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Updated: May 14, 2025
Why he contented himself with the examples of the old masters, who used glass coloured in the making, which he shaded simply with black; the reason he limited himself to little, distinct figures, to the gestures and draperies of which he gave a decided character; his ideas upon the art of the glass-workers, which in reality declined as soon as they began to design better, to paint, and to enamel it; and his final opinion that a stained-glass window should be simply a transparent mosaic, in which the brightest colours should be arranged in the most harmonious order, so as to make a delicate, shaded bouquet.
The glass-workers of those days were set apart from all other traders, and in Italy as well as in France a noble might devote himself to this calling without bringing down on himself the insults and scorn of his friends.
The glass-workers imitated the emerald, jasper, lapis lazuli, and carnelian to such perfection that even now we are sometimes embarrassed to distinguish the real stones from the false. The glass was pressed into moulds made of stone or limestone cut to the forms required, as beads, discs, rings, pendants, rods, and plaques covered with figures of men and animals, gods and goddesses.
The day had a melancholy cast in the narrow waterways of Murano, where clouds of smoke, dense and constant, rose from hundreds of glass-workers' chimneys, dimming the reflections in the lagoon and obscuring that wonderful coloring of sky which is nowhere so radiant as at Venice.
"I am familiar with the mystical wine-press which was often represented by the glass-workers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries," said the Abbé Gévresin. "That was practically a paraphrase of Isaiah's prophetic verse: 'I have trodden the wine-press alone, and there was no man with me'; but the mystic mill is, I own, unknown to me."
Suddenly this picture vanished; the Patriarch remained, and by his side appeared the first High Priest of the worship of Jehovah, whom the sculptors had omitted to represent on the exterior of the porch, but whose image the glass-workers have portrayed in a window of the same front; Aaron, the great Pontiff, anointed by Moses.
All these matters were against him, and people wondered why old Angelo kept the waif in his service, since he would have engaged any one out of a hundred young fellows of Murano, all belonging to the almost noble caste of the glass-workers, all good Christians, all trustworthy, and all ready to promise that the lovely Marietta should never make the slightest impression upon their respectfully petrified hearts.
At first so many colours blind one and the forms are indistinct; besides, the lead cuts the figures and it is difficult to make out anything, but I know them to my fingers' ends. They are stories, things of their own times, that these glass-workers painted; the intrigues have been forgotten, and no one has disentangled them."
In Alexandria the glass-workers, paper-makers, and linen weavers were those who were proudest and most jealous of their title of "Men of Macedonia." Money, Cornelia soon discovered, was even a greater god here than in Rome.
It was a working-room indeed; the caprice of a wealthy young man, who amused himself in his leisure hours by painting on glass. He had re-found the ancient methods of the thirteenth century, so that he could fancy himself as being one of the primitive glass-workers, producing masterpieces with the poor, unfinished means of the older time. An ancient table answered all his purposes.
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