A thousand flowers

part 2

I posted a few days ago about one type of lampworked beads used in paternosters, namely the kind with looped and dragged surface decoration. Everything else I know about lampworked beads should easily fit into one more post, with some room left over! ;)

Another fairly easy technique for decorating the surface of lampworked beads is to roll them in "frit" -- which is what glass workers call little ground-up bits of glass. "Frit" can be made from leftover bits of glass in whatever colors are available, ground up and sifted to produce bits of whatever size range the glassmaker wants.



The hot bead is rolled in the frit, and when the resulting bits are melted into the surface of the bead, you get random dots of color, something like the beads below. (These have a thick layer of clear glass added over the spotted core.)



500 Jahre Rosenkranz includes one rosary made from spotted, or as the description says, "marbled" glass beads. Unfortunately the photo is small, black and white and terrible, but here it is, for what it's worth:

Millefiori

The gift rosary I made that prompted me to investigate lampworked beads in the first place is shown below, and it's the reason these two posts are titled "A thousand flowers." That's the literal translation of "Millefiori," the type of beads I used for the Ave beads.



I will happily recommend Venetian Bead Shop, where I bought these: they carry a wide variety of colors, shapes, foiled and sparkly beads, swirls, hand-blown hollow beads, and many other types traditionally made in Murano, the glassmaking district near Venice. Their shipping is fast and their prices very reasonable. Occasionally they are out of stock of a particular color, but seldom for long.

Millefiori beads are created by first making a rod of glass out of many smaller rods, arranged in a flower-like pattern and melted together. The rod is then drawn out into a long, thin cane, and slices from such a cane will all show the same flower pattern. To make a millefiori bead, several such slices will be applied to the surface of a hot bead of some other color, which is then quickly rolled smooth. (You can see that these beads are hand made, because some of them are more smooth than others!)

These beads are quite nice: I've seen so-called "millefiori" beads from other countries that are much less well done and look more like multi-colored mishmash than flowers. These are sometimes labeled as "ethnic," which always makes me snort.

What I don't know here is when and where millefiori beads have been actively made and traded. The technique seems to have been known in Italy in the 15th century, but this says nothing about whether it was popular or rarely used. Wikipedia (for what it's worth) seems to think that millefiori beads have only become really common in the last century or so. Resources, anyone?

This paternoster was made for someone who likes "everything Italian," hence the bright colors. I tried a couple of different shades of plain blue glass for the marker beads before I found one that looked right.



This just about concludes all I know about the use of lampworked beads in rosaries! But I'd certainly like to find out more.

Let a thousand flowers bloom

I was reminded the other day that I'd promised to look into the topic of "lampworked" glass beads, and the fact that I just made a gift rosary this month out of Italian "millefiori" beads meant that this was the month I finally went and looked at my books.

It's clear from a number of sources that glass was a popular medium for paternoster or rosary beads in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. While beads of gold, silver, amber, coral and semi-precious stones are valuable enough to be mentioned in the wills and inventories of the wealthy, there were hundreds and thousands of humbler folk who aspired to nothing more precious than beads of wood, bone, or glass to count their prayers. Few of those survive, and there is less written about them, so finding anything about them takes some digging.

Making glass beads by hand uses very simple technology and attracts many people who are looking for an interesting craft project, especially in more recent years when the basic equipment and the glass for making such beads have become easy to find and affordable. You can buy yourself a torch, some basic tools, protective goggles and enough glass rods to get you started for a couple of hundred dollars or less. If you're not intimidated by having a small blowtorch burning within inches of your fingers, you can produce some remarkably pretty beads with a bit of practice, including many that you wouldn't be able to find for sale. And if you're interested in historical glass, you can make good replicas of beads worn by the Vikings, Anglo-Saxons and similar peoples. They make impressive gifts, too.

Naturally, the question I'm most interested in is what types of lampworked beads were used in historical rosaries. I knew I had seen a few instances of glass beads with such designs, and this week I went back to look again at the photos and see what I could discover.

The exhibition catalog 500 Jahre Rosenkranz: 1475-1975: Kunst und Frömmigkeit im Spätmittelalter und ihr Weiterleben, from a 1975 exhibition in Köln (Cologne, Germany) has two examples of rosaries made from lampworked beads. One is shown in a fairly good, clear picture, although it's in black and white:



These beads are described as "blue glass, decorated with yellow stripes (Murano)." They are tentatively dated to the 17th century (with a question mark!) and are in the Diocesan Museum collection in Köln. All the glass beads in this rosary are of the same type; the marker beads are slightly larger and each of them is set off by small bone beads and rather clumsy bone disks or caps on either side. Also included in this rosary are carved bone "Five Wounds" markers: two small arms ending in hands, two feet, a heart (?) and a skull.

The smaller beads seem to be arranged in six groups of nine (?) beads (though the last group now has only six). Attached to the loop is a short straight string with a marker bead, three small beads and another marker, as on a modern rosary. This is rather an odd number, and my guess is that, like many old rosaries, this has been re-strung at some point, perhaps in an attempt to make it look more "modern." Or it could be simply missing a few beads, which not rare either.

Iclear from looking at these beads that the decoration is not just a simple "stripe." However, once you are reasonably adept at making lampworked beads, it's not too difficult to do.

The first step is to melt a thin rod of a contrasting colored glass and make a series of loops back and forth on the surface of the bead:



A metal pick can then be used to "drag" the centers of these loops downward.



Repeated around the bead, this makes a nice looped or "feathered" pattern.



The middle bead in the illustration above starts with a series of straight red stripes instead of continuous loops, and the other two beads illustrate open loops (top) and closed loops with a yellow filling (bottom).

Using different stripes and dragging some parts up and some parts down can produce some very complex-looking zigzagged and "feathered" beads, but it's really just surface decoration and simple to do.



So we have evidence of beads with at least this simple style of decoration being used for a paternoster. They were likely more expensive than ordinary glass beads because of the additional labor -- certainly today these beads aren't cheap unless you make them yourself or know someone who makes their own.

Lampworked beads are something I don't know as much about as I'd like to. I have books on Egyptian and medieval glass, but there are very few beads in them and they're rather earlier than I'm really interested in. When in the Middle Ages did beads with this looped-and-dragged technique become common in Europe? Who made them and where? How far did they travel in trade? Who could afford them? I'd welcome some book recommendations if anyone knows of good sources.

More about "complex" glass beads another time.