Antique Venetian millefiori trade bead with many wonderful bundled cane murrini. This bead also has a white core which is extremely rare. 30x12mm
The most exciting thing I just discovered is on the side of the bead not shown in the image: Crescent moon and star on a red background. This is widely recognized today as a sign of Islam, but in 1844 (about the time this bead was probably made) it had just become the official emblem of the Ottoman Empire.
There are plenty of other great murrine on this bead, but asymmentrical figurative ones are extremely rare.
Trade beads almost always have holes big enough for 2mm leather cords
Millefiori, the Italian name for these colorful beads, means 1000 flowers
The beads are decorated with slices of glass canes created either, by bundling super thin glass rods together to form the pattern then fusing them, or encasing round or star pattern canes in concentric layers of different colored glass.
The canes are sliced into murrini, which are laid out on a hot surface as the semi-molten glass cores of the beads are rolled over them, picking up the slices.
Made in Venice, Italy for the African trade mid-1800s to early 1900s
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