this curious now fragmental piece of silk damask, has at one time been thickly strewed with trefoils cut out of gilt metal, but very thin, and not sewed but glued on to the silk: many of these leaves have fallen off, and those remaining turned black.
From among these examples a few will show the reader how the goldsmith had been tasked to work upon them as jeweller also, and gem the liturgical garments to which these shreds belong, with real or imitated precious stones. In the orphrey upon the back of that very rich fine crimson velvet chasuble, No. 1375, pp. 81-2, the crossed nimb about our Lord's head is gemmed with stones set in silver gilt; and the sockets still left on the piece of crimson velvet, No. 8334, p. 199, unmistakably speak for themselves.
Besides precious stones, coral, and seed-pearls,
Glass,
coloured and wrought into small beads and bugles, is another of those hard materials, the presence of which we find in this collection. As now, so far back during the mediæval period, the Venetians, at the island of Murano, wrought small glass beads and bugles of all colours, as well as pastes—smalti—in every tint for mosaics, and imitations of jewels. This art, which they had learned from the Greeks, they followed with signal success; and likely is it that from Venice came the several specimens of glass—blue, like lapis lazuli—which we still see on that beautiful frontal in Westminster Abbey,[1]—the work of our countryman Peter de Ispagna,[2] the member of an old Essex family. At No. 8276, pp. 168-9, is a piece of an orphrey for a chasuble, plentifully embroidered with glass beads and bugles, which shows how much such a style of ornament was used towards the latter end of the twelfth century, at least in Lower Germany, and some of the Italian provinces. Belonging to St. Paul's, London, A.D. 1295, among many other amices, there was one having glass stones upon it; "amictus . . . ornatus lapidibus vitreis magnis et parvis per totum in capsis argenteis deauratis, &c."[3]
Enamel.
Another form of glass fastened by heat to gold and copper—enamel, the invention neither of Egypt, Greece, nor Italy, but of our own old Britons,[4] was extensively employed as an adornment upon textiles. Besides the examples we have given,[5] that gorgeous "chesable of red cloth
