I also found this from 1400 Florence
https://www.wga.hu/art/zzdeco/1gold/15c/01i_1399.jpg
Hope it helps!

Nice examples. A shame the photo is so small.

If I had to guess the date of those I would have guessed 16th century, so perhaps they are very late 15th century? They seem very polished (in the skill sense) and “sure”, something that is less characteristic of early 15th century glass.

Nice variety of styles and techniques. I always enjoy looking at glass (as a child I was enraptured by glass artisans creating mouth-blown glass, and would have watched them for hours if my parents hadn’t dragged me away).

Thanks for the link.

https://66.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m5kcalaOqN1r60zczo1_r1_540.jpg

Diane, I know you have frequently mentioned Hellenistic influence in connection to the VMS. You’ve also mentioned Spanish, Iranian, and Indian.

My reaction has always been the same. ALL of medieval art and literature is in some way touched by Greco-Roman influence, it’s part of the history of Europe. There were Greek colonies in many regions in the Middle Ages (including Provençe, southern Italy, the Mediterranean islands, and others). There were also a couple of significant revivals in learning the Greek language in the 14th and 15th centuries. Scholars wanted to read the ancient texts.

Latin script is full of Greek scribal conventions. Indian literature (esp. Sanskrit) uses the same concepts. Medieval herbal literature was largely descended from Greek manuscripts. The Juliana Anicia Codex is in Greek.

Just as European culture greatly influenced the history of the Americas, the Greeks and Romans greatly influenced the history of the Middle East and Europe, from Pakistan to northern England.

So how does one distinguish which aspects of a manuscript relate to the natural evolution of culture, and which ones might be related to the cultural background of a specific person? Early medieval manuscripts from France have drawings with unusually long fingers as one might see in Indian cultures. Sixteenth-century Iranian art is full of Chinese motifs.

In the Middle Ages, there were Greeks living in Marseille and Florence, and Scandinavians living in Lombardy and the northern coast of Africa. Greeks living in Marseille are going to have a different culture perspective from those living in Athens. Scandinavians living in Africa will have a different culture from those in Schleswig.

Did the person or persons who designed the VMS come from another culture? Quite possibly. People were mobile. Immigration was easier in those days than it is now. There were foreign colonies everywhere. I don’t see anything particularly unusual in the possibility of multicultural influence.

Things have changed a lot since then, and especially of late, there’s a spring wind as it were. It’s such a heartening sign to see the manuscript granted equal dignity with other medieval works and taken seriously at last that I’ve even written a post about it.

Thanks for posting the comment, and for the reply.

D. O’Donovan wrote: “This is was one of numerous details in the manuscript – and not just this section – which led me to conclude that a substantial proportion of it had been first enunciated in the Hellenistic east between the 1st-3rdC AD.”

That seems to me to be a bit of a leap in logic.

Whirled, feathered and caned glass were the primary patterns used in colored Hellenistic vessels and the VMS container doesn’t include those patterns. Hellenistic influence is found in many aspects of medieval art and literature—people of the Middle Ages looked to the ancients just as we do today—but my main thrust was to discover whether the knowledge and techniques used in ancient times were still known and used around the 14th and 15th centuries and it appears that some of these skills disappeared for a few centuries, to be gradually resurrected from the late 15th century onward.

It still remains an open question whether they were capable of fabricating this in the early 15th century (or thereabouts). If it is, in fact, meant to represent layered/fused glass (in the style of cased glass), then it is ahead of its time. I was not able to find any Hellenistic examples of cased glass in which the transparent layer is fused over a colored one (the style made popular by Bohemian glassmakers Egermann and Moser in the early 19th century), although the Blue Vase (opaque over translucent) shows that they might have had the technical skills to do it.

If the VMS vessel represents something else (e.g., colors mixed in the same layer as transparent elements), it’s still fabulously ornate for its time and would only be available to a wealthy few. The creator of the VMS either had a very rich imagination or very rich friends.

D. O’Donovan wrote: “I came to the same opinion as you – that the object is made of glass.”

I’m not certain it’s made of glass. Cut crystal, like the little amphora I included in the bottom-right of the chart, can be cut and smoothed with a great deal of precision. Or, the drawing might be trying to express something other than glass (double containers or double layers, for example). It LOOKS like it might be glass (I rather hope that it is), but I don’t want to assume so without more evidence.

I came to the same opinion as you – that the object is made of glass.
I believe the top part is pierced-work, i.e. that it’s a scent-diffuser.
You can see an example of another object formed as ‘pineapple’ pierced-work depicted on an enamelled glass recovered from Begram.

The lower section of the object in the Vms contains the scent itself, and it is shown half-full.

This is was one of numerous details in the manuscript – and not just this section – which led me to conclude that a substantial proportion of it had been first enunciated in the Hellenistic east between the 1st-3rdC AD.

The process for enamelling glass survived there too, and returned to the eastern Mediterranean only around the 12thC . We know from the designs on the 12thC glasses that knowledge of the technique had followed the trade routes from the Indo-Persian contact region (i.e. that of old Bactria).

Recently, Marco Ponzi mentioned a paper by David Pingree about the transmission lines from that same region of images for the Decans and Horas – Pingree is just one of a number of scholars who have worked on the subject of the decans and horas’ transmission, but the point is that once more the origins are right, the right line of transmission too , and the time. By ‘right’ I mean in accord with the information offered by the Vms imagery.

I think it rather a pity that I weren’t first sharing that research now rather than in 2010, when even to mention European trade with medieval Egypt was to be scoffed at, and anyone who dared quote me was displaying exceptional independence of mind.

Here’s the Begram glass, showing the ‘pineapple’. Note the headband on Penelope, and the palette (I mean, the range of colours used on the glass).

https://qmnblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/alex-enamelled-glass-beaker-low-res1.jpg