Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/668

Rh 650 it was found at Pompeii in the house of the faun. has been engraved by Richardson. Costly as these beautiful objects must have been, a very great number of them existed, for even now fragments of ten to ﬁfteen may probably be met with in the hands of the curiosity dealers in Rome in the course of three or four months. The same process was used in producing large tablets, employed, no doubt, for various decorative purposes. In the South liensington Museum collection is a fragment of such a tablet or slab; the figure, a portion of which remains, could not have been less than about 14 inches high. The ground of these cameo glasses is most commonly transparent blue (often lined with opaque white to throw up the colour), but sometimes opaque blue, purple, or dark brown. The superimposed layer, which is sculptured, is generally opaque white. A very few specimens have been met with in which several colours are employed. At a long interval after these beautiful objects come those vessels which were ornamented either by means of coarse threads trailed over their surfaces and forming rude patterns, or by coloured enamels merely placed 011 them in lumps; I and these, doubtless, were cheap and common wares. But a modiﬁcation of the ﬁrst-named process was in use in the 4th and succeeding centuries, showing great ingenuity and manual dexterity,———that, namely, in which the added por- tions of glass are united to the body of the cup, not through- out, but only at points, and then shaped either by the wheel or by the hand. The attached portions form in some instances inscriptions, as on a cup found at Strasburg, which bears the name of the emperor Maximian (286- 310 A.D.), on another in the Vereinigte Sammlungen at Munich, and on a third in the Trivulzi collection at Milan, where the cup is white, the inscription green, and the net- work blue. Probably, however, the ﬁnest example is a situla, 10:‘; inches high by 8 inches wide at the top and 4 inches at the bottom, preserved in the treasury of St Mark at Venice. This is of glass of a greenish hue; on the upper part is represented, in relief, the chase of a lion by two men on h01'seback accompanied by dogs; the costume appears to be Byzantine rather than Roman, and the style is very bad. The ﬁgures are very much undercut. The lower part has four rows of circles united to the vessel at those points alone where the circles touch each other. All the other examples have the lower portion covered in like manner by a network of circles standing nearly a quarter of an inch from the body of the cup.1 The art of glass-making no doubt, like all other art, deteriorated during the decline of the Roman empire, but it is probable that it continued to be practised, though with constantly decreasing skill, not only in Rome but in the provinces. Some few existing vessels, as two chalices of coarse blue glass in the British Museum, may perhaps be referred to this period, but the most remarkable production was mosaic for the decoration of churches. Examples of such decorations may be still seen in Rome dating from every century through the dark ages; and, though glass for mosaic was certainly made at Constantinople, and perhaps also at Ravenna, it is probable that it was also made in Rome. Glass was largely used in the immense windows of the churches built between the 3d and the 10th centuries. The ﬁrst mention of coloured glass in a church window occurs in the time of Pope Leo III. (795-816); but pro- bably it was used at a much earlier period. ‘ An example connected with the specimens just described is the cup belonging to Baron Lionel de Rothschild; though externally of an opaque greenish colour, it is by transmitted light of a deep red. On the outside, in very high relief, are ﬁgures of Bacchus with vines and panthers, some portions being hollow from within, others ﬁxed on the exterior. The changeability of colour may remind us of the “ calices versicolores" which Hadrian sent to Scrvianus. GLASS It also - [IIISTOl{Y. tised there to a very great extent during the Middle Ages. One of the gates near the port took its name I from the adjacent glass-houses. St Sophia when erected by Justinian had vaults covered with mosaics and immense ' windows filled with plates of glass ﬁtted into pierced marble I frames ,- some of the plates, 7 to 8 inches wide and 9 to 10 high, not blown but cast, which are in the windows, may possibly (late from the building of the church. Glass for mosaics was also largely made and exported. In the 8th century when peace was made between the l caliph Walid a11d the emperor Justinian II., the former I stipulated for a quantity of mosaic for the decoration of the 11cw mosque at Damascus, and in the l0tl1 century the I materials for the decoration of the niche of the kibla at l Cordova were furnished by Romanus II. In the 11th I century Desiderius, abbot of Monte Casino, sent to Con- stantinople for workers in mosaic. The grounds of the Byzantine mosaics were usually either of gold or silver, a I thin leaf of the metal having been enclosed between two layers of glass. We have in the work of the monk Tlieophilus, I)¢'versm‘2nn. 4-lrtium. Sc/eeclulu, and in the probably earlier work of Eraclius, about the 11th century, instructions as to the art of glass-making in general, and then as to that of producing coloured, gilt, and enamelled vessels, which these writers speak of as being practised by the Greeks. But we look almost in vain for existing specimens of such works. Perhaps the only entire enamelled vessel which we can conﬁdently attribute to Byzantine art is a small vase preserved in the treasury of St Mark at Venice, a very clever reproduction of which was exhibited by the Murano Glass Company at the Paris exhibition of 1878. This is decorated with circles of rosettes of blue, green, and red enamel, each surrounded by lines of gold ; within the circles are little ﬁgures evidently suggested by antique originals, and precisely like similar ﬁgures found on carved ivory boxes of Byzantine origin dating from the 11th or 12th centuries. Two inscriptions in Cufic characters surround the vase, but they, it would seem, are merely ornamental and destitute of meaning. The presence of these inscriptions may perhaps lead to the inference that the vase was made in Sicily, but by Byzantine workmen.‘-’ Of uncoloured glass brought from Constantinople several examples exist in the treasury of St Mark at Venice, part of the plunder of the imperial city when taken by the crusaders in 1204. The glass in all is greenish, very thick, with many bubbles, and has been cut with the wheel; in some instances circles and cones, and in one the outlines of the ﬁgure of a leopard have been left standing up, the rest of the surface having been laboriously c11t away. The in- tention would seem to have been to imitate vessels of rock crystal. Saracens, for a glass disk serving as a weight has been met with in Egypt bearing the date 96 of the Hegira, corre- sponding with 7l5 A.D. (see memoir by Mr E. '1‘. Rogers, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. x. pt. 1). N umer- ous later examples leave no doubt that the manufacture of glass continued to exist in Egypt, though perhaps in a '1 The Sam Catiuo at Genoa, supposed throughout the Middle Ages to have been an emerald but really composed of green glass, is a shallow I hexagonal dish rather clumsily formed and ﬁnished by cutting. It was perhaps originally a paten, and was taken at the capture of Cacsarea in 1101. At Reichenau on the Lake of Constance, is (or was) preserved a slab of transparent green glass 2 feet wide by 13 inches high and 3 inches thick, which was also supposed to be an emerald. According to tradi- tion it was sent to Charles the Great by the empress Irene. Some of the Roman artiﬁcers in glass no doubt emigrated Byzan- to Constantinople, and it is certain that the art was prac- me- Probably at Alexandria, one of the great seats of glass- A1ex_- making, the art survived the conquest of Egypt by the ‘““l"“'