This favour granted to glass jewelry proceeded from the immense trade in it carried on by Venice at that period, and the government was careful in no way to check a branch of industry which extended its relations in Africa and Asia, and consequently favoured the extension of its navy, upon which depended the increase of the power of the republic.
The Venetian glass-makers were soon engaged almost exclusively in this branch of its manufacture, a circumstance which may be accounted for as follows: About 1250, a Venetian Matteo Polo and his brother Niccolo, father of the celebrated Marco Polo, were attracted by commercial views to Constantinople. In 1256 they both visited the khan of Tatary, who inhabited the banks of the Volga. War having obliged them to leave the states of Bereke,[19] in which they had been stopping, they passed on to Bokhara, to the south of the Caspian Sea, and afterwards proceeded to the court of Kublai, great khan of the Tatars, whose sovereignty extended over the greater part of Asia. On their return to their own country, after twenty years’ absence, they found Marco Polo, whom they had left in the cradle. Their narrations inflamed the imagination of the young man, who desired to accompany his father and uncle in a new journey, on which they set out. Marco Polo went with them in 1271. In 1274 he arrived at the court of Kublai-Khan, attached himself to the service of that monarch, became governor of one of his provinces, and was trusted by him with the most important missions.
Extensive travels, and the duties of his high station, filled up the best years of Marco Polo’s life. On returning to Venice, in 1295, after having explored the greater part of Central Asia, the shores and islands of the Indian Ocean, and those of the Persian Gulf, he pointed out to his fellow-citizens, whose intrepidity as navigators was equal to their love of enterprise as merchants, the routes they must follow to spread the productions of European industry over Tatary, India, and even as far as China; he described the manners of the people who inhabited these immense regions, and their extraordinary predilection for beads, coloured stones, and jewels of every description, with which they were fond of adorning their persons and of decorating their garments. Nothing more was needed to excite the industrial and mercantile spirit of the Venetians. The glass-makers particularly devoted themselves more zealously than ever to the manufacture of beads and glass jewels (arte del margaritaio, arte del perlaio), a manufacture which, from that time, formed a totally distinct branch from that of glass vessels (fabbriche di vassellami o recipiendi di vetro e cristallo). The names of Cristoforo Briani and of Domenico Miotto have been handed down to us as having been the inventors of coloured beads (margarite), and as having also been the first glass-makers who turned their attention to the imitation of precious stones.
This Miotto having been successful in a large speculation he had made at Bassora, almost all the Venetian glass-makers applied themselves to the manufacture of these objects, which were soon dispersed over Egypt, Ethiopia, and Abyssinia, along the coasts of North Africa, over central Asia, India, and even as far as China.
This commercial movement would necessarily retard during the course of the fourteenth century, any progress in the manufacture of glass vessels; in fact, all the information existing upon the glass-making of Venice at this period refers for the most part only to the making of the margarite, which were a source of such commercial advantages to the republic. Carlo Marino quotes a document from which it appears that a certain Andolo de Savignon, Genoese ambassador at the court of the emperor of China, obtained from the great council full powers to export this same glass jewellery to a very considerable amount. We learn also, from the inventories of the fourteenth century, that at that period richly ornamented vases of glass were still obtained from the East. Yet the manufacturers of glass vessels were already endeavouring to procure the documents most needed for the improvement of their productions. The learned Morelli has given an extract from a manuscript contained in the Naniana library, and dating from the fourteenth century, which gives an account of the processes employed by the Greeks for rendering glass colourless and spotless, for gilding and staining it, and for covering it with paintings.
The invasion of the Eastern Empire by the Turks, and the taking of Constantinople in 1453, which occasioned the immigration of so many artists into Italy, was beneficial to glass-making, as well as to the other industrial arts. To date from the fifteenth century, we find the manufacture of glass vessels taking a new direction. The Venetian glass-makers borrowed from the Greeks all their processes for colouring, gilding, and enamelling glass; and the Renaissance having restored a taste for the fine forms of antiquity, the art of glass-making followed the movement given by the great artists at that period who rendered Italy illustrious; and vases were produced in no wise inferior in form to those bequeathed by antiquity. Coccius Sabellicus,[k] a Venetian historian of the fifteenth century, affords us evidence of the admiration excited in his time by the beautiful and varied productions of the Venetian glass manufactories.
At the end of the fifteenth century, or rather in the first years of the sixteenth, the Venetian glass-makers distinguished themselves by a new invention, that of vases enriched with filagrees of glass, either white or coloured, which twisted themselves into a thousand varied patterns, and appeared as if encrusted in the middle of the paste of the colourless and transparent crystal. This invention, which, while it enriched the vases with an indestructible ornamentation, preserved at the same time their light and graceful forms, gave a new impulse to the manufactories of glassware, and caused their beautiful productions to be even more sought after by every nation of Europe. Accordingly the Venetian government used every possible precaution to prevent the secret of this new manufacture from being discovered, or Venetian workmen from carrying away this branch of industry to other nations.
Already, in the thirteenth century, a decree of the great council had prohibited the exportation, without the authority of the state, of the principal materials used in the composition of glass. On the 13th of February, 1490, the superintendence of the manufactories of Murano was intrusted to the chief of the Council of Ten, and, on the 27th of October, 1547, the council reserved to itself the care of watching over the manufactories to prevent the art of glass-making from being carried abroad. Yet all these precautions did not appear to have been sufficient, and the inquisition of the state, in the twenty-sixth article of its statutes, announced the following decision: “If a workman transport his art into a foreign country to the injury of the republic, a message shall be sent to him to return; if he does not obey, the persons most nearly related to him shall be put into prison. If, notwithstanding the imprisonment of his relatives, he persists in remaining abroad, an emissary shall be commissioned to put him to death.” M. Daru, who, in his Histoire de la république de Venise, has given us the text of this decree, which he had copied from the archives of the republic, adds that, in a document deposited in the archives of foreign affairs, two instances were recorded of the execution of this punishment on some workmen whom the emperor Leopold had enticed into his states.
If the government of Venice thought it needful, on the one hand, to display all its severity against the glass-makers who should thus betray the interests of their country, it, on the other hand, loaded with favours those who remained faithful to its service, and great privileges were accorded to the island of Murano. From the thirteenth century, the inhabitants of Murano, for instance, obtained the rights of citizens of Venice, which rendered them admissible to all the high offices of the state.[i]