ANCIENT GLASSES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 129, 2 June 1934, Page 8 (Supplement)

ANCIENT GLASSES.

VALHALLA OF BEAKERS. MIGHTY MEDIEVAL GOBLETS. A WONDERFUL COLLECTION. With every matron of social pretensions now deeply concerned over the proper sliapes and colours of cordial and claret glasses, the collection of drinking vessels at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art acquires more than antiquarian significance. In two small rooms have been gathered some of the most priceless treasures ever turned ont for the drinking activity of man. There are great beakers and goblets of the medieval Gothic "wald-glas"— or "forest glass" —green as the leaves of the trees, and curiously studded with knobby designs. Much of the charm of these cups, whose capacities were built to baronial gullets, is in the irregularity of their shapes and in the garbled tones of green where the varying thin and thick sections of the glass let the light streak through in tapestried effects. Removed by years from these trolllike goblets, are samples of the enamelled glassware of the fifteen hundred. These are very colourful specimens. Brilliant blues, reds and golds splash their surfaces, confined within the outlines of griffins, coats-of-arms, bibulous harvest scenes and jousting tournaments. Compared with the painted-on transparent enamelling of the nineteenth century, these earlier efforts, fused to the bowl, seem crude and ungainly, but something of the fire and vitality of the Renaissance designers has transcended their medium, leaving the viewer, hundreds of years after, with a sense of the 1 vigour and stir of that time. There are glasses and tumblers here: goblets and pokals. But most interesting of all —more interesting even than the three cases of English glasses, sturdy and plain, with their strange, steely lustre, like bubbles in a gray dawn —are the Dutch glasses of the early eighteenth century, whose designs are stippled with a diamondpoint on the inside of the glass. This ghostly pricking was a ■unique Dutch art, the process never having taken hold, it seems, beyond the borders of the Low Countries. So delicate and fragile is this artistry that, at first, the glass seems to be unpatterned, and it stands strangely nude and colourless, with the bowl holding what seems to be a tumbled cobweb. It is only when one strains or cranes the neck, or allows strong light to shine behind, that the seeker is rewarded with a vision of breath-taking brilliance. For suddenly there seems to blaze before him the fine features of some departed goddess, the slope of a greenwood park or the waters of a flowing foxmtain, all mobile and alive. Such is the amazing delicacy with which the glass has been worked.