engraved
cristallo
glasses and flutes of Venice because Murano glassmakers had alchemical secrets, skills learned over hundreds of years. The English hadn’t the materials, the knowledge, or the climate. 2 At least not yet.
But now the Duke of Buckingham, who virtually controlled the monopoly on English glass production, was
buying
Venetian glassmakers and glassmaking secrets. His agents, they said, were everywhere along the Venetian coast and islands, offering money, making deals to bring Italian glassmakers to London. It wasn’t the first time Venetian glassmakers had betrayed their secrets. Fifty years before, the glassmaking priest and alchemist Antonio Neri had been enticed into the Antwerp house of the Portuguese nobleman Emanuel Zimines and persuaded to write out his spagyrical secrets in a book published in Florence in 1612 called
The Art of Glass.
Persuaded? Some say he was tortured. Now the English Royal Society had paid the physician Christopher Merrett to translate Neri’s book into English because the English glassmakers needed the ancient alchemical secrets. No Muranese glassmakers, Morelli intoned, should ever have been allowed to leave the island. The Venetian civic council had been too weak. Just as Daedalus died for trying to carry away the secrets of his labyrinth, so, they said, Neri had paid with his life in an alleyway in Pisa in 1614. He was only thirty-eight. He would practise alchemy no more. The Venetian brotherhood had seen to that. 3
But despite the ban on the importation of glass to England, Greene, a member of the Worshipful Company of Glass Sellers, was still ordering Venetian glass in large consignments like this. Morelli knew this meant only one thing: Venetian glass was still far superior to the glass Buckingham’s men were making and Greene was prepared to take the risk of importation as long as he could get away with it. The glass seller had drawn page after page of designs and sizes, specifying width of bowls, size of stem, even the thickness of the glass. Morelli’s eyes glanced briefly down the order—drinking glasses, claret glasses for French wine, sack glasses for Spanish wine, small beakers for brandy, goblets, a new design for a beaker with a flaring lip, forty dozen goblets, 286 dozen beer glasses—5,400 items in all, including a number of specialist items such as mirror plates, strings of beads, and prisms. This order would easily fill one of Morelli’s three ships.
Morelli did not like the change in the Englishman’s tone in this letter—an edge of threat and a new sense of power that membership of the Worshipful Company of Glass Sellers had given him, as well as his insinuations, his underhanded way of implying that unless the quality improved he would buy his glasses elsewhere. This time Greene wanted Morelli’s ship to sail to King’s Lynn, not into London, for, he said, he wanted to meet the consignment there and oversee its unpacking onto canal barges that would carry the chests down the fenland waterways and into Cambridge for the fair at the end of August. The glass would be safer travelling on water than on the road, Greene wrote, even if it did increase the length and time of the journey. It would also be cheaper. Morelli thought for a moment. That would mean shipping by July. They had only May and June to complete the order. 4
During May, when the sun was high and hot in the sky, Morelli’s men unloaded hundreds of barrels of quartz pebbles that had been sailed down the River Po to the coast from the beds of the River Ticino, and then sailed around the coast to Murano’s port. Here they roasted the quartz in furnaces and when the pebbles were cooled, pulverised them, grinding them to a pure white powder called silica, which they stored in sacks at the back of the glasshouse. Now the master glassmakers mixed up the batch, stirring into the white powder secret amounts of soda imported from Syria and Egypt, which would lower the melting temperature of the
cristallo
glasses and flutes of Venice because Murano glassmakers had alchemical secrets, skills learned over hundreds of years. The English hadn’t the materials, the knowledge, or the climate. 2 At least not yet.
But now the Duke of Buckingham, who virtually controlled the monopoly on English glass production, was
buying
Venetian glassmakers and glassmaking secrets. His agents, they said, were everywhere along the Venetian coast and islands, offering money, making deals to bring Italian glassmakers to London. It wasn’t the first time Venetian glassmakers had betrayed their secrets. Fifty years before, the glassmaking priest and alchemist Antonio Neri had been enticed into the Antwerp house of the Portuguese nobleman Emanuel Zimines and persuaded to write out his spagyrical secrets in a book published in Florence in 1612 called
The Art of Glass.
Persuaded? Some say he was tortured. Now the English Royal Society had paid the physician Christopher Merrett to translate Neri’s book into English because the English glassmakers needed the ancient alchemical secrets. No Muranese glassmakers, Morelli intoned, should ever have been allowed to leave the island. The Venetian civic council had been too weak. Just as Daedalus died for trying to carry away the secrets of his labyrinth, so, they said, Neri had paid with his life in an alleyway in Pisa in 1614. He was only thirty-eight. He would practise alchemy no more. The Venetian brotherhood had seen to that. 3
But despite the ban on the importation of glass to England, Greene, a member of the Worshipful Company of Glass Sellers, was still ordering Venetian glass in large consignments like this. Morelli knew this meant only one thing: Venetian glass was still far superior to the glass Buckingham’s men were making and Greene was prepared to take the risk of importation as long as he could get away with it. The glass seller had drawn page after page of designs and sizes, specifying width of bowls, size of stem, even the thickness of the glass. Morelli’s eyes glanced briefly down the order—drinking glasses, claret glasses for French wine, sack glasses for Spanish wine, small beakers for brandy, goblets, a new design for a beaker with a flaring lip, forty dozen goblets, 286 dozen beer glasses—5,400 items in all, including a number of specialist items such as mirror plates, strings of beads, and prisms. This order would easily fill one of Morelli’s three ships.
Morelli did not like the change in the Englishman’s tone in this letter—an edge of threat and a new sense of power that membership of the Worshipful Company of Glass Sellers had given him, as well as his insinuations, his underhanded way of implying that unless the quality improved he would buy his glasses elsewhere. This time Greene wanted Morelli’s ship to sail to King’s Lynn, not into London, for, he said, he wanted to meet the consignment there and oversee its unpacking onto canal barges that would carry the chests down the fenland waterways and into Cambridge for the fair at the end of August. The glass would be safer travelling on water than on the road, Greene wrote, even if it did increase the length and time of the journey. It would also be cheaper. Morelli thought for a moment. That would mean shipping by July. They had only May and June to complete the order. 4
During May, when the sun was high and hot in the sky, Morelli’s men unloaded hundreds of barrels of quartz pebbles that had been sailed down the River Po to the coast from the beds of the River Ticino, and then sailed around the coast to Murano’s port. Here they roasted the quartz in furnaces and when the pebbles were cooled, pulverised them, grinding them to a pure white powder called silica, which they stored in sacks at the back of the glasshouse. Now the master glassmakers mixed up the batch, stirring into the white powder secret amounts of soda imported from Syria and Egypt, which would lower the melting temperature of the
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