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Innovation, Reform, and Revival: 3,500 Years of Form and Decoration in Glass
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10283 |
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Section : |
The Arts
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12 / 1986 |
4,107 Words |
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John W. Keefe
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Because glass is so commonplace, it is usually difficult for the twentieth-century observer to realize that it was once a mysterious, magical substance. It was furthermore a commodity that competed in the world luxury market with gemstones and precious metals. Although glass is today taken for granted in many respects, it remains an internationally collected item whose appeal seems to have continued undiminished over three and a half millenia. However, even glass collectors are frequently unaware of how little basic glassmaking techniques have altered while at the same time producing myriad variations in form and decoration. Perhaps more than any other branch of the decorative arts, glass has basically retained its original techniques of fabrication and decoration.
Despite its popularity and prominence as a collectible, the composition of glass puzzles many. It derives from the fusion of a siliceous material, such as sand or powdered flint, with an alkali, metallic oxide, or salt. The proportion of these primary ingredients and the types of silica and alkali involved determine the transparency or opacity, clarity or distortion of light and color or the lack thereof in the glass.
The first written mention of glass was made by the Roman historian Pliny, who credited the discovery of glass to a group of Phoenician sailors who had landed upon the coast of modern Syria. While lighting a fire, the sailors rested their cooking vessels on blocks of natron (their cargo and a form of alkali). This chance combination of fire, silica, and alkali created true glass, which ran in molten streams from the fire site. Although the tale is appealing, it is more likely that early artisans working with earthenware accidentally discovered the formula for glass while attempting to improve their glazes. Whatever the circumstances of its invention, it is known that the Assyrians, Syrians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and Hebrews all worked with glass, enjoying far-flung trade with cultures not possessing it. None of these ancient groups kept a record of their trial and error experiments; hence we have only a murky understanding of the origins of glass.
We do know that the first glass vessels were made around 2000 B.C. Knowledge of their manufacture probably descended from developments with glazes, molded solid beads, and amulets. The earliest containers were probably fabricated by casting or pouring the molten substance into a simple open mold. Once the glass cooled, the mold was removed and the object finished by polishing or grinding. More common and slightly later was the practice of core-forming, by which the molten glass was wound in a thick thread around a core of dung or clay coated with powdered limestone. With reheating, the threads could be made to coalesce into a ground color; an alternative method may have been to dip the formed core into an open crucible of molten glass. Colored trails, or thin threads of glass, could then be applied to the body of the piece and combed or pulled into distinctive patterns. These could be left standing in relief as the body of the piece or they could be rolled flush with the body wall. Once this basic technique was established, it was a reasonably simple step to add handles, pouring lips, and decorative rims like that seen in the eighteenth dynasty Egyptian column flask, a core-formed threaded, combed decoration.
Although the forms of these early vessels became more elaborate as time passed, the drawn-up trails decorating the surface formed a pattern type that has persisted to the
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