Millefiori Antique Venetian Trade Bead, Early Multi-Color Bundled Cane Designs, 36x9mm
SKU: AFE-1847
Sale price
$30.00
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Only 1 in stock
Description
- Unusually long, skinny antique Venetian millefiori trade bead 36x9mm
- The design is similar to the familiar red white and blue version in AFE-2237, but here you can clearly see uneven lines where possibly dozens if not hundreds of micro-canes, apparently not much thicker than a hair, were arranged and bundled together before being fused into this design. The artistry is astonishing. And this is the only version I've seen that includes amber with the blue, white and brick red.
- 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 to early 1900s