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Updated: June 6, 2025
He says: "In the days when stoves were heated by coke furnaces, and the heat distributed by the flues, the principal trouble was the escape of fumes of sulphur which caused dire disaster to all the enamels by entering into their composition and preventing their ever drying, not to speak of hardening.
The first book ever printed in Venice is here: Cicero's Epistolæ, 1469, from the press of Johannes di Spira, which was followed by an edition of Pliny the Younger. A fine Venetian Hypnerotomachia, 1499, is here, and a very beautiful Herodotus with lovely type from the press of Gregorius of Venice in 1494. Old bindings may be seen too, among them a lavish Byzantine example with enamels and mosaics.
It is not much, but it is all I have. And you are to accept my apologies for the somewhat miscellaneous nature of the cargo, Messire de la Foret consisting, as it does, of armours and gems, camphor and ambergris, carpets of raw silk, teakwood and precious metals, rugs of Yemen leather, enamels, and I hardly know what else besides.
The enamels, being permeated with sulphur and other products from the coke, could never be made satisfactory, and the only way was to clean it all off. The other principal troubles are the blowing of the work in air bubbles, which is caused mainly by the heat being too suddenly applied to the articles, but these are very small matters to the experienced craftsman."
Here, a cabinet, painted and carved in a sentimental but vicious style; there, an equivocal-looking chapel, studded with enamels and mother-of-pearl, with miniatures on ivory wrought out in relief, like those on old-fashioned snuff-boxes; there, one of those pretty Florentine retreats, adapted to the hypochondriasis of women, and even then called boudoirs.
It includes some twenty carved crosses mounted in silver and enamel from Mount Athos; hanging lamps of pierced silver, in which the design is much older than the workmanship, with medallions of saints; silver-mounted book-covers, one of which is decorated with enamels; a most curious "five-bread platter," with a cup in the centre, and two little cruets and two little platters on projecting arms, all in pierced work of archaic design enriched with blue enamel; and some embroidered vestments of the fifteenth century, all of which are said to have been brought from Studenitza.
The treasury is particularly rich in reliquaries, of which the most valued contains the head of S. Blaise. It consists of a number of small Byzantine enamels reset in an elaborate floral pattern of filigree and enamel by a Venetian goldsmith in 1694 "Franc°° Ferro Venet°," as he signs himself on the lower edge. The design resembles the later Hungarian enamel-work very closely.
It was of great height and breadth, with all the majolica lustre which Hirschvogel learned to give to his enamels when he was making love to the young Venetian girl whom he afterwards married. There was the statue of a king at each corner, modelled with as much force and splendour as his friend Albrecht Dürer could have given unto them on copperplate or canvas.
Under these circumstances he had succeeded in procuring unique books, adopting obsolete formats which he had bound by Lortic, by Trautz-Bauzonnet or Chambolle, by the successors of Cape, in irreproachable covers of old silk, stamped cow hide, Cape goat skin, in full bindings with compartments and in mosaic designs, protected by tabby or moire watered silk, ecclesiastically ornamented with clasps and corners, and sometimes even enamelled by Gruel Engelmann with silver oxide and clear enamels.
Imagine a collection of gold ornaments, jewels, and enamels, in which we can detect the skill of the goldsmith, of the painter of stained-glass, of the engraver, and of the illuminator of missals; the inspiration is grave and monastic, the destination a palace or a cathedral, the effect dazzling; and out of this miraculous handicraft Filippo Lippi is always distinct, soft as the dawn, mysterious as a flower, less vigorous but more illusive than Botticelli, and so strangely personal that while looking at him we are absorbed.
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