| Original Message: The Glass |
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Dear Ali, The beads cannot exist before the time of the glass! The Venetian beads exploit a translucent red glass that was only first used by Venice at ca. 1825. (It has not been demonstrated to be earlier, except possibly at Bohemia. No one knows when the Bohemians devised it, but it cannot be a lot earlier. They mainly used it to make glass reproductions of their famous garnets.) I am very careful to say "Venetian or European" because I don't know, for certain, who may have made these trade beads first (including the brown-&-white agate-glass beads—that are also in European red, blue, and green combined with white, and from the same general time). Show me a single bead whose identity is not controversial, that is from the Islamic Period, that is made with translucent red glass. (As far as I know, without exception, ALL red glass from ancient times is OPAQUE copper-red—a glass that has been made continuously since at least 500 BCE.) From Medieval European times, there are a very few examples of translucent red glass, that was sparingly used in stained-glass windows. Also, it is said the Chinese made a dusky translucent red glass, used in some beads—but this is also fairly distinctive. Show me a single lampworked bead from the Islamic Period. Same argument. The bead cannot exist before the technology to make it existed. And, let's be clear. The COMBED BEADS have an authentic Islamic Period prototype, that the Venetian beads copy. They are very similar-looking—but they are not the same. Nevertheless, the bead world is full of people who naively believe that everything that looks like something else IS that something else. I don't know of a prototype for the agate-glass beads. I do think the Chinese made a version of them—but I believe these are 20th C. beads, from the time when they learned lampworking from the Japanese, who learned it from Europeans. Jamey All rights reserved by Bead Collector Network and its users |
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