They look valuable and they are. But for all their pretensions, these aristocratic specimens of early Venetian millefiori and 
mosaic work are ancestors of the flower-embedded glass paperweight that adorned grandfather’s desk in post-bellum days. 
Near relatives, too, are the striated marbles, the glassies so much in vogue with the younger set 
THE GLASS of a THOUSAND FLOWERS 
Fascinating Millefiori, Long Ago the Object of the Collector s Enthusiasm, 
Is One of the Latest Fancies of the Modern Connoisseur 
GARDNER TEALL 
Above is shown Venetian millefiori work of early date. The 
Venetian workers, basing their efforts on the models of the 
ancients, far surpassed them in achievement. Venetian glass 
was considered extraordinarily light, and was in particular 
favor and demand on this account 
The millefiori glass of yesterday and today 
offers to the collector a fascinating study. It 
is the “Glass of a Thousand Flowers”, a 
pretty name the Italians gave it centuries ago 
— mille, a thousand, and fori, flowers. 
Don't you remember when you were little, 
very little, the round, heavy glass paperweights 
into which you could look like a crystal gazer 
and find mysteriously embedded flower-like 
forms of colored glass? How you puzzled 
grandfather’s head, too, when you asked him 
questions about it. These old millefiori paper¬ 
weights—long since out of fashion, alas!— 
were bought on faith as curiosities, and only 
the sophisticated age that decreed such marbles 
unfitting the dignity of maturity relegated them 
to hiding places now for the most part for¬ 
gotten. The wonderful striated marbles, the 
attractive “glassies” of our own Golden Age 
maintained with us the tradition of attach¬ 
ment; and now we have once more begun to 
display the paperweights of the Thousand 
Flowers and antiquarians are doing such brisk 
business in them that manufacturers are al¬ 
most encouraged to place on the market again 
these interesting objects of millefiori glass. 
Collectors of Glass 
Since the time when the observing Herodotus 
wrote that the sacred crocodiles of Memphis 
wore earrings of melted stone, the collecting of 
glass has encouraged its finer development. 
The ancient glass workers were proud enough 
to sign fine pieces, though these are excessively 
rare. There was, for instance, “Africanus, 
citizen of Carthage, artist in glass.” Nero was 
an ardent collector of fine pieces of glass, col¬ 
lecting them in his own peculiar manner, as 
It is a bad guess if you call them 
marbles, or sections of tissue, or 
the inside of a kaleidoscope. 
They are two beautiful shallow 
bowls of millefiori glass from the 
hand of skillful Venetian artisans 
It was from the careful study of 
delicate antique bits such as these 
the fine-fingered workers of Ven¬ 
ice derived the inspiration which 
resulted in seven hundred years 
of splendid artistic achievement 
T IME has crumbled many a granite monu¬ 
ment to the memory of monarchs of early 
Egyptian dynasties, but a tiny scent bottle of 
yellow glass, with the name Amenophis worked 
upon it in blue, has come down to us from the 
Golden Age of the Pharaohs. King Ameno¬ 
phis little guessed that his fragile gift at life’s 
parting from Queen Taia would have survived 
the vicissitudes of the unguessed ages that have 
treated his granite pedestal of the Colossus of 
Thebes with such scant courtesy. Yet here 
we may hold it in the palm of a hand, a lovely 
trinket whose fragility has defied the boast of 
bronze or the strength of stone! 
As Pliny says, it is no easy matter to give 
novelty to old subjects, authority to new, to 
impart luster to rusty things, light to the ob¬ 
scure and mysterious. Yet he who writes of 
antiques and curios may find in the subject of 
old glass so wide a field in which to browse 
that its restraints seem few indeed and its in¬ 
terest of broad appeal. 
Excavated near the Appian 
Way—one of those well- 
known roads that lead to 
Rome—this bowl is a price¬ 
less example of the millefiori 
work of classic times. The 
earliest Roman mosaic and 
millefiori glass is, so far as 
our knowledge goes, from the 
reign of .Augustus 
