by John Browne
Glass warfare
Some of the most highly sought-after Venetian objects, often produced with cristallo, were mirrors. Glass, especially with a thin reflective coating applied to its surface, was a far superior way of creating a mirror than using a polished metal sheet.14 However, uneven surfaces and poorly reflective silvering left a lot to be desired. ‘One sees someone else there rather more than oneself,’ one fifteenth-century observer remarked.15 By improving the glass base and using a new material for silvering, glassmakers were able to produce the most ‘divinely beautiful, pure and incorruptible’ mirrors, ‘even if the price is excessive’.16 Perfectly transparent windows and mercury-coated glass mirrors were shipped out from Venice to wealthy households in Paris and London. In the seventeenth century, these extravagantly embellished luxuries were the height of fashion, bringing light into the aristocracy’s grand chambers and reflecting the beauty of the inhabitants. The finest Venetian mirrors were sold for astronomical prices. One piece, framed in silver, was purchased for almost three times more than a painting by Raphael. Cabinets aux miroirs, rooms lined with mirrors, became the wonder of the day, both as optical phenomena and displays of wealth. Queen Anne of Austria and Catherine de’ Medici both had them built.
Unable to produce glass of equal quality, the French were spending huge sums of money to import decorative glass objects from Venice. The trade balance became unsustainable and so, in 1664, French politician Jean-Baptiste Colbert asked Pierre de Bonzi, the French Ambassador to Venice, to tempt Venetian glass artisans to Paris. Bonzi replied, ‘whoever might suggest that they go to France would run the risk of being thrown into the sea’.17 The Republic of Venice recognised the economic importance of its glass industry and did everything it could to keep hold of its monopoly, closely guarding its skills and trade secrets. Glassmakers were given enormous privileges, such as the right to carry small swords, and were given a prominent place during the procession of the Feast of the Ascension, all to entice them to stay in Venice. Even a noble who married the daughter of a glassmaker would not have to forfeit his rank, a powerful gesture in a status-ridden city. But the Venetians did not rely on prestige alone to protect their trade. Any glassmaker leaving Murano would face severe consequences. The Council of Ten, the Republic’s secretive executive body, had ruled that ‘if any worker or artist should transport his talents to a foreign country and if he does not obey the order to return, all of his closest relatives will be put in prison’. If that failed, ‘an emissary will be sent to kill him and, after his death, his family will be set free’.18
Eventually, Bonzi did find three venal, risk-taking workers who were willing to leave Venice in return for a huge sum of money. In June 1665, the workers arrived in Paris and set up their workshops on the Rue de Reuilly. Twenty more Murano glassworkers soon followed, enticed by large salaries on offer at the newly established Royal Company of Glass and Mirrors at Saint-Gobain, near Paris. The Venetian authorities duly retaliated by threatening to gaol their families and seize their property, but since too many workers had already left, their threats became increasingly empty. Colbert even arranged for some of the workers’ wives to join them in Paris. However, in January 1667 a Muranese worker in Paris came down with a fever and died. Three weeks later, another worker died after complaining of intense stomach pains. The word on the street was that they had been poisoned by the Venetian authorities. Being Venetian, they believed in conspiracy, and so the workers began to return to Murano. For a little while this halted progress at Saint-Gobain, but it was too late. Many of Venice’s trade secrets had already been passed on and production of French glass and mirrors took off.
In 1682, Louis XIV used the output of the thriving French glass industry to construct the greatest cabinet aux miroirs ever built: the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Seventeen huge mirrors filled the giant arches of the hall, each consisting of eighteen smaller square mirrors. ‘The mirrors are false windows facing the real ones and expand this hall a million times over so it seems almost infinite,’ wrote the Mercure Galant gazette.19 The mirrors got cheaper and bigger and, in 1700, the Royal Company cast a piece of glass that was three metres long by one metre wide. In France, the glass industry soon rivalled, and then overtook, that of Venice, whose trade secrets were increasingly leaking into neighbouring European countries through espionage and betrayal. In 1680, the Venetian Ambassador lamented: ‘I have tears in my eyes when I see how these many factories, which by an admirable gift that Providence, nature and hard work had granted particularly to us, have been so transported and sustained by the unpunished spitefulness of a few of our fellow citizens.’20 At the end of the seventeenth century, the Venetian glass industry was on the verge of collapse. Muranese glasshouses failed to keep up with technological and stylistic innovations, such as lead crystal glass, created elsewhere in Europe.21 The Council of Ten made the situation worse by putting in place restrictive regulations to protect the property rights of glassmakers and maintain the price of glass products. By doing so they eliminated the flow of new ideas into Venice and stifled innovation.
In Great Britain, renowned Parisian glassmaker Georges Bontemps helped the glass factory of the Chance Brothers in Birmingham to acquire French workers and their know-how.22 He later moved there himself to work after fleeing the French Revolution, taking with him his unique expertise in sheet glassmaking.23 But in spite of the influx of experts and ideas, there remained a barrier to the growth of the British industry. Since 1746 glass had been taxed heavily and only the rich could afford to buy it. Few homeowners could spare the money for windows, especially as the government taxed the windows as well as the glass from which they were made. This tax was ‘daylight robbery’. The Lancet described it as ‘an absurd impost on light’ and ‘one of the most cruel the Government could possibly inflict on the nation’24 because it was causing so much ill health. In 1845 the tax was repealed and the glass industry began to grow rapidly. ‘The manufacture of plate glass adds another to the thousand and one instances of the advantages of unrestricted and unfettered trade,’ wrote Charles Dickens.25 With a sudden abundance of cheap glass, architects began to experiment with glass on an unprecedented scale.
The Crystal Palace
Thirty thousand eager spectators stood below the glass roof of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London. ‘Around them, amidst them, and over their heads was displayed all that is useful or beautiful in nature or in art,’ wrote The Times.26 ‘Above them rose a glittering arch far more lofty and spacious than the vaults even of our noblest cathedrals.’27 The crowds were awaiting the arrival of Queen Victoria to open the 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations. As the Queen was driven by carriage through the gates of the park, the towering glass and iron structure of the Palace came into view in front of her and a frigate on the Serpentine fired a salute. Fortunately, fears that the blast of the guns would ‘shiver the glass roof of the Palace and thousands of ladies will be cut into mincemeat’ were not justified.28
Inside the cavernous glass structure, the most accomplished and magnificent inventions and craft from around the world were on display. Exotic silks, jewels and spices from the East stood alongside the latest scientific contraptions of the West. Alfred Krupp’s new cast-iron guns sat next to the daguerreotype and Fox Talbot’s calotype. Henry Bessemer had yet to turn his attention to the improvement of iron and steel manufacture, but he demonstrated a new vacuum table to aid the grinding and polishing of glass and a variety of inventions for improving the extraction of juice from sugar cane.29 One hundred thousand exhibits were on show. And in the centre of the Palace was a magnificent eight-metre-high British crystal glass fountain.
Visitors paid a shilling, an entire day’s wage for a labourer at the time. Many people must have thought it was worth it, since over a quarter of the population of Great Britain went. Travel was still a luxury and photography still in its infancy, but everyone could experience first-hand the wonders of the world on their own doorstep. The Great Exh
ibition was not just an amusement park. It was a trade show and marketing venue for inventions of the Industrial Revolution with the transparent Crystal Palace acting as a giant shop window for the competing products of nations from around the world. Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s consort, had been persuaded to hold the exhibition and become its Patron by Henry Cole, a civil servant. He had been overwhelmed by the scale and magnificence of the 1849 Exposition of the Second Republic in Paris. Cole decided that Great Britain would have to go one better, putting on not just a national but an international exhibition. That sort of display, he assured Prince Albert, would confirm Britain’s position as the leading industrialised nation and affirm its continuing global eminence.
The Palace, designed by the architect and engineer Joseph Paxton, was an ideal venue for an exhibition. Sun streamed in from every angle, displaying each exhibit in natural light. At the time, glass was not considered a building material by many and Paxton was one of very few engineers experienced in its architectural use; he had already built the world’s biggest greenhouse, 70 metres long, for the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire.30 That was modest compared to his design for the 600-metre-long and 150-metre-wide Palace, built with 3,300 iron columns and 300,000 panes of glass.31 The Chance Brothers won the contract to provide the glass, having previously been employed for the greenhouse at Chatsworth. They received a special commendation for bringing in new practices from Europe through Bontemps and others, being praised for ‘the liberality, intelligence and spirit of the enterprise which they have manifested at great cost and risk’.32 Glass had really become a global industry.33
The Crystal Palace made London ‘100 per cent glass-conscious’.34 The world suddenly became aware of the importance of glass, not just for objects of beauty, but also as a utilitarian building material. However, each pane of glass in the Crystal Palace was still made individually by hand and blown by human breath. To make flat glass for windows, spheres or cylinders were first blown, cut open and then flattened.35 This was expensive to do and often resulted in windows marked with defects. Larger sheets of glass were produced by casting molten glass on to an iron surface, but without a perfectly smooth bed on which to set the glass the surface would be rough. Grinding and polishing the sheet was a costly process in which about half the glass was lost.
The widespread use of glass as an architectural material would have to wait for an extraordinary innovation. In 1952, Alastair Pilkington invented the float glass process. Float glass is produced by dipping an iron bar into a pool of molten glass and pulling it out to form a continuous sheet. This sheet is drawn over a bath of smooth molten tin so that the glass also sets smoothly and does not need further working. Pilkington’s process produced perfectly clear glass at a fraction of the cost of traditional processes.36 Soon glass fronts became the norm for new city buildings. A recently built glass-fronted skyscraper in London pierces upwards to a height of 310 metres looking, appropriately, just like a shard of glass.37
Glass is now used in profusion, creating objects of both astonishing beauty and everyday utility. Mirrors and glass windows are no longer the preserve of the rich; the world about us has become coated in transparent and reflecting surfaces.
Glittering surfaces
In The Music Lesson, a photograph by Hiroshi Sugimoto, two wax figures stand beside a virginal. Above the female figure, who is playing the instrument, an ebony-framed mirror reflects her face against the backdrop of the studio’s chequered marble floor. In the same reflection, the three black legs of the camera tripod can also be seen. The photograph is an approximate staging of a painting of the same name by Johannes Vermeer.38 In that painting, although much harder to make out, a leg and a crossbar of the artist’s easel are reflected in the mirror. Using a mirror, both Sugimoto and Vermeer make us aware of the artist, self-consciously placing himself in the room alongside his subjects. Mirrors provide an alternative perspective on the scene, expanding our vista and adding a level of reality. The image might even seem to come from behind the solid glass. In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, Alice amuses herself by pretending that the image seen in the looking-glass is another world. As she walks through the looking-glass, she leaves everything behind and enters a world of imagination. Jonathan Miller, author of On Reflection, explains: ‘Apart from the straightforward sensuous allure of things which shine, shimmer, glint, glimmer, gleam or flash, reflections appeal to us, rather as shadows do, by paradoxically representing states of affairs whose actual existence is somewhere other than where they seem to be.’39
The earliest mirrors were objects of wonder and introspection. Plato was the first Western thinker to discuss them: ‘You can take a mirror and turn it in all directions: from less than nothing you will have the sun and the stars in the sky, yourself and different animals, furniture and plants, and all the objects you just mentioned. Yes, all of these apparent objects, without any reality to them whatsoever.’40 The mirror image, Plato believed, was deceptive and distorted. Narcissus confused the illusion of a mirror of water with reality and became enchanted by his own reflection. Unable to stop gazing at the beautiful being he believed he saw on the other side of the water, Narcissus died. On the other hand, Socrates suggested that if a youth viewed himself in a mirror he would understand himself better.
Today images in mirrors give even the most outwardly confident a sense of wellbeing. There are very few people who can walk past a mirror without glancing at their reflection. I wonder what life would be like without our reflected images. But glass and mirrors have done far more than just change how we perceive ourselves within society. They have also transformed our view of ourselves within the Universe.
‘If they had seen what we see’
In the summer of 1609, Galileo Galilei, at the time living in Venice, heard news of a device for ‘seeing faraway things as though nearby’.41 The device, he was told, was made from a tube with a piece of curved glass placed at each end. Galileo was intrigued, but wary: curved glass was known to distort, and placing two pieces of glass together was assumed to create further distortion. A master craftsman, Galileo bought glass lenses from a spectacle maker and set about constructing his own telescope. By the end of the summer, he had created one which could magnify by eight times. He demonstrated it to the Venetian lawmakers ‘to the infinite amazement of all’.42 With his telescope, Galileo observed objects never before seen by human eyes. He mapped hundreds of new stars and even, to his surprise, viewed mountains on the moon and moons around Jupiter.
At the time, the Earth was widely believed to sit at the centre of the Universe. Spherical planets and stars would rotate around this centre in crystalline spheres. The irregular features of the night sky, which Galileo observed, contradicted long-held beliefs about the perfect nature of these heavenly spheres. The more accurate measurements of planetary orbits made by the telescope also drove a stake through the heart of the Earth; it was no longer the centre of the Universe. Galileo’s observations provided the evidence for the controversial new model of the Universe, communicated by Nicolaus Copernicus in 1543, in which the Sun was placed at the centre.43 That model not only contradicted prevailing religious doctrine, but was also an affront to common sense. How could the Earth move through space without its motion being felt by people on the ground?44 The evidence provided by Galileo’s new instrument, however, continued to stand up. For the first time since antiquity, the extent of the night sky was expanding. And with the knowledge conveyed by silicon-based telescopes, Western thought began to break away from a view of the Universe that had changed little since the time of Aristotle. ‘If they had seen what we see,’ Galileo wrote of earlier astronomers, ‘they would have judged as we judge.’45
Silicon opened the heavens beyond the natural limitations of the eye. The further we saw, the further we wanted to see. Galileo’s invention started a drive to build ever more powerful telescopes. By the middle of the seventeenth century, wealthy astronomers were building telescopes up
to 50 metres in length, requiring a system of masts and pulleys for operation. The greater length of telescopes was one way of overcoming the blurring of the image which resulted from the curvature of the lens.46 In these ‘refracting telescopes’, different colours of light were bent by a different amount as they passed through the lens, producing an unclear image. Isaac Newton overcame this problem by inventing a ‘reflecting telescope’ that used mirrors rather than lenses. The mirrors reflected each part of the incoming light in the same way, regardless of its colour, so that a clear image was produced. To Newton, his telescope was further proof that white light is composed of a spectrum of colours.
Even when very large mirrors were used, the image produced remained clear. And the bigger the mirror, the further the telescope could see. Eighteenth-century astronomer William Herschel took this principle to extreme lengths.47 He did more than any astronomer to improve the power of reflecting telescopes, extending our view of the Universe far outside the Solar System. ‘The great end in view,’ he wrote to Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, ‘is to increase what I have called “The Power of Extending into Space … ”’48 By grinding and polishing larger and larger mirrors, Herschel was eventually able to resolve starry pinpricks of light into diffuse objects.49 Some of these ‘nebulae’ were later shown to be galaxies akin to the Milky Way. Reflecting telescopes have grown in size ever since: from the two-and-a-half-metre circumference mirror in the Hooker telescope on Mount Wilson in 1917, to the five-metre Hale telescope on Palomar Mountain in 1948. Today, telescopes, with mirrors of more than 10 metres, sit high on mountains in the Canaries and Hawaiian islands, recording the night sky around us with unprecedented accuracy.