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 kinds and shapes, and, above all, little vases decorated with chevron bands; all these things belong rather to what in a general way may be classed as jewellery, objects of personal decoration. Of the one essential application of glass, as we understand the term, we have not so far found a single undoubted example—its application, I mean, to vessels intended to hold wine or water. This was to come a little later, and to come with a rush, as it were; for by the first century of our era, glass had already taken a position at least as important as at any subsequent time in our history.

I am speaking of glass, of course, in the narrow sense of the word, especially as a receptacle for liquids, for wine in the first place. From this time onward this is the predominant service to which the material has been put, and, indeed, at no time was its relation to wine-drinking more intimate than among the Romans of the early empire.

It is certainly strange that in spite of our comparatively intimate acquaintance with the ways of life of the Greeks during the time that intervened between the conquests of Alexander and the period of their absorption in the Roman Empire, we should be in possession of no evidence, documentary or material, that would throw light on this, for us, most important of all questions: Where was it, and at what time, that the great discovery was made—the art of blowing glass? For it was thanks to this discovery that the material came for the first time to take an important place among the art products and even the industries of the day. This is a point that cannot be too often or too strongly impressed upon the reader.

The glass vessels of the ancients rarely bear any inscription, and there is little, as a rule, in the decoration that can give occupation to the antiquary. Classical glass has therefore been comparatively neglected, except when of superlative merit; the record of its provenance has generally been lost: in continental museums it has either found a back place on the shelves of the Greek and Roman collections, or it has been handed over en masse to other departments. We thus find crowded together in the same case delicately turned bowls from Greek tombs, cinerary urns from Gaul or Britain, and examples of the rudely carved and engraved glass of the third and fourth centuries.

Such little evidence as there is, especially a few passages in Roman writers, would point to Alexandria, above all other towns, as the principal home of the glass industry in the first centuries before our era. We know, however, of no find of blown glass in Egypt, previous to later Roman or Coptic times. The Ptolemaic glass found at Tanis and elsewhere differs, as we have seen, little from the old type; and even at what is probably a later period we have found the same old type of glass in use at Denderah for inlaying (see above, p. 32). It was not the Egyptians themselves that favoured the new process—by them the new glass was doubtless rejected as something exotic and unholy. The Greeks, on the other hand, seem never to have taken any interest in the material—the ‘fused stone,’ as they called it, was at the best but a poor substitute for the native minerals that it imitated.

Perhaps after all there is an element of truth in the prevalent Roman tradition, and we should not be far wrong in giving the credit for the introduction of the new system of manufacture to the glass-makers of Sidon or of some other of the Phoenician coast towns.

I have already pointed out that the Greeks had at first no separate word for glass. Herodotus speaks of ear-ornaments made of ‘melted stone’ (?????a ??t?). Plato, in the TimÆus, thinks it necessary to explain that he uses the word ?a??? in the same sense. In the treasure-lists of temples, of the early part of the fourth century, where the same word is used, the reference is apparently to vessels of glass. We hear, too, of seals of glass (sf?a??de? ?????a?) in similar inscriptions of the same date. The word ?a??? ultimately became the equivalent of the Latin vitrum.

In any case, it is from Greek tombs of the Hellenistic period that we obtain our earliest specimens of glass, other than the small articles of verroterie that formed the exclusive subject-matter of the last chapter. There have been preserved a few rare bowls of transparent glass, sometimes quite colourless, or more often stained with blue or with a honey-like tint resembling that of the hyacinth or the sard. These bowls are distinguished by the purity of their outline; they have apparently been finished on a lathe, but whether the glass was originally simply cast, or, as is possible, blown into a mould, it is impossible to say. The only ornament consists in one or more incised lines near the margin. A few of these bowls have been obtained in Athens, others come from tombs in the south of Italy,—we have unfortunately no means of fixing the date in either case. It is rather from the refinement of their curves and the restraint in the decoration that we are led to class them as pre-Roman.

But it is from the glass found in the tombs of Canosa that we can form the best idea of what the Greeks of Ptolemaic times were capable in this direction, and we are fortunate in having in London a remarkable series of glass vessels from these tombs. Canusium was one of the few cities of Apulia that preserved much of its Greek culture as well as the partial use of the Greek language well into the time of the Roman Empire. The beautiful specimens in the Glass-Room in the British Museum, some of them so thoroughly Hellenic in character, are referred to the first century of our era, but in general character and feeling, as well as in their shapes, they reflect the art of an earlier period. A bowl of pure white glass—the sharp outlines, especially of the solid handles, show that it was finished by a cutting tool—is of a form (the s??f?? of the Greeks) well known both in pottery and metal ware. The two graceful bowls, decorated in gold with an exquisite design of acanthus leaves, combined with a small plant with tendrils, both radiating from a central flower, even in their present condition, perhaps surpass in beauty any other known example of ancient glass. From the technical side, the marvellous skill with which the two shells of glass of which these bowls are built up, are fitted together, should be carefully noted. It will be observed that the inner shell projects considerably beyond the outer one, and that the latter at the line of junction has been apparently levelled down by subsequent grinding. How far the two layers have been soldered together by subsequent firing, it would be difficult to say. Between the two shells, the gold leaf that forms the base of the decoration has been applied. We are reminded (but longo intervallo, not only artistically but technically also) both of the so-called cemetery glass of later date, and of the ‘doubled glasses’ made in the eighteenth century in Bohemia.

Scarcely less remarkable are the other examples of glass from Canosa exhibited in the same case. Here may be seen two bowls built up with coils of little rods, each rod containing an opaque white string in the centre of a clear base; these, as I have mentioned, are identical with the bowls, now in the Assyrian Department, brought back by Layard from Nineveh. In addition to these varied types of glass there were found in the same tombs some large dishes of millefiori ware, and finally a large flat bowl of white glass with a somewhat rude pattern cut with the wheel, and with a row of spurs projecting from near the edge. This, as will be seen further on, is a method of decoration more common at a time of artistic decline, in the third and fourth centuries.

Quite Greek in character are the strange little unguent pots that come from Cyprus. On the cup-like overlapping lid of one in the British Museum may be seen outlined in black, apparently between two layers of glass, a little cupid bearing a bunch of grapes. Although many of these little pots have lately been found in Cyprus, it is only in a few cases that the design on the lid, so truly Greek in style, has been preserved.

There is some reason to believe that when the use of the blowing-tube was first introduced it was applied as a supplement to a moulding process. The hollow vesicle of glass—the paraison, to use the old French word—was blown into a more or less hemispherical mould, and the irregularities of the resulting bowl were then removed by grinding on a wheel. At any rate, during what we may call the Alexandrian period, a bowl of simple outline, whether shallow or deep, is the characteristic form. In the case of certain dishes in the shape of a boat, the wheel has played a still more important part.

For the personal adornment of their women the Greeks continued to make a variety of small objects of glass, more or less on the old lines. We find, too, intaglios engraved on glass of various and often most exquisite tints at least as early as the fourth century B.C. In the preparation of these pastes the greatest attention was paid to the exact imitation of precious stones. At a somewhat later date, in the second century B.C., cameos in high relief cast in glass pastes of various colours came into vogue. The ‘mother’ design was modelled in clay, and upon this matrix the mould in which the glass was to be cast was formed. These early glass cameos are compared by the late Dr. Murray to the circular, moulded reliefs on the black pottery of this period, and he points out that they apparently preceded the large reliefs engraved on stones of the onyx family which were so much in favour a little later (Greek ArchÆology, p. 160). It must be borne in mind that neither in the case of cameo or intaglio could the paste copy be made directly from the original stone. The paste gem, thus moulded, was often carefully finished by hand.

Early Roman Glass

In the absence of any continuous series of glass vessels that can be classed as Greek, it would seem somewhat of a contradiction to say that the artistic glass of the Romans was founded upon examples distinctly Greek in outline and decoration. And yet there can be no doubt that in the earlier period, at any rate, the source of inspiration of the Roman glass-maker was the same as that of the contemporary potter or bronze-worker. At the time when objects of glass were first brought to Italy in the ships of the Greek traders, we may be certain that the places where this glass was made—whether these be sought at Alexandria or at one or more of the cities of the Phoenician coast—had been completely Hellenised. Again, the new material found its way in through towns which, if not Greek speaking, were thoroughly Greek in culture, through CumÆ—in the neighbourhood of this city glass was probably first made in Italy—and through the semi-Greek towns of Apulia. But in one important respect this Greek glass differed from the contemporary bronze and pottery. It was to the Greeks a new art with few old traditions, and these not of Hellenic origin. In the first century before Christ the industry was only beginning to be of any importance. It thus came about that in a greater degree than perhaps any other branch of ancient art, the manufacture of glass may be regarded as an art essentially Roman. This fact may help to account for the extreme poverty of the material for its history and methods of manufacture to be found in Roman writers. There were in this case no Greek authorities for these writers to fall back upon. Compare the meagre and confused narrative of Pliny in the brief section that he devotes to glass with his detailed, and in a measure scholarly, accounts in other departments of the arts where he could borrow from earlier Greek technical treatises.

The glass that we know as Roman was made for a period of about four hundred years. It was manufactured at one time or another in nearly every country into which the Romans penetrated, from Syria and Mesopotamia on the one hand, to Spain and Britain on the other. It has even been found in the tombs of tribes that the Romans never subdued, as in Denmark and Sweden. There is scarcely an application of glass known in Europe in the eighteenth century that was not known also to the Romans, and they were masters of the various processes by which glass may be decorated.

Millefiori Glass

M. Froehner, in his introduction to the catalogue of the Charvet collection, has divided Roman glass into as many as fifteen classes. Some of these divisions are perhaps rather arbitrary, and very little success has attended any attempt made by him or by other writers on the subject to classify the vast material on a geographical basis, still less to trace the history of its development.

There is, however, one division of classical glass—we can hardly call it Roman, although most of the finer specimens may be traced back to Rome or to the tombs of Central and Southern Italy—which forms in some degree a transition from our primitive family to the true blown glass of imperial times. This is the so-called Millefiori Glass. We have, doubtless, in this a development of the ‘fused mosaics’ of the Egyptians, worked out on a larger scale, and employed for other objects than flat slabs and fragments for inlay.

In the millefiori bowls of Greco-Roman times we can distinguish two predominant types: the madrepore design in the first place, which closely imitates the pattern on a polished slab of coralline limestone, with the addition that the ground is of a deep translucent green or of a purple of subdued tone. In this class may be placed such exceptional pieces as the bowl from Crete, in the British Museum; here we have rosettes of yellow, green, and red upon an opaque ground of a rich blue. The second type is equally characteristic, but more difficult to describe. Short, loosely rolled scrolls of an opaque white float in a more or less transparent base, interspersed with a few quadrangular masses of gilt glass. It would be difficult to say what natural substance is imitated in this case—perhaps some kind of fossiliferous lumachella marble, which may have been in vogue at one time at Alexandria. We may be quite sure that the Roman glass-workers would not have failed to imitate the famous Murrhine vases, which seem to have been originally carved from a natural stone, and it is among the millefiori glasses that such imitations may probably be looked for.

These millefiori bowls are evidently built up with more or less spirally arranged fragments of glass mosaic,^[23] the individual pieces having been probably cut from a cane of glass, itself formed by a combination of minute rods, as in the case of the Egyptian ‘fused mosaics.’ These pieces were arranged in the mould in a coil, starting from the centre, but how far, if at all, during the subsequent partial fusion, they were subjected to any blowing operation, is a moot point. In any case, the final effect is the result of an elaborate process of cutting on the wheel and subsequent polishing.

In this millefiori glass the sections of the canes are arranged with a studied irregularity (so as, in a measure, to mask the spiral arrangement), and a further variety is given by setting up many of them obliquely to the surface. On the other hand we can seldom, perhaps never, find any trace of the distortion, which would inevitably be caused by the subsequent use of the blowing-tube. In other cases, the individual fragments may be built up of irregular longitudinal bands, so as to give the general effect of an agate breccia, as in a fine bowl at South Kensington. When the contorted bands are continuous we have another important type, founded apparently upon the endless varieties of banded agate and other native stones that have been formed by slow deposition in the hollows of rocks. One variety imitates amethystine quartz, but here, as elsewhere, rich combinations of colour, which can have no prototype among natural stones, are often introduced. We have an exceptionally beautiful example of this in certain cigar-shaped alabastra, said to have come from Sidon. Meandering bands of emerald green, powdered with gold, are divided by lines of white and deep blue. Good examples of this ‘peacock’ decoration may be found in the British Museum, at South Kensington, and in the GrÉau collection.^[24] Allied to these, and still more rare, are the little globular bottles with bands of green and gold, of which there are exquisite specimens in both our great Museums.

In the Etruscan Museum of Gregory XVI. in the Vatican, the millefiori glass is well represented by a series of bowls from Greek and Etruscan tombs. There is a choice collection of fragments of millefiori and banded glass in the British Museum,^[25] and a still larger one in the Industrial Museum at Vienna.

A broken fragment of glass will indeed often tell us more than a complete vase. We can, for example, see from it whether the pattern passes continuously through the whole thickness of the glass, or whether it has been inlaid, or perhaps pressed into the surface when hot. In one case we have a process that reminds us of mosaic work; in the other there is some approach to a champlevÉ enamel, only with a base of glass instead of metal. In some rare examples we find the glass inlay surrounded by a fine ribbon of gold, suggesting the cloisonnÉ enamels of the Byzantine jeweller. There is a minute example of this delicate work in the Slade collection (Catalogue, Pl. III. No. 4).

Colours of Roman Glass

It is evident that the Romans had at their command a full gamut of colours, both transparent and opaque, obtained from iron, copper, manganese, and antimony—the same metals, in fact, as the Egyptians made use of. But their deep transparent blue they probably obtained, in most cases, from cobalt, a metal unknown to the latter people.^[26] There was one great deficiency, however, in their palette. They were never able to obtain a transparent red. The ruby red derived from copper or from gold was known to the early mediÆval alchemists, but no undoubted instance of the use of this valuable colour has been observed in glass of the classical period.^[27] The nearest approach to a transparent red is to be found in the honey and brown-red tints resembling the sard and the hyacinth; colours such as these are derived chiefly from iron, and may pass, on the one hand, into a pale yellow, and on the other into various shades of olive-green. The opaque red glass containing a large percentage of the basic oxide of copper and also some oxide of tin,^[28] was much admired by the Romans; it was probably the vitrum hÆmatinon of Pliny. In the GrÉau collection is a head of Neptune in this material, of considerable artistic merit; to this head the oxidation of the surface has given the appearance of a finely patinated bronze.

Wall Decoration of Glass

Before going on to speak of the blown glass of the Romans, it will be well to say something of another application of glass that found favour among them at one time. This consisted in the decoration of the surface of walls, and in a few rare cases of pavements, by slabs of glass of various colours.^[29] We may, perhaps, trace a double origin for this use of the material. On the one hand, it but carried out more fully the decoration of wall surfaces by rosettes and other patterns, both of glass and of glazed pottery, a plan often adopted by the Egyptians. This style was imitated with the little plaques of glass inlay, of which so many fragments have been found among the vineyards in the neighbourhood of Rome.^[30] On the other hand, slabs of glass were used to imitate the veneer of porphyry and other marbles, so much in use in Rome in the first and second centuries. The two favourite stones, the red Egyptian porphyry with white spots and the green Serpentino from the Taygetus range with large, whitish crystals of felspar, were admirably imitated in slabs of glass often of large size; of these many important specimens may be seen in the British Museum. This method of decoration must have been introduced at Rome at a comparatively early date, if we are to accept the usual interpretation of the passage where Pliny describes the application of glass to the exterior of the theatre built by Scaurus at the beginning of the first century before Christ.

The best known examples of this glass veneering come from the ruins of a building some four miles to the north of Rome, generally known as the Villa of Lucius Verus; there are many fine pieces from this source in our museums. In private houses this veneering of glass was above all in favour for the bath-chamber. ‘Vitro absconditur camera’ says Seneca, instancing this practice as a sign of the advancing luxury of the age.

In the earlier methods each slab or tile is built up of pieces of glass of geometrical outline; in rarer cases the adjacent pieces have been fused together or again pressed into a base of glass by a plan similar to that formerly used in Egypt. But when the individual pieces of glass have been cut into shapes and then fitted together to form the design, we have the opus sectile of the Romans. We are here dealing with something nearly approaching in character to a true mosaic, and therefore outside the limits we have given ourselves. But it is impossible to pass over without mention the marvellous examples of this class of work which covered the walls of the basilica erected at Rome by Junius Bassus, consul in the year 317. Although this building no longer exists, important remains of the opus sectile which once covered its walls are preserved in a private palace at Rome, and some smaller compartments may be seen in the Church of St. Antonio Abbate on the Esquiline. These have been described in a paper read by the late Mr. Nesbitt before the Society of Antiquaries (ArchÆologia, vol. xlv.; see especially the coloured plate XVIII.). The main subjects, indeed, and the ground are executed chiefly in coloured marbles, but for us the most interesting part is the band representing embroidery below the large picture of Hylas and the Nymphs. This frieze of small figures is formed entirely of glass, and it will be noticed that in this part both the subject and the treatment are Egyptian. We have here the copy of a wall-hanging—probably of one of the heavy embroidered tapetia Alexandrina. It must be borne in mind that although this work was nearly contemporary with the Christian mosaics of the time of Constantine, the designs must, in part at least, have been copied from some earlier composition. The frieze of figures indeed takes us back to the Egyptian renaissance of Hadrian’s time.

The glass of which the larger plaques of this Roman veneer were made was probably poured out upon an even surface, rolled while hot, and at times, but not always, subsequently polished. It may be regarded as a primitive form of what the French call verre coulÉ, a term which includes our modern plate-glass. The thick heavy glass that the Romans used for their slit-like windows belongs to the same class; it is well known that slabs of considerable size have been found in position at Pompeii, but we are not concerned here with this purely practical application of the material.^[31]

The employment of glass for mirrors, although known to the ancients, was, if we may judge from the few specimens that have survived, only practised on a very small scale. Pliny says that the Sidonians had applied glass to this purpose, but he speaks of it rather as a curiosity than as a matter of practical importance. Some little circular mirrors of convex glass, about an inch and a half in diameter, have lately been found in Greek or Greco-Roman tombs at Arsinoe in Egypt. There is one in the MusÉe Guimet at Paris, set in a silver frame with a ring as if for suspension from a necklace. I do not know the exact nature of the metallic backing (it is merely described as ÉtamÉ), but this is still quite brilliant. M. Garnier mentions two mirrors mounted in wood from a tomb at Saqqarah; others of watch-glass shape, set in frames of lead, have been found in Roman tombs at Ratisbon.

Moulded Glass

Two quite distinct applications of glass fall under this head. When the glass paste, in a fluid or semi-fluid condition, is pressed into a mould, we have a simple process for making either imitations of cameos and intaglios cut in precious stones, or again small articles of verroterie in no way differing from those produced by the peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean from an early period. Most of the work executed in this way in Roman times has little claim to artistic merit or originality. Masks and busts thus prepared were afterwards applied to the decoration of other objects—furniture, or even metal ware^[32]—or they were fused on to the sides of vessels of blown glass.

Much attention was given to the imitation of precious stones. In the British Museum is a remarkable series of medallions and plaques in a paste made in imitation of lapis lazuli, the sapphirus of the ancients. The colouring matter in this case would appear to be the famous Egyptian blue, which was certainly known to the Romans (see p. 27). In one example at least we can see that the coloured paste only formed a coating upon a base of ordinary glass, and this would point to the former being a material of some value. The large plaque of this blue paste, inscribed Bono Eventui, seems to have been finished with the tool, but we cannot look upon it as throughout a work of the sculptor. Heads of the Medusa or of Jupiter, viewed in full front so as to fill the roundel, are the commonest type. The dark paste in which some small portrait heads in the British Museum are cast is probably an imitation of the rare black sard.

I have now to speak of another class of moulded glass, of what is, in fact, a true ‘hollow ware,’ made by blowing a vesicle of glass into a mould. This is the first time that we unmistakably come across the use of the blowing-tube. In the case of glass it is practically impossible to use a mould in the shaping of a hollow vessel without some such method of forcing the viscid material into its place by pressure from the inside. I think, therefore, that it is not unlikely that it was in connection with some system of moulding that the blowing-tube was first introduced. Thus combined, the process calls for less manipulative skill than is required in the shaping of the free paraison by the glass-blower.

Moulded ‘hollow ware’ was produced at a comparatively early date in the East. Unfortunately we have no means of determining whether the glass-blowers of Sidon were acquainted with the process before the first century B.C. By that date, at least, the little flasks, unguentaria or what not, blown into moulds, had completely displaced the primitive chevron bottles that had so long been in favour. These moulded flasks are shaped in imitation of various fruits—dates, bunches of grapes, pomegranates—again the double scallop shell was a favourite pattern; more rarely we find the head of a man or a woman, especially of a negro. The glass is of various colours, but a rich honey tint is the commonest.

Another frequent type, especially to be connected with the towns of the Phoenician coast, is to be found in the little bottles, generally with eight panels round the body, on which are impressed various implements connected with the sacrifice, or at other times Bacchic emblems or musical instruments. In one or two cases the reliefs on these flasks have been thought to have reference to the Jewish worship. These little octagonal bottles have been found in various parts of the eastern basin of the Mediterranean, as well as on the north shores of the Black Sea. The glass of which they are made tends to decompose to a white porcelain-like mass, without further injury to the surface, a fact which would point to its containing a certain amount of lead and perhaps of tin. Here, for the first time in the history of glass, we come across the name of the manufacturer—we can hardly say the artist. It is, indeed, as might be expected, to the moulded ware that we are indebted for the most important of the scanty inscriptions that have been found on Roman glass; of these I shall have something to say on a future page. Such inscriptions in relief are above all prominent on the only other type of moulded glass which I can find space to mention. I refer to the cylindrical cups of thin greenish glass, which were apparently given as prizes for victory in various contests, or which perhaps merely served as mementoes of the occasion. Among the most interesting of this class is a series of glasses of which the best examples have been found in England; these are surrounded by double or triple zones, showing in relief chariot-races or combats of gladiators. All are of late date, and are of no merit as works of art. On one, exceptionally perfect, found near Colchester, and now in the British Museum, above the two bands of reliefs showing the rival chariots rounding the critical point at the extremity of the spina, the inscription Crescens Ave—Hierax Vale would seem to celebrate the victory of the first-named charioteer, but it may perhaps only express the hopes of Crescens’ backer.

The moulded hollow glass of the Romans often calls to mind the red Samian pottery decorated with reliefs, to which it is, however, as a whole inferior in artistic merit. The material does not lend itself well to elaborate designs, and one misses the crisp outlines given to glass by the cutting-tool. There is generally an air as of a cheap and second-hand copy, which gives a very modern aspect to many of these moulded pieces, and this is above all the case when the glass is transparent.^[33]