A History of Inventions, Discoveries, and Origins. Johann Beckmann
habitudine, cogitata; experimentis illustrata. Hamburgi, 1685, 8vo.
317 Joh. Molleri Cimbria Literata. Havniæ, 1774, fol. i. p. 88.
318 Miscellanea Berolinensia, i. p. 94.
319 The author shows only, in a brief manner, in how many ways this precipitate can be used; but he makes no mention of employing it in colouring glass.
320 I cannot, however, affirm that the vasa murrhina of the ancients were a kind of porcelain coloured with this salt of gold. This is only a mere conjecture.
321 Alchymia Andr. Libavii. Franc. 1606, fol. ii. tract. i. c. 34.
322 See Gotting. Gel. Anzeigen, 1778, p. 177.
323 It is well known that Neri’s works are translated into Kunkel’s Ars Vitraria, the edition of which, published at Nuremberg in 1743, I have in my possession. The time Neri lived is not mentioned in the Dictionary of Learned Men; but it appears, from the above edition of Kunkel, that he was at Florence in 1601, and at Antwerp in 1609. The oldest Italian edition of his works I have ever seen is L’arte vetraria—del R. R. Antonio Neri, Fiorentino. In Venetia, 1663. The first edition, however, must be older. [It is Florence, Giunti, 1612.—Ed.]
324 Neri, b. vii. c. 129, pp. 157 and 174.
325 Amst. 1651, vol. iv. p. 78. Lewis says that Furnus Philosophicus was printed as early as 1648.
326 Glauber first made known liquor of flint, and recommended it for several uses. See Ettmulleri Opera, Gen. 1736, 4 vol. fol. ii. p. 170.
327 Lewis, Zusammenhang der Künste. Zür. 1764, 2 vols. 8vo, i. p. 279.
328 The first edition was printed at Augsburg, in duodecimo, and the same year at Amsterdam. It has been often printed since, as in 1739, in 3 vols. 4to, without name or place.
329 A French translation of Orschal and Grummet is added to l’Art de la Verrérie de Neri, Merret et Kunkel. Paris, 1752, 4to. The editor is the Baron de Holbach.
330 See Peter le Vieil’s Kunst auf Glas zu malen, Nuremberg, 1779, 4to, ii. p. 25. This singular performance must, in regard to history, particularly that of the ancients, be read with precaution. Seldom has the author perused the works which he quotes; sometimes one cannot find in them what he assures us he found, and very often he misrepresents their words.
331 In what the art of Abraham Helmback, a Nuremberg artist, consisted, I do not know. Doppelmayer, in his Account of the Mathematicians and Artists of Nuremberg, printed in 1730, says that he fortunately revived, in 1717, according to experiments made in a glass-house, the old red glass; the proper method of preparing which had been long lost.
332 Ferber’s Briefe aus Welschland. Prague, 1773, 8vo, p. 114.
333 The devastations to which the productions of this beautiful art have been subjected are deeply to be regretted. It appears from the interesting Account of Durham Cathedral, published by the Rev. James Raine, that there was much fine stained glass in the fifteen windows of the Nine Altars which
“shed their many-colour’d light
Through the rich robes of eremites and saints;”
until the year 1795, when “their richly painted glass and mullions were swept away, and the present plain windows inserted in their place. The glass lay for a long time afterwards in baskets on the floor; and when the greater part of it had been purloined the remainder was locked up in the Galilee.” And in 1802 a beautiful ancient structure, the Great Vestry, “was, for no apparent reason, demolished, and the richly painted glass which decorated its windows was either destroyed by the workmen or afterwards purloined.” The exquisite Galilee itself had been condemned, but was saved by a happy chance.
334 In 1774 the French Academy published Le Vieil’s treatise on Glass-painting. He possessed no colour approaching to red, except the brick-red or rather rust-coloured enamel subsequently mentioned in the text, derived from iron.
335 It appears by a boast of Suger, abbot of St. Denis, which has been preserved, that the ancient glass-painters pretended to employ sapphires among their materials; hence, perhaps, the origin of the term Zaffres, under which the oxide of cobalt is still known in commerce.
336 Oxide of chromium is now substituted for the copper.
337 That such was the method in use, an attentive examination of old specimens affords sufficient evidence. One piece that I possess exhibits large bubbles in the midst of the red stratum; another consists of a stratum of red inclosed between two colourless strata: both circumstances plainly point out the only means by which such an arrangement could be produced.
338 In 1793, the French government actually collected a quantity of old red glass, with the view of extracting the gold by which it was supposed to be coloured! Le Vieil was himself a glass-painter employed in the repair of ancient windows, and the descendant of glass-painters, yet so little was he aware of the true nature of the glass, that he even fancied he could detect the marks of the brush with which he imagined the red stratum had been laid on!
339 [M. Langlois names the following writers: “Neri en 1612, Handicquer de Blancourt en 1667, Kunkel en 1679, Le Vieil en 1774, et plusieurs autres écrivains à diverses époques, decrivaient ces procédés.” (p. 192.) He fixes the restoration of the art in France at about the year 1800, when Brongniart, who had the direction of the Sèvres porcelain manufacture, worked with Méraud at the preparation of vitrifiable colours, p. 194. Among modern artists he particularly mentions Dihl, Schilt, Mortelègue, Robert, Leclair, Collins, and Willement.]
340 Bulletin de la Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale, 1826.
341 Though it is difficult to produce the copper-glass uniformly coloured, it is easy to obtain streaks and patches of a fine transparent red. For this purpose it is sufficient to fuse together 100 parts of crown-glass with one of oxide of copper, putting a lump of tin into the bottom of the crucible. Metallic iron employed in the same way as the tin throws out a bright scarlet, but