Millefiori Glass
Millefiori
The Venetian influence in the manufacture of nineteenth-century glass actually goes back to ancient Egypt during the time of the Roman occupation and earlier, when the Egyptians were producing glass articles composed of what we now term Millefiori rods. Deming Jarves, in his book Reminiscences of Glass-Making
The first explanation of these works of art is to be found in the Collection of Antiquities by Count Caylus, who described them as "composed of delicate different-colored fibres of glass joined together with the greatest nicety, and conglutinated into a compact homogeneous mass by fusion." Winkelmann, in his Annotations on the History of the Arts among the Ancients, describes in great detail two small pieces which were brought to Rome in 1765. The first piece was a representation of a bird, possibly a duck, with brilliant, colorful plumage. The other piece, about one inch in diameter, exhibited ornamental drawings of green, white and yellow on a deep blue ground.
Murano Millefiori Paperweight
The method of producing Millefiori, or "mosaic rods" as Mr. Jarves termed them, was brought to the Italian peninsula by Alexandrian craftsmen about 30 B.C. By this method a bundle of variously colored glass rods were so arranged that its end resembled a rosette or mosaic picture. Bound tightly together and subjected to intense heat, this bundle of multicolored rods was fused into one rod which could, while in a plastic state, be pulled to any length and still retain its original pattern in miniature.
The earliest Millefiori articles were produced by slicing the rods either obliquely or straight across and placing the little cross-section disks side by side in a terra-cotta mold. The mold, with its contents, was subjected to heat in a furnace where the disks fused together at the edges. This curde method of production limited the utility and size of the articles that could be made from Millefiori rods.
US $10.60
With the discovery of the ductility of glass, sometime during the first century A.D., Millefiori articles were manufactured differently. Into a heated mold, lined with cross-section disks, a bulb of transparent, plastic glass was inserted and expanded by further blowing. The little cross-section disks became embedded in the plastic metal and could then be handled like any other blown glass. Irregularities in the surface of the finished product were ground down to a smooth finish.
Victorian Millefiori Hat Pin
An early prototype of the mid-nineteenth-century paperweight was made by the Venetians in the late fifteenth century. A solid ancient Venetian ball, consisting of fragments of Millefiori and filigree cane, was illustrated in Apsley Pellatt's Curiosities of Glass Making. The paperweights made by the French with such a high degree of craftsmanship were produced by arranging small sections or "set-ups" of Millefiori rods in an upright position on a bed of plastic glass. A punty was attached to what was to be the underside of the weight and the whole was dipped into a pot of fluid crystal glass where it acquired a heavy coating of metal. Shaping and polishing followed and the article emerged to dazzle the layman with its intricacies.
About 1910 Fred Carder produced what he termed "Tessera." Actually, it was Millefiori glassware produced according to the earliest technique by lining a mold with small cross-section disks and allowing them to fuse at the edges in a muffle.
Source: Nineteenth Century Glass - It's Genesis and Development
