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Innovation, Reform, and Revival: 3,500 Years of Form and Decoration in Glass
| Article
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10283 |
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Section : |
The Arts
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1986 |
4,107 Words |
| Author
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John W. Keefe
John W. Keefe is curator of decorative arts at the New
Orleans Museum of Art and the author of numerous articles and
exhibition catalogs on the subject of glass. This article is
based upon an exhibition by the museum entitled 3,500 Years
of the Glassmaker's Art, which was organized by Mr. Keefe.
Presented during the past autumn, it featured nearly 1,000
pieces of glass drawn from the museum's permanent collection. |
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
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