Glass

I. SYRIAN OR VENETIAN GLASS. Enamelled Beaker of slightly greenish glass with a few elongated bubbles. (H. 7-1/2 in.) The Virgin and Child enthroned between conventional lilies;...

Glass is a substance in so many ways connected with the conveniences and amenities of our daily life, and the word calls up so many varied associations, that I must here at the...

The first of these, one more especially of archæological interest, would include all the glass made before the discovery of the process of forming a vesicle by blowing through a...

So far, all the glass with which we have come in contact has belonged without exception to one family; small objects, generally brightly coloured—beads, ornaments of various kin...

It is after all in the development of the art of blowing glass that the principal merit of the glass-workers, in the age immediately preceding our era, is to be found. By this m...

The vague and indefinite use of the terms ‘Byzantine Period’ and ‘Byzantine Art’ has been the cause of much confusion in many branches of history, and nowhere more than in the h...

We must now turn to the Germanic tribes of the north. Thanks to the late conversion of these tribes to Christianity, we have in the objects found in their graves a comparatively...

In a general way, it may be said of the Oriental glass that penetrated into Europe in the early Middle Ages, that the type is given by carvings in rock crystal. We can point to...

One of the chief glories of the later Middle Ages in Western Europe is undoubtedly to be found in the stained glass windows of the churches. Theophilus early in the twelfth cent...

I have here to deal with a singularly restricted family of glass—that made in the Saracenic East during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. This enamelled glass...

Of the ‘Goblet of the Eight Priests,’ now in the museum at Douai (figured in Gerspach, p. 107), we have an earlier record than in other cases. It was bequeathed by one Marguerit...

Before taking up the subject of Venetian glass, it will be well to say something of another early Italian centre of the industry. It is only of recent years that the important p...

In the fourteenth century, as we have seen, the Venetian galleys brought glass ware to the ports of England and the Netherlands. M. de Laborde (_Les Ducs de Bourgogne_) found in...

The history of modern glass begins, as I have said, with the famous Venetian _cristallo_ of the sixteenth century. Many other varieties were made at this time, but it was the ab...

In the history of European glass the culminating point is perhaps reached in the Venetian glass of the first half of the sixteenth century—I am speaking, of course, from the art...

Before going on to speak of the glass made in Spain, it will be well to say a few words of that made in the Spanish Netherlands during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

It is as a matter of practical convenience that I have chosen not to make a separate division for the ‘green glass’ of the Dutch of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Not...

I have still to describe the origin and development of a method of decorating the surface which forms, I may almost say, the last main division in the artistic history of glass....

In Holland the War of Independence does not seem to have interfered with the work of the glass furnaces already established in several of the towns by Altarists or Venetians. M....

In an English work treating of glass, or rather of certain descriptions of glass, and that chiefly from the artistic point of view, what position in the book and what relative a...

We may probably regard the reign of William III. as the turning-point in the history of our English glass as in so many other of our minor arts. It is to that period that one mu...

I shall now devote a short chapter to the glass made in Asia, that is to say in Persia, in India, and in China, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The history of glass in the nineteenth century is mainly concerned with improvements in mechanical processes, by means of which it is now possible to turn out a perfectly clear...