The Story of Glass

by Sara Ware Bassett

"Ah, we build not that way here, señorita," he said. "Three centuries did our people spend in building into St. Mark's the marble carvings brought from the East; erecting the altars; and adorning the walls. These mosaics alone it took workmen two hundred and fifty years to fashion. Venice was a rich Republic, you see, and could well afford to put into this cathedral the money she might have spent on war. Above the slabs of marble are the mosaics, señorita. So it was in St. Sofia, my father told me; the slabs of marble near the ground and the decoration above. This whole cathedral of ours is covered on all the walls with mosaics—pictures made from bits of glass put together to form scenes from the Bible or from history. Even the most ignorant people who had had no schooling could read such stories, could they not?"

Jean nodded.

She was dazzled by the beauty of the place—by the soft light; the walls rich in gold and color; by the many wonderful things there were to be seen. She was interested, too, in the smoothly worn, uneven floor which showed where the piles beneath the church had settled.

"Mosaic makers, you know, Jean, began crude attempts at making pictures in glass thousands of years ago, for glass-making was familiar to the Egyptians as well as to the Phœnicans and Syrians. The Greeks and Romans, too, were great glass-makers. So glass-making came down through the ages. The Byzantine churches usually were lighted by a row of tiny glass windows round the base of the dome. Some of this ancient glass still remains in St. Sofia. The common way of making such windows was to cut a design in a slab of marble or plaster, and then insert small pieces of colored glass. Sometimes, too, a pattern for wall decoration was worked out by sticking fragments of glass into soft stucco. So the first mosaic work began. We can see some of it in the museums of England."

"There seems to be a great deal to see in those London museums, Uncle Bob," Jean gasped.

"I am afraid you will be more convinced of that fact than ever when you get there," chuckled Uncle Bob. "But to return to Giusippe's mosaics. You may remember, perhaps, that when the Mohammedans invaded Constantinople and found how important a part the glass-makers played in decorating the churches, they at once handed the artisans over to the caliphs, that they might be set to work adorning their mosques. Now the Mohammedans believed it a crime to make a copy of either man or woman in a picture, a carving, or a statue. It was punishable to pay reverence to sacred figures; therefore all decoration in their churches took the form of flowers, fruit, or conventional designs. So no great mosaic pictures with figures such as these were made. Between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Damascus became the center of glass-making, and there are in existence in some of the museums old Arab lamps which hung in the mosques with inscriptions from the Koran engraved upon them. It is Giusippe's St. Mark's which revived the art of mosaic making, and served as the bridge between those Pagan days and the days when with Christianity the arts revived and mosaic makers began to represent in glass figures of Christ and the saints."

"And then the painters came, as Giusippe has said," put in Jean.

"Yes, the great artists were born, and from that time pictures on canvas instead of pictures of glass decorated the churches. But the mosaic makers did an important service to art, for it was they who indirectly gave to the world the idea of making stained-glass windows. And in Venice those who ceased to make mosaics made instead the beautiful Venetian glass of which Giusippe has told us."

"And are there no mosaics made now, Uncle Bob?" asked Jean.

"Yes. When in 1858 it became necessary to restore some of the mosaics in St. Mark's, a descendant of one of the old Murano glass workers named Radi, together with a Dr. Salviati, started a factory on the Grand Canal, where they gradually revived some of the past glory of Venice. They copied the old time glass products, making Arab lamps such as hung in the mosques; cameo work similar to the Naples and Portland vases; and pictures in mosaic. It was they who did The Last Supper for Westminster Abbey, and the mosaics for Albert Memorial Hall in London."