Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/684

664 seen in the British Museum a small lion's head of blue-green glass found at Thebes, which is probably the oldest specimen extant.

Under the Egyptians the art developed in all its details. They knew how to melt, color, and carve it.

The Greeks, too, used it, and many beautiful medallions were made from it by them. By far the greatest number of specimens of ancient glass preserved to us are Roman, and many quaint cups, vases, and images in both public and private collections attest the skill of the Roman glass workers. Pliny gives many curious details in regard to the glass making of his time, and mentions the invention of mirrors. He also speaks of the manufacture of glass in Italy from "a sort of sand found on the banks of the river Volturno," and adds that the same process is used in Gaul and in Spain.

Many of the Gallo-Roman cemeteries have yielded treasures of cups, necklaces, and tear bottles, iridescent fragments in which the metallic reds, blues and greens, still keep their original splendor. For many centuries it was supposed that the secret of this prismatic luster was lost, but modern glass workers have succeeded in reproducing or at least in approximating it.

One might dwell at length on the gradual development and perfection of this wonderful art were it not that space forbids and that its course has been traced by abler pens. Let us, then, touch only on the Venetian fabrications, which seem to have had their origin somewhere toward the fifth century, when the Venetian population, hunted and persecuted by barbarous tribes, sought refuge in the seclusion of the lagoons. Here in unmolested peace they pursued their work, into whose mysteries they had been initiated perhaps by the Egyptians or the Phoenicians, and to which their own skill and artistic sense lent much. It was not until the middle of the thirteenth century that the city regulations, fearful of accidents from fire, compelled the glass makers of the Rialto to establish themselves on the island of Murano, at a safe distance from the homes of men. Since that time the name of this little island has been closely associated with the production of exquisite objects which seem to embody in their fragile forms the transparent clearness or opalescent tints of the waters of the Adriatic.

Strange stories have come down to us of the vigilance with which Venice guarded the secrets of her delicate handicraft. Throughout the intricately woven, many-colored web of her history runs the thread of her glass-makers' chronicle, like the gleaming lines of gold which intermingle on some fantastic Venetian goblet.

In the thirteenth century a fresh impetus was given to the