January, 1 9 1 S 
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The Venetians added to the colored glass effects of the ancients the discovery of crystalline white glass, and marvelously 
combined the two in many a piece of veined and variegated loveliness. Some of the examples reproduced here offer con¬ 
vincing proof that the result well deserves its charming appellation of “The Glass of a Thousand Flowers” 
we may infer from such anecdotes as that 
wherein Petronius is chronicled as having 
broken a precious bowl of murrhine to atoms 
just before his death, to prevent the possi¬ 
bility of its falling into the grasp of Nero. So 
greatly was it prized at the time that its value 
had been placed at a sum now equivalent to 
$250,000! The very high prices paid today 
by museums for bits of antique glass are very 
apt to be far less than the same objects brought 
in Roman times; this, of course, refers only to 
glass of high artistic quality, such as would 
have commanded the attention of connoisseurs 
contemporary with its product. 
“Who,” says Johnson in The Rambler, 
“when he saw the first sand or ashes by a cas¬ 
ual intenseness of heat melted into a metallic 
form, rugged with excrescences and crowded 
with impurities, would have imagined that in 
the shapeless lump lay concealed so many con¬ 
veniences of life as would in time constitute a 
great part of the happiness of the world ? Thus 
was the first artificer of glass occupied, though 
without his own knowledge or expectation. He 
was facilitating and prolonging the enjoyment 
of light, enlarging the avenues of science and 
conferring the highest and most lasting plea¬ 
sure; he was enabling the student to contem¬ 
plate nature and the beauty to behold herself.” 
Ancient Glass and Venetian 
We need not go into the early history of 
glass here, more than to say the ancients were 
highly skilled in the making of mosaic and 
millefiori glass, their products inspiring the 
millefiori glass of the Venetians and their fol¬ 
lowers in Europe and America. One cannot 
do better than to quote here from M. A. Wal- 
lace-Dunlop’s Glass in the Old World, long 
out of print. In this work the author says: 
“No method of glass working has probably 
excited more attention than the wonderfully 
minute mosaics found scattered over the world 
both in beads and amulets. Old writers have 
exhausted their ingenuity in conjecturing the 
secret of their manufacture. Many of them 
are far too minute for human eyes to have ex¬ 
ecuted, but like many other marvels the expla¬ 
nation is simple when once discovered. They 
They are spotted, striated, checkered, streaked, mottled, 
dappled, clouded, barred—every imaginable diversification 
of pattern is offered by the beads grouped in the illustration 
above. These beads are of Roman-Egyptian origin, and 
date from the earliest antiqmi 
Gorgeous things are these rare 
pieces of early Venetian millefiori. 
Derived from the glass of Greek 
and Roman manufacture, they 
were in turn copied in other 
European countries 
of the art of millefiori 
Fine glass was highly prized by 
the connoisseurs of antiquity, 
some pieces being signed by the 
“artist in glass” who made them. 
Nero himself was a keen collector 
of glass, we are told 
were made (and are now successfully imitated 
in Murano) by arranging long slender glass 
rods of various colors so as to form a pattern, 
a picture, or the letters of a name, and then 
fusing them together, and while still warm the 
rod or cane so formed could be drawn out to 
almost any length, the pattern becoming per¬ 
haps microscopically small, but always retain¬ 
ing its distinctness. A tube of glass treated in 
the same manner never loses a minute hole in 
the middle. Thin slices cut off such a rod 
would present on each side [face] the exact 
picture [just as the pattern appears when slic¬ 
ing a cucumber] or pattern originally ar¬ 
ranged. When this idea had been once sug¬ 
gested, thousands of patterns could have been 
invented, and slices from these rods placed in 
liquid blue or other colored glass, and cast in 
a mould and ground into shape, gave rise to 
the endless combinations of Greek or Roman 
workers. . . . The millefiori glass of the 
Venetian republic was simply a revival of this 
old industry. . . . Under the Ptolemies the 
Egyptians acquired a rare perfection in 
mosaic! We have, so far as I know, no Roman 
mosaic or millefiori glass antedating the reign 
of Augustus. It is in the Augustan age that 
we first learn the name of a mosaic glass 
artist, Proculus of Perinthus, to whom the 
Alexandrian merchants erected a statue. 
The building of St. Mark’s in Venice, begun 
in 1159, gave impetus to Italian glass manu¬ 
facture. With the fall of Constantinople 
nearly a half century later, many Greeks, 
skilled artists in glass, undoubtedly made their 
way to Venice and brought thither the secrets 
of their trade. Certain it is that the early 
glass workers of Venice and of Murano, where 
later the glass industry centered, gave curious 
and interested study to the old mosaics of the 
ancients and in due course rediscovered the art 
of millefiori and perfected it in a manner that 
would have caused the Romans to open their 
(Continued on page 60) 
