Millefiori Antique Venetian Trade Bead, Amber w/ Blue, Black & Brick, 37x14mm
SKU: JSD-1225
Sale price
$24.00
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Only 1 in stock
Description
- This interesting antique Venetian millefiori trade bead seems like it might have a cased core of 5 layers of blue, white and brick, surrounded by a thin coat of amber or maybe a lot of tiny amber canes through which some of the red shows.
- In either case it was interesting enough to be chosen to join the Bead Timeline Exhibit and the Bead Museum in Washington DC (sadly now closed).
- 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-to late 1800s
- From the collection of Joyce Diamanti, bead researcher, writer and educator