Millefiori Antique Venetian Bead, Wonderfully Complex Pattern on Rare Brown Core
SKU: AFE-2292
Sale price
$18.00
Shipping calculated at checkout
Out of stock
Description
- The only one of it's kind in my collection, this one lived in a box with other brown core beads, but even more unusual is the multi-color striped pattern crisply executed in flawless detail on the outside of this perfect 16x10mm bead
- It was selected by top experts in the field, to be displayed in the Bead Timeline exhibit hosted by the Bead Museum in Washington DC.
- 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 bundling very thin glass tubes together to form the pattern, then fusing them, or encasing round or chevron pattern canes in concentric layers of different colored glass.
- The canes are sliced into murrini, which are laid out on a hot surface and 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
- Only one available