Mosaic Glass Patella Cup

Description

Ancient Roman glassmakers invented the decorative technique now commonly known as mosaic glass, seen in this bowl. The first steps in this process are arranging thin threads of glass of varying colors into a long bundle, then fusing these into a single rod. The resulting cane is then sliced into thin discs, and each will bear the same pattern, perhaps a flower design or concentric circles in the shape of an eye. As seen here, the cane slices can then be reworked into a vessel with this pattern repeated across the surface. Mosaic glass fell out of favor until the nineteenth century, when Muranese glassmakers studied ancient vessels and began to make replicas, striving to rival the achievements of their Italian ancestors. | Sargent, Whistler, and Venetian Glass: American Artists and the Magic of Murano, 2021. | Most of the glass vessels in this case date from the first century BC to the fourth century AD. Early glass vessels were made in the Middle East and Egypt using the core-forming technique, in which molten glass was poured over a clay core and decorated with threads of colored glass. During the first century AD, Rome became the center of glassmaking, and the invention of blown glass led to new methods, including free-blown glass, which could be decorated by pinching, rolling, or dragging the surface, and mold-blown glass, in which the molten glass was blown into a terra-cotta mold. The Romans also developed stratified glass, in which different colored canes were fused together and blown (see 1929.8.147.1, 1929.8.147.2), and millefiori glass (Italian for "one-thousand flowers"), in which colored strips of glass were joined together into a rod, cut into slices, and fused into bowls and cups (see 1929.8.157.9). Many glass vessels were buried in the tombs of wealthy Romans and this contact with damp soil over hundreds of years caused the surface of the glass to deteriorate and become iridescent (see 1929.8.147.37, 1929.8.157.22).