I'm not sure if it was the artist's intention, but the 3 black dots in white circles look like faces to me and the yellow spikes radiating out from the circles give them hair a raising effect... or maybe I've just been looking too closely at murrini for too long!
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, early 1800s to early 1900s.
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