The subject of the typical forms of vessels is very clearly illustrated in Meyer's "Handbook of Ornament," to which I may refer the student who wishes to pursue the subject further.
GERMAN BEER MUGS.
On the subject of bottles, however, I will just refer to a curious correspondence in design motive in two different materials.
ITALIAN FLASKS & BOTTLE.
The ordinary Italian oil or wine flask is one of the most charming of modern useful vessels. It is simply a piece of blown glass of the form first assumed by the molten glass when blown at the end of the glass-worker's tube. To make this primitive but elegant bottle portable and enable it to stand, it is bound around by a twist of rushes, or cane leaves twisted into a circular stand, and braced by vertical broader bands of the untwisted leaf at intervals, and a loop of the twist is twined around the neck, and left free to hang up or carry the vessel in. The whole is both highly practical and picturesque.
This is a type of Venetian glass bottle or decanter highly ornamented, in which the fundamental motive or idea of the protecting binding of rushes seems to be followed in glass. The melon-like divisions are defined by strings of raised glass laid on the surface, while the panels between are engraved in arabesques of leaves and birds, and the whole forms a very pretty piece of ornate glass design. (See illustration, p. 83.)
Here we have another instance of decorative motive derived from useful function, and of the adaptation in one material of a suggestion derived from another, though applied to the same type of form.
I have not mentioned the plate or dish type of vessel, which has on the whole, perhaps, received the most attention from the decorator of surfaces, perhaps on account of the more pictorial conditions its functional form presents.