Millefiori Antique Venetian Trade Bead, Rare Early Ambitious Bundled Cane Flower/Stars, 30x10mm
SKU: AFE-931
Sale price
$29.00
Shipping calculated at checkout
Only 1 in stock
Description
- A terrifically difficult design of multi-colored six-layer stars/flowers build up with an astonishing number of micro-canes. 30x10mm
- The bead has a few barely visible chips at one end but the surface for this collector piece is pristine
- 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