You know what you look like every morning because you look in a bathroom mirror. But until the 15th century no European owned a glass mirror. If you wanted to see yourself, looked into a lake, or a piece of bronze. When did wall mounted glass mirrors come into existence? HH owns a lovely 17th century style Venetian glass mirror, etched, and mounted on wood. He wants to know when highly decorated mirrors entered the history of the looking glass.
The story began in Venice, the Floating City, or La Serenissima, known for its most famous product, glass, as diaphanous as water, and as difficult to mold. Glass, like water, is a liquid.
In the 15th century the island of Murano rose to prominence as the world’s greatest glassmaking center, named the “Isle of Glass.” There they made first recorded mirror in 1369. Few people afforded a glass mirror because of the difficulty in their manufacture. A looking glass owned by a nobleman from the 14th to the 17th century was a prized possession, often listed in their estate inventory upon death. People often willed their mirrors to heirs.
The process of making a silvered glass mirror was laborious and dangerous. Glassmakers fused glass with a silver alloy, and mercury, a toxic substance. In 1540 Vincenzo Redor patented a process for the levelling and polishing of a rolled glass sheet, producing for the first time a uniformly shaped mirrored glass. In the mid-15th century Angelo Barrovier added lead to the glass compound to create Cristillo glass, transparent, colorless, and reminiscent of rock crystal. The year 1546 saw the founding of the Venice Mirror Guild. By 1600 mirrors became fashionable. They exported them to the great Courts of Europe, purchased in small rectangles of mirrored silver glass in a simple wooden frame.
Flat Mirror Technique
Various techniques in manufactory made this new and precious commodity. They called the process the flat mirror technique. Glaziers melted tin in glass tubs and applied when very hot to the flat glass. They polished the tin to make it reflective, and added gold and bronze to the mixture, followed by rubbing the reflective surface of the glass mirror with iron oxide powder to make it shiny and transparent. Another technique, invented later, involved quicksilver. They pounded sheets of tin and spread, then rubbed with quicksilver with chamois rags. Once done, both the tin rubbed with quicksilver and the flat glass were hot-pressured together. Any bubbles formed in this process rendered the mirror unusable.
The hand rolled glass didn’t always offer the gazer a true reflection. However, people didn’t use mirrors as vanity pieces, but to cast light around a room. A candle in front of a mirror became exponential in lighting power. Louis XIV’ s hundreds of mirrors purchased at great expense for the ballroom at Versailles is a good example.
Venetian Glass Mirrors
Venice became known for the perfection of glass blowing because of Byzantine craftsman that worked in Venice as early as the 5th and 6th centuries. Venice was settled by people of the East. Other peoples with a strong glass tradition came as well, such as Syrians and Egyptians, the original master glass makers. Venice became a refuge for many people of many cultures because in the 5th and 6th century as Rome began to crumble. Barbarian hoards invaded the once cultured city. Romans fled the area as well. The Venice marshland was not desired real estate and difficult to conquer. Wise people of many parts of the Mediterranean world found that a town built on marches and water impenetrable by the Barbarian hoards. No castles with moats were necessary in Venice.
HH’s mirror is in the taste Rococo, an important signature of 17 and 18th century Venetian art. The first such mirrors, with elaborate shapes and etched glass carvings were a tour de force of the glassmaker’s art. They hand-cut those rounded shapes. The early ancestor of HH’s Venetian glass mirror is from the early 17th century when the style for curvilinear shapes in furniture and decorative arts replaced the previous more linear style. HH’s mirror is a 19th century reproduction of a 17th century Venetian mirror. The 19th century collector of fine Venetian glass mirrors commissioned a larger copy of a 17th or 18th century mirror.
The value of HH’s mirror is $1,800.