Glass

It is as a matter of practical convenience that I have chosen not to make a separate division for the ‘green glass’ of the Dutch of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Not that Holland was in any way dependent on Germany in this matter, but in the case of this, the first of the three main divisions of German glass of which I have to treat in this and the following chapters—the plain or prunted green glass—the produce of the two countries is very similar. Our second group—the family of enamelled glass, so important in Germany—is scarcely represented at all in Holland. On the other hand, in the case of our third group, the Dutch struck out a line of their own. I shall therefore treat of the engraved glass of Holland in a subsequent chapter.

It is remarkable how little is known of the nature of the glass made in Germany before the first half of the sixteenth century, when the Italian influence began to make itself felt. A few insignificant little bowls and some small flasks that have served as reliquaries have been preserved in the treasuries of German churches (Plate XXI.), but for our principal source of information we are dependent upon contemporary pictures. Here, however, we soon discover that it is rather to works of the early Netherlandish school that we must turn for information, and that even from this source practically nothing is to be gleaned until about the second quarter of the fifteenth century. What is then found is not of much note, small tumbler-like vessels for the most part, of thick greenish glass decorated with threadings or studs, the latter more or less of the nature of prunts. There is, however, one fifteenth-century form which is of some interest: the metal-mounted wooden cups of mazer-like form, in use at that time appear to have been copied in glass; these may be recognised by their peculiar stunted and sometimes coiled handles.^[184]

These somewhat primitive vessels of the fifteenth century are of interest as leading the way to the first important division of German glass, the ‘Green Glass’ of Western Germany and the Netherlands.^[185] It is worthy of note that this family of glass, essentially of local origin not only as regards the nature of the metal but also in respect of the shape and the method of decoration, only reached its full development in the course of the sixteenth century, at a time when the new cristallo was being made by Italian workmen in the same district. There must have been something like a conscious reaction in favour of the native forms and materials. As to the pronounced green colour, we know that this was held to enhance the flavour of the wine drunk from the glass; as far back as the early sixteenth century, iron and copper scale were purposely added to supplement the pale tint given by the iron contained in the impure native potash (Mathesius, Sarepta, cxciv.).

In the decoration of this green glass recourse was had to the old methods of threading, but above all to the more or less circular projections or bosses of varied forms that are found scattered over the sides. These are technically known as ‘prunts’—the nuppen of the Germans. We have had something to say of one special form of these protuberances when describing the glass of the Anglo-Saxons.^[186] These prunts fall into two groups: the stechel-nuppen or thorned prunts, of which the old Franco-Saxon form is an extreme type; and the beeren-nuppen or berry prunts, derived possibly in the first case from the moulded reliefs of bunches of grapes that we find so often on Roman glass. A third group might perhaps be made for another classical form where the projections take the shape of a medallion—a head stamped on the surface of the prunt while it is still soft.

These nuppen had a practical use,—so Mathesius, a contemporary writer, tells us.^[187] They were to prevent the glass from slipping between the fingers of the drinker. With a similar object—for the insertion of the fingers in this case—these prunts are sometimes reversed, forming deep pits in the sides of the vessel. There is a late example of this form at South Kensington and another in the British Museum. The stechel-nuppen may assume less aggressive forms; the points may be smoothed down while the metal is soft, and we then have merely a series of disc-like thickenings on the sides of the glass. By this means, as in the more refined Dutch roemer of the seventeenth century, effects of great beauty, due to the varying transparency of the glass, were obtained.

In colour this Rhenish glass may vary from a greenish-blue to a pale bottle-green, or again to a deep, almost black, tint of olive-green or violet. It is from glass of this description that the pale-coloured wines of the country have been drunk, perhaps without break, from late Roman times. This it is, as well as the fact that it has never been decorated with enamel, and rarely, in Germany at least, by the wheel or with the diamond, that has given to the green prunted glass of this family a position apart. I have called this glass Rhenish, inasmuch as the centre of the manufacture seems to have been around Cologne, whence some of it found its way down the river to the Low Countries, along with the wine that was drunk from it; but much green glass was, we know, made also in the Netherlands.

From the cultur-historisch point of view, perhaps the most striking claim to attention of this family of German glass lies in the fact that here we come across the one original and artistic form of wine-glass that has been developed in modern times—apart, that is, from the stemmed glass of Italian origin, about which there will be a good deal to say in a future chapter. The typical roemer—for this of course is the glass of which I am speaking—consists of three parts: a bowl of ovoid outline, shaped like the flower of a tulip; a hollow cylindrical stem, studded with mulberry-like prunts (often flattened out to discs); and a hollow conical foot, formed by coiling a rope of glass round a core of wood (Plate XXXVII.). Here we have the roemer in the fully developed form of the seventeenth century, as we see it in fact in the still-life pictures of the Dutch painters of the time, or again—this time in actual use—in the marksmen’s banquets (schuttersmaaltyd) of Van der Helst and Frans Hals. In the earlier forms, however, the foot is either entirely missing or is present only as a zig-zag or toothed ring of glass applied to the base of the stem. In these early examples again the broad hollow stem is not divided from the bowl by a diaphragm of glass, but forms an integral part of the cup.^[188] On the other hand, before the end of the seventeenth century the cylindrical stem was more and more encroached upon by the spun-foot, while the coiled threading with which in earlier days the conical foot was entirely built up was, in late examples, twisted round a glass support so as to become a mere ornament^[189] (Czihak, Schlesische Gläser, pp. 75 seq., and Hartshorne, English Glasses, pp. 66 seq.).

Of the Rhenish green glass, the only other forms that I shall mention are the upright barrel-shaped beaker covered with prunts of various forms, in which the Mai-trank, a kind of ‘cup,’ was brewed, and finally the Krautstrunk or cabbage-stalk, a tall cylindrical glass bristling with formidable thorny prunts. Mathesius, who is responsible for the picturesque name, already in the seventeenth century calls the Krautstrunk an old form. The form is indeed noticeable, for among this family of green glass it is the only important instance of the cylindrical shape so much in favour for the enamelled ware.

The green glass as a group is very poorly represented in our London museums; as I have said, it can best be studied in the works of the Dutch painters. The handsome roemer in Jan van de Velde’s still-life piece (National Gallery, No. 1255) may be taken as a typical example.

Venetian Influence in Germany

We must now turn again to the glass of Venice, and consider how far and in what direction its influence can be traced upon that made in the north. This much we know—that in the fifteenth century, and perhaps earlier, the Venetian glass was largely imported into Germany, and this not only on the backs of hawkers, for the large Venetian firms had agencies in many German cities.^[190] There were at that time depôts of the Venetian merchants at such comparatively remote places as the Silesian towns of Görlitz and Breslau, and early in the fifteenth century the Italian glass was sold in the market-place of Vienna. At this time, however, we are unable to trace any influence these importations may have had upon the local German glass—of this last, indeed, practically nothing is known. It would seem that it was not until the sixteenth century was well advanced that any attempt was made in Germany to compete with the Venetian cristallo. Like the mediæval glass of France and England, the earlier German glass was doubtless a mere household ware, of all descriptions the least likely to be preserved.

It was in Southern Germany—in Switzerland and Swabia, and still more in the wealthy towns of Augsburg, Regensburg, and Nuremberg—that the Italian influence, in the matter of glass as in the other departments of the arts, was most strongly felt. As early as 1531 the town council of Nuremberg granted a subsidy to promote the introduction of the Venetian methods of making glass. We are told that Augustin Hirschvogel (d. 1560), a member of the well-known family of glass-stainers, some of whom we shall meet again before long, was interested in the question, and, according to one account, he learned the secrets of the art at Murano. In any case, there exist specimens of what is undoubtedly German glass, decorated with coats-of-arms of local families, both the shapes and the enamelling of which carry us back to the Venetian enamelled glass of the early sixteenth century. Good examples of this ware may be found in the richly enamelled pilgrims’ flasks, of which there are examples in the Germanic Museum at Nuremberg and in the British Museum. In such specimens the Italian influence is seen not only in the beadings and the gilding, but in the nature of the metal itself. How strong this southern influence was in these parts in the second half of the sixteenth century we may see in the work of the contemporary goldsmiths. In the case of glass, however, the purely Italian forms seem to have been early abandoned, and the same may be said of the style of the enamels employed in the decoration.

Of a later time than these South German examples of enamelled ware are the even more definite copies of the sixteenth-century glass of Venice that were made in the neighbourhood of Cologne. Here we have deliberate imitations of the Italian models—tall-stemmed glasses of thin cristallo with wide-winged handles, the latter often of deep blue metal. There is a row of these flügel-gläser, as the Germans call them, arranged on an upper shelf in the British Museum; some of these may perhaps be referred to the glass-house at Dessau, where Italians were employed between 1679 and 1686, but as a whole such glasses must be of a somewhat earlier date than this. In any case, we must regard these flügel-gläser as exotic growths, which lie quite apart from the two great German groups of the seventeenth century—I mean, of course, the enamelled and the engraved glass.

In fact, the real influence of the new cristallo of Venice was exerted in another direction. People who had seen this clear white glass were no longer content with the thick heavy metal of varying hues of green, blue, and yellow, often full of bubbles and defects. Already early in the sixteenth century in various parts of Germany attempts were made to introduce the Venetian methods of working, above all the Venetian materials. Now the Germans of that day were a practical people, already well ahead in many of the technical arts, above all in those relating to mining, to the smelting of metals, and to the arts du feu generally. After a moment of hesitation, instead of merely copying the formulas that they learned from the Italians, they adapted them to the conditions of their own country, and thus were soon able, in the central mountain districts among a population of miners and woodmen, to establish a glass industry quite independent of foreign aid. In France, on the other hand, and still more in England, up to the end of the seventeenth century, whatever glass of artistic character was produced was made for the most part by foreign workmen, and to some extent with foreign materials. Perhaps the most striking instance of the independent line taken by the German glass-workers may be found in the continued use of potash made from the beechwoods of their forests, and with this alkali they were soon able to produce a glass as brilliant and colourless as the soda-made cristallo of the south.

So far we have only got to the fringe of our subject; for the green glass of the Rhine and Holland can in no way be regarded as characteristic of German glass as a whole. Such glass I would rather class as Lotharingian, using that term for that central land that is neither French nor quite German. In so doing I am of course treading on delicate ground; but I am prepared to maintain that it is rather in a heavily enamelled willkomm-humpen of plain cylindrical form from Saxony or Franconia than in a prunted roemer of green glass that we have a really characteristic type of the glass of Germany.

And this brings us to the question, to how much of this Central German glass the term Bohemian may be fairly applied? This at least may be safely said, that the expression ‘German glass from the Bohemian frontier’ would cover nearly the whole of it. What it is essential to remember is that with the exception of a small section of the engraved glass we have little to do with Prague and the Czecs of the central plateau of Bohemia. As a whole this glass was made by German-speaking people dwelling on either side of the mountains which gird Bohemia to the north-east, the north-west, and the south-west, and divide that kingdom from Silesia, from Saxony, and from Bavaria respectively. Of all these districts it may be said that wherever the pines and beeches of the wooded slopes provided both fuel for the furnaces and (from their ashes) the indispensable potash, wherever, too, from the hillsides a pure white sand could be extracted, and finally, wherever in the mountain streams a source of power for cutting the wood or grinding the glass was at hand, there a glass furnace would sooner or later be established.

Starting from the gorge of the Elbe above Dresden, to the east a complicated system of mountains covers the frontiers of Bohemia and Silesia. In the valleys that run down on either side glass has been made from the fourteenth century, if not before. It must not be forgotten that until it was seized by Frederick the Great in the eighteenth century Silesia had long been a dependence of the crown of Bohemia.^[191]

To the west, beyond the gorge of the Elbe, the high plateau of Misnia falls abruptly on the Bohemian side, forming the Erzgebirge. Although for the glass of this district, the classical land of mining and metallurgy, we have no modern work to fall back upon, yet in the sixteenth century it produced two important writers on metallurgy and mining—Georg Agricola, the learned professor of chemistry, and the Lutheran divine Mathesius. Both of these writers have something to say upon the contemporary processes of glass-making.

At the western extremity of the Erzgebirge, on the one hand the Fichtelgebirge forms a link joining those mountains to the Thüringer Wald—these are both essentially German forest districts where much glass was made; on the other hand the Böhmer Wald runs south-east to the Danube. On the southern slopes of the latter range was made much of the glass that supplied the rich Franconian and Bavarian cities.

And the mention of these towns brings us to this difficult question: How far was the enamelling and the engraving of the finer specimens carried out in the mountain valleys where the glass was made, and how far in the workshops of the cities to which the undecorated glass had been transported?

For the northern districts at least Herr von Czihak has brought forward much evidence to show that the artists in the local towns carried back to the mountain furnaces, to be there fired, the glass that they had painted with enamel colours, and that even the finer kinds of engraving were done in the upland villages where water-power was abundant. This was certainly the case in later days in the famous centre of glass-engraving that grew up at Warmbrunn, in the Hirschberg district of Silesia. On the other hand much glass was, it would seem, enamelled in Dresden, and in the south the finer work both of the enameller and the glass-engraver was probably executed in the studio of the artist—at Nuremberg, for instance, or in other Franconian or Swabian towns.

For the German glass of the sixteenth century we have fortunately the two already mentioned contemporary writers, both of them Saxons by birth—Georg Agricola and Johann Mathesius. Agricola, it is true, ‘the founder of the sciences of mineralogy and metallurgy,’ in his famous work De Re Metallica,^[192] devotes only a few pages at the end of his last chapter to the subject of glass; but here may be found the first accurate drawing of a glass furnace that has come down to us. Agricola mentions that he had passed two years at Venice, and had seen much of the glass-working when there.^[193] Indeed, what he says of the materials, of the source of the alkali above all, seems to have relation to the Italian rather than to the German glass.

But this is not the case with the furnaces, which he describes and illustrates. Agricola distinguishes three separate ovens: the fritting oven; the main oven, where the glass is melted in pots; and an annealing oven for slowly cooling the glass. These ovens, however, may be combined in various ways in smaller works, reducing the number to two or even to one. The fritting oven is a detached building of beehive shape, which is also used for annealing the pots. The main oven, eight feet in height and ten feet in diameter, is of a similar outline. The wood is burned on the floor of a lower chamber, without any grating of firebars; the flame passes through into an upper chamber, around which are arranged eight pots, each two feet in height, with a working-hole in front of each pot. From the back of this chamber a passage opens which conveys the heated gases to the quadrangular annealing oven.

Surely so much information has rarely been compressed into one print as we find in the main illustration to this part of Agricola’s text (Plate XXXVIII.). Here at one working-hole (fenestrella) we see a workman gathering the glass at the end of his fistula or blowing-iron, another is shaping the gathering upon the marver at his foot, a third is vigorously blowing the paraison to the required size, and a fourth is swinging another round his head. On the ground lie scattered moulds of various forms, and here, too, we may discover the forceps (pucella) used in shaping the glass. To the right, in the foreground, lies a large wooden case closely packed with glass vessels of various shapes: we can distinguish, I think, bottles, alembics, and some prunted cylinders, which may well be the Krautstrünke of Mathesius. Above, to the right, the itinerant hawker marches off with a fresh supply of glass of all shapes arranged in an open-work crate strapped on his back. Finally, to the left, in a little office, the master discusses business with a customer over a foaming glass of beer—this last a truly German trait.

Our other source of information for the German glass of the sixteenth century is found, of all places in the world, in a collection of so-called sermons written by the friend, table-companion, and biographer of Luther—Johann Mathesius (1504-1565). Mathesius, after leaving Wittenberg, settled as pastor at Joachimsthal, a famous mining centre on the southern slopes of the Erzgebirge. These Sermons for Miners^[194] are a strange mixture of what to us seem fantastic analogies drawn from the Bible, with matter of an eminently practical nature relating to the crafts and occupations of his audience. The title of his fifteenth sermon will give some idea of how he treats the subject:—‘Of glass and the making of glass, and passages where it is mentioned in the Holy Writings, and how we may thereby call to mind both the fragility of our present bodies and the clearness and brilliancy of our bodies in the future state.’

A careful perusal of what both these writers have to say on the manufacture of glass leaves the general impression that in the first half of the sixteenth century Germany had not made much progress in that art. It is to Venice, in the first place, and then to Antwerp, that Mathesius turns for brilliant examples. At Murano, he tells us, they can actually make panes of glass ‘through which from one’s room one can see all that is passing in the street.’ So too, he says, it is in that town and in Antwerp that is made the finest schmelzglas of all colours used by the goldsmith—above all the mysterious ritzkel.^[195]

‘Now,’ says Mathesius, ‘we come to the German glass-houses. Some have their own sand, others pound white quartz and pebbles. They make use of the ashes of oak, maple, beech, and pine; the ashes of the fir and of the willow turn out good work, but from their fatty nature yield glass that is not so white. Native salt is added also to the sand and ashes, but the Polish rock-salt is more advantageous. Many buy up broken glass and make with it the best work.’^[196] If you wish, continues Mathesius, to obtain white and pure glass, it is essential to use only well dried wood, for green wood makes the glass opaque and blackish. The metal should be cooled more than once and remelted, the glass-gall being carefully skimmed off each time. If you propose to make fair and pure glass, ‘neither bubbly, feathery, cloudy, dull, stony, or gritty,’ prepare your frit carefully by rabbling and turning over the mixture of sand, potash, and salt on the floor of the first furnace, in the same way as metallic ores are treated ‘when they are roasted by the valuable new process.’ (Whatever this may have been, it was an illustration that would appeal to his audience of miners.) When the mixture begins to sinter together, the stuff should be shovelled into cold water. The frit thus prepared is then placed in the melting-pots and gradually heated.

There then follows a careful account of the various processes involved in the blowing and shaping of the vessel: of this I will only remark that there is no mention in it of the use of the shears for trimming the rough edges of the glass—technically an important point.

We are now able to form some idea of the processes by which glass was made in Central Germany about the middle of the sixteenth century, and when we come to examine the glass itself by the aid of extant examples, it will be found that this is indeed the date from which the start must be made, for there are few pieces in our collections that can claim a greater antiquity.

It was apparently not long before this time that the Germans began to apply enamels to their drinking-vessels whether of glass or pottery. Mathesius (1562) speaks of enamelling as a new art. ‘The ready wit of man,’ he says, ‘is always finding something new; some have on the white glass painted all kinds of pictures and mottoes, and burnt them in, in the annealing oven,^[197] as we find the “counterfeits” of great men and their arms painted upon the panes that are set in our windows.’ This is an important passage which confirms what we might otherwise be led to infer—namely, that the origin of the enamelling that we find on the beakers of the German renaissance must be sought, not in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century enamelled glass of Venice, but rather in the new method of colouring window-glass that was at this time spreading all over Germany. I refer to the highly finished pictures, painted in enamel colours on white glass and subsequently burned in, which were now replacing, especially for secular use, the true lead-mounted stained glass of the old church windows. It was an easy step to apply this method of decoration to the cylindrical surfaces of the great tankards and goblets from which the German people drank their beer. Now it is not in Northern or Central Germany that we find the best specimens of these enamelled ‘quarries.’ The finest examples come from the south, from Nuremberg, from Swabia, and above all from Switzerland, at that time the home of a distinguished school of glass painters. And the same may be said of the glasses, though this is a point that has been somewhat neglected until quite lately. Both the willkomm-humpen and the pass-gläser—the broad and narrow cylinders—found in Swiss and Bavarian collections are, as a rule, much more carefully decorated than the quaint but rude glasses of what we must vaguely call the central district. Unfortunately we have no means of more definitely determining the place of origin of the latter class of beakers; in fact it may be said generally of the glass made on both sides of the mountains that encircle Bohemia, that there is little to distinguish the productions of the different centres, however far apart they may lie.

Now it is not too much to affirm that, as a whole, the enamelling on German glass is in every way bad. The colours are opaque; when not crude they are muddy and dull. It is almost too high praise of them to say that they look as if they had been painted on in oil-colours. Take, for example, an average adler-humpen, such a one as the big beaker in the British Museum (Slade, No. 835). A mustardy yellow, that takes the place of the gilding that is absent in the main painting, is predominant; there is then an opaque blue, crude and unpleasant, and a dull maroon, which—and this is universally the case on these glasses—is the nearest approach we get to red. Apart from these colours we find only browns and drabs of undecided tints. So much for the main decoration; but if we now look carefully we find round the neck something that takes us back to Venice—a delicate scale pattern of fine powdered gold, and above this a line of beading with little pearls of various colours. This band of exotic ornament is seldom absent, at least in the earlier specimens.^[198]

There is no need to say much of the shapes of these enamelled glasses, for they are almost invariably of a more or less cylindrical form, with a foot of the simplest character; covered glasses are comparatively rare. They may be divided for our purpose into the broader beakers (often with curved sides and sometimes of great capacity) on the one hand, and on the other the narrower straight-sided tall cylinders. Much ingenuity has been devoted by German writers to the identification of the names by which these glasses were known in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and they have attempted to distinguish between the spechter, the bröderlein, the Krautstrunk, the pass-glas, the humpen and the willkomm. On the other hand, the term wiederkomm or vidrecome, given by so many English and French writers to the large broad forms, is unknown in Germany, so that I think the expression may be definitely abandoned and replaced by the word humpen or willkomm humpen. Narren-gläser—fools’ glasses—says Mathesius, would be a better name for these huge beakers that a man can hardly lift. The tall, narrow cylindrical form, when divided by horizontal lines, is known as a pass-glas. The spechter of Mathesius has been identified with a glass of this shape, sometimes decorated with square nail-headed studs. These spechter came from the Spessart forest district (west of Würzburg), and they form, as it were, a link between the prunted green glass of the Rhine and the enamelled beakers of Central Germany.

There is a small group of enamelled glass of very uncertain origin which claims attention here. We are concerned with certain little ewers, either of colourless or more often of deep cobalt-blue glass; they are generally mounted in metal, but the handle is always of glass. There are several examples of these ewers in the British Museum, many of which bear dates ranging from 1577 to 1618. The cobalt-blue glass has, by Dr. Brinckmann, been traced back to the glass-houses of Neudeck Platten, on the Saxon-Bohemian frontier. In the treatment, however, of the enamels on these little jugs, we are reminded of some of the work executed by the Altarists in France. The enamelling is of a somewhat more pleasing character than that which we find on the big beakers; white, yellow, green, and red are applied without shading. A favourite subject is a stag-hunt or the coursing of a hare, and at the side is often found a graceful lily of the valley^[199] (Plate XL. 2).

To return to our broad cylindrical glasses—the huge humpen and the smaller kanne, both of which indeed sometimes take the form of a barrel or a truncated cone—it is usual, on the basis of the decoration, to divide these beakers into the following classes:—

1. The Reichs-adler Humpen. On these, the double-headed eagle, displayed, with imperial crown, occupies nearly the whole surface of the glass. A big crucifix covers the breast of the bird, though this is replaced in some examples by the ball of empire. The arms of the seven electors and of the forty-eight members of the Heilige Römische Reich are arranged in a definite order along the outstretched wing feathers^[200](Plate XXXIX.).

2. The Kur-fürsten Humpen. Here, on the upper zone, the emperor on horseback rides in front of the three spiritual electors—the four lay princes follow below. In other cases the kaiser sits on his throne, with the electors on either side.^[201]

3. The Fichtelgebirge glasses, on which a mountain landscape is rudely indicated. None of these glasses can be attributed to an earlier date than the second half of the seventeenth century. A good example in the British Museum shows the Ochsenkopf, one of the highest peaks of the district, as well as the four rivers that issue from its slopes. A padlock hanging by a gold chain over the mountain points to the treasures therein contained: as an often-repeated inscription says:—An Eisen, Erz und Holz, thut mann viel von ihm ziehen. Many of these beakers, and perhaps others of a similar character, may be referred to the glass-houses of Bischofsgrün, which are situated at the foot of the Ochsenkopf.

In spite of the crudity of the enamels and the rudeness of the design, it is impossible to deny that there is a certain attraction in the intensely German character of the decoration on these three groups of glasses, which thus form a class by themselves. They smack of the soil and of the simple German folk who made them. The earliest example known, an adler-humpen, is dated 1547, and differs little in the quality of the enamel from the later specimens, which range down to the beginning of the eighteenth century.^[202]

There are in the British Museum two remarkable tankards which, though they do not fall under any of the above divisions, may well be mentioned here. On one we see an elaborate hunting scene: in the centre the net is spread and the game is being driven in by dogs and beaters (Plate XLI.). On the other is a strangely crude representation of the Last Supper, in the arrangement of which, however, Leonardo’s famous design may still be traced.

Before treating of the big glasses painted at Dresden and of those of the South German school, I may well say something of the second class of cylindrical vessels, of which the most important sub-division is formed by the pass-gläser, the tall narrow beakers divided by stringings of glass or by enamelled rings into a series of zones. These glasses played an important part in the drinking contests of the time. It would seem—to judge from the lengthy verses, commencing and ending in all cases with the word vivat, found on many of them—that it was required of the drinker to swallow at one draught the liquid contents of each zone, neither more nor less. At other times the drinking was apparently regulated by the dealing of cards. There is a remarkable example of the typical pass-glas at South Kensington: it is divided into twelve zones by quilled threadings of glass. The simple decoration of hearts, roses, and wreaths, as well as the long inscription, is painted in white enamel.

A somewhat later group of enamelled glasses may be traced to Dresden, to the Hof-kellerei of the Saxon electors, whose arms these glasses bear. The painting on them, though of no great artistic merit, is somewhat less rude, more ‘urbane,’ in fact, than that on the previous examples. They form, indeed, a transition to the carefully executed Nuremberg glasses. There are several examples of these Saxon beakers in the British Museum. A fine covered willkomm (Slade, No. 843) bears the portrait of the elector John George as well as of the four Saxon dukes, all booted and spurred, and with plumed hats on their heads. This beaker is dated 1656, the year of the elector’s death. Another, a pass-glas (Slade, No. 847), has the arms and initials of Augustus the Strong, king of Poland (1697-1733); the four zones into which this glass is divided, each holding about half a pint, are indicated by numerals, calling to mind, says Mr. Nesbitt, the peg tankards of the sixteenth century. Another example, dated 1658, also from the Slade collection (No. 851), a goblet with the arms of the elector of Saxony, encircled by the garter, is remarkable for the glass being externally striped with opaque white bands in obvious imitation of the vetro di trina. There is a somewhat obscure reference to German glass so decorated in the often-quoted sermon of Mathesius, and of this passage much has been made by German writers.^[203] I doubt whether the imitation was in any case more than superficial, and I do not think that, at least before the middle of the seventeenth century, any example of German glass can be pointed to which is really built up with rods as in the case of the true Venetian lace glass.

There is a large class of painted beakers on which the decoration has reference to the occupation of the original owner, and among these the zunft-becher, the guild or corporation glasses, hold an important place. These glasses date, without exception, from a comparatively late time, when among the upper classes the new engraved crystal glass had taken the place of the enamelled ware; already by the end of the seventeenth century the latter had come to be regarded as somewhat bourgeois in character. However that may be, these humpen bearing the arms of the guilds and quaint representations of the trades and industries are among the most interesting of their class. Many of these Innungs gläser are still preserved in the halls of the trade guilds. Herr von Czihak mentions several instances of this in Breslau and other Silesian towns.

In Southern Germany the Venetian influence was not only more early felt, but, what is of greater importance, it continued in play for a longer time, being continually renewed by fresh importations of the Italian glass. The art-loving dukes of Bavaria, Albrecht V. and his successor Wilhelm V., in the second half of the sixteenth century, did much to promote the manufacture of glass on improved methods. Strangely enough, however, we find that it was from Antwerp, not from Italy, that the assistance came in the first case; and it was to compete with Italian glass imported from Venice by way of Antwerp that Bernhart Schwarz, a glass-maker of the latter town, erected a furnace—at Landshut, on the Isar. Scarpaggiato, the Venetian, who came later, was engaged, in the first place, to make window-glass and mirrors. He is stated, however, to have been a master of the art of making vasi a reticelli and a ritorti of both white and coloured glass.

At Hall, near Innsbruck, some remarkable imitations of Venetian glass were made in the third quarter of the sixteenth century. In the Imperial Museum at Vienna there are many specimens of this Tyrolese glass, much of it scratched with the diamond and heavily gilt. There may be seen a goblet made by the art-loving Archduke Ferdinand, the husband of Philippine Welser.

As I have already said, it was in the towns of South Germany—Swabian and Ducal Bavarian—as well as in Switzerland, that the new art of painting window-glass with enamel colours was carried to the highest perfection, and we can trace the influence of this school of painters upon the decoration of the enamelled beakers preserved in the museums of Zürich, Munich, Augsburg, and other South German and Swiss cities. But it is to the Franconian Nuremberg, which, though further to the north, fell under the same influences, that we must turn to find the most brilliant work of this southern school. Here we come upon the family of the Hirschvogels, so many of whom during the course of the seventeenth century were famed as designers of glass for windows, and we have evidence from documents that have been preserved that the younger members at least of the family painted on drinking-glasses with enamel colours (Friedrich, Alt-Deutsche Gläser, p. 157).

It is chiefly on the ground of the coats-of-arms found on a few examples that we are enabled to attribute to Nuremberg artists a variety of enamelled glass which differs in many respects from the heavily painted humpen and pass glasses of which I have been speaking. In the British Museum may be seen certain tall cylindrical beakers which may be taken as examples of this South German glass. The metal is colourless but somewhat grey, and, as in the northern glasses, a delicate scale pattern of gold with scattered pearls of enamel forms a ring below the upper margin. But now we find the gold used freely in the rest of the decoration also, replacing the coarse yellow enamel of the northern beakers. The colours are purer and more effectively combined, and we see among them a green of good quality. In the case of the two beakers from the Slade collection in the British Museum, the figure of Jacob Praun on one glass, on the other that of his wife, stand detached in the field; there is no other decoration apart from the heraldic bearings of this Nuremberg family (these are on the other side of the glass) and the above-mentioned gold band. I may add that the Nuremberg enamellers showed a superlative skill in the treatment of these elaborate coats-of-arms backed with fluttering mantlings.

Of the larger humpen and pass glasses painted with allegorical or sometimes comic subjects, we have no good examples in our English collections. A beaker in the Germanic Museum at Nuremberg, showing the ten ages of man in as many compartments, is an exceptionally good example of such work. The drawing and composition of the subjects on these larger South German glasses are carefully carried out—the colouring, however, is generally poor; in the later examples, indeed, it tends to pass over to the monochrome or grisaille class, of which I must say a word before finishing with these enamelled wares.

The school of grisaille painters on drinking-glasses, founded towards the middle of the seventeenth century by Johann Schaper, is in many ways closely associated with the contemporary engravers on glass. Like the latter, the grisaille painters followed the pseudo-classical, the ‘Italianising’ style, rather than the old German traditions. Schaper, who came from Harburg on the Elbe, settled in Nuremberg in 1640, and died there in 1670. His manner of work, founded on copper-plate engravings, was much admired at the time, and he is in the next century mentioned among the famous artists of Nuremberg by Doppelmayr in his Nachricht von den Nürnbergischen Künstlern. Schaper, he says, ‘auf die Trinkgläser ... gar delicat mahlte,’ burning in his work afterwards so successfully that he surpassed all his contemporaries. He painted—round the sides of small tumblers and wine-glasses, for the most part—landscapes, figures, and heraldic bearings, either in black or a warm sepia, signing his work with his initials. There are some small examples of the glass enamelled by him at South Kensington. The large goblet in the British Museum (Slade, No. 860), painted with a cavalry combat, is of a considerably later date, but it shows that Schaper’s influence continued into the eighteenth century; in this case, however, the grisaille is heightened in places by touches of colour. The tall pass-glass (Slade, No. 859), painted with an elaborate procession celebrating the birth of a Bavarian prince, belongs, on the other hand, to quite another school. It is dated 1662, and Schaper’s influence had probably not reached Munich by that time.

Painted and Gilt Glass

Before passing on to the many-sided subject of engraved and cut glass, a word must be said of certain applications to glass of painting and gilding which were much in favour in Germany in the seventeenth century. I have here to deal with a miscellaneous class of objects; indeed the chief connecting-link between them is the fact that the decoration is in no case fixed by fire.

Single sheets of glass may be simply painted at the back, and ‘fixed’ by means of a transparent varnish. Such plates, painted with Biblical or allegorical subjects, may be seen let into the panels of the elaborately carved and inlaid cabinets of the time. It cannot be said that the effect of this pausch glas Malerei, as it is sometimes called in Germany, is very satisfactory. It is indeed merely a debased variety of what used to be known in France as verre églomisé; the term fixé peint has also been used for work of this kind.

The gilding that was so plentifully applied to the German engraved glass of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was fixed by a ‘cold’ process, by simply attaching the gold-leaf by means of a varnish. For the most part it is only when applied to the sunk part of an incavo decoration that this gilding has survived.

The gilding, however, has been more effectually preserved in the case of another cold process which came into vogue before the end of the seventeenth century, and rapidly spread from Bohemia, or perhaps rather from Silesia, to various parts of Germany. In the case of these zwischen gläser we are taken back to an old process, already known to the Alexandrian Greeks. The plan adopted in no way differs in principle from that made use of in the decoration of the beautiful bowls from Canosa, now in the British Museum (see p. 46).^[204] Very inferior to these in artistic merit are the little footless tumblers, with designs in gold, often hunting scenes, which seem to have been made on both sides of the Silesian-Bohemian frontier before the end of the seventeenth century. These are built up of two glasses, both somewhat tapering and both cut into an equal number of perpendicular sides, so that when the smaller of the two was inserted into the interior of the larger the glasses fitted exactly, and could not rotate one upon the other. The inner glass being somewhat the taller, we find the ring of junction, which is generally concealed by a band of gold, about half an inch or so below the top of the glass. The edges are so exactly bevelled that this line of junction is barely perceptible even to the touch. Before fitting the two glasses together, the inner one had been coated on the outside with gold-leaf, and the design carefully engraved on the gold with a steel point; while on the inside of the outer glass a coating of old linseed oil or of varnish had been smeared. I should add that a medallion of ruby glass, variously ornamented, is usually found at the bottom of these tumblers inserted between the two layers of glass, or sometimes replacing the base of the outer cylinder. These glasses will not stand warm liquids: an example in the British Museum is disfigured by some large flattened blisters, probably the result of heat.^[205] Glasses built up in this manner may of course be decorated in other ways; the gold-leaf, for instance, may be replaced by silver foil. Kunckel, of ruby-glass fame, describes a method in which the inner glass is plainly gilt, while the outer one is painted on the inside in imitation of precious marbles (Ars Vitraria Experimentalis, 1679). I have seen examples of this manner of decoration in German museums.