tour 1 of 21
The art of glass
The Art of Glass
For centuries glass has been valued for its
visual and tactile properties which have allowed the creation of
many beautiful objects. This tour uses some of the outstanding
glass objects in the British Museum to illustrate the major
developments in the history of glass
manufacture.
Glass is made
by melting a mixture of sand and an alkali. The first glass vessels
were made in the Near East in about 1600 BC. The brightly-coloured
glass was opaque and was used to make small bottles, jars and jugs
by coating a clay core with molten glass, then adding trails of
colour. This glass was regarded as an artificial precious stone
which only the rich could
afford.
In the mid-first
century BC, glassworkers in Syria-Palestine discovered how to
inflate hot glass by blowing through a tube. The method was taken
up throughout the Roman Empire and production expanded rapidly. By
the end of the first century AD, weakly coloured or transparent
glass was an everyday material. Glass table wares became common and
window panes and glass mirrors began to be
used.
Syrian glassworkers
developed the techniques of gilding and enamelling glass in the
thirteenth to fourteenth centuries. Glassworkers in Europe adopted
these techniques, which were developed extensively in Venice in the
fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries.
The demand for a
truly colourless transparent glass or 'crystal'
drove developments in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. Since then the exploitation of the visual properties of
glass in new ways has continued to play a key role in its
appeal.