashes of her parents and her brother. The coloured glass was made by Simon of Cologne. One day, while visiting Miraflores, Isabella noticed upon the windows of this sanctuary the shield of a gentleman named Martin de Soria. Furious at the liberty thus taken with a fabric of her own, “afferte mihi gladium” she called in Latin to one of her attendants, and, raising the sword, dashed the offending window into a thousand pieces, crying that in that spot she would allow no arms but those of her father.