Ennion and His Legacy: Mold-Blown Glass from Ancient Rome

This isn't coin related, but for those of you interested in all things ancient, I visited the Corning Museum of Glass yesterday and saw this fascinating exhibit.

From the article...

At the end of the first century B.C., glassmakers working in the environs of Jerusalem made a revolutionary breakthrough in the way glass was made. They discovered that glass could be inflated at the end of a hollow tube. This technical achievement—glassblowing—made the production of glass vessels much quicker and easier, and allowed glassmakers to develop new shapes and decorative techniques.
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Among the earliest workshops to design and create mold-blown glass was one in which a man named Ennion worked. Ennion was the first glassmaker to sign his glass objects by incorporating his name into the inscriptions that formed part of the mold’s design, and thus he stands among a small group of glass workers whose names have come down to us from antiquity.

I was astonished by the remarkably delicate and beautiful pieces in this exhibit - a few were on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. You can see them all here...

Ennion and His Legacy: Mold-Blown Glass from Ancient Rome

This bowl, colored with cobalt was one of my favorites...

 

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Very cool! Did you get to do any glassworking during the tour?

 

The kids did some glass-blowing, but it wasn't very hands-on at all. They got to inflate the glass, but the pros did everything else. I suppose it would be a bit of an insurance risk to let kids get too close to 2000-degree open furnaces.

 

Well, you got my number JA---I LOVE ALL THINGS ANCIENT!!

Luckily, I live on Long Island and NYC is just an hour or so away ---so the Met is a relatively easy commute...

Love the link and I'm always mesmerized by the exhibits I have been fortunate enough to gaze upon.....

I imagine the kids loved all of it??

 

The kids had a lot of fun. But this was in Corning, NY, so you'd have at least a 4-hour drive, depending on where you are on Long Island. I'm not sure how long the pieces on loan are going to be there before they return to the Met.

 

Beautiful piece. I was able to get a glass goblet a couple of months ago at my coin club. Mine you could tell spent a couple of thousand years buried in the sand, but beautiful iridescent "toning". Most ancient glass turns iridescent for some reason.

I am a big fan of Corning, owning some of their stock. Nowadays they make the gorilla glass used on cell phones.

 

Fascinating exhibit.

This weekend I am finally able to take in the exhibit at our local art gallery. We currently have a collection of Greek and Roman artwork on loan from the Collection of Classical Antiquities of the National Museums in Berlin. I am ashamed to say that it has been on display since April and only now I am able to get a chance to go.

I have been reading way too many click bait titles lately it seems because my mind can't seem to wrap itself around "Mold Blown" and keeps wanting to correct it to "Mind Blowing"

 

There was a demonstration of the mold-blowing. The molds were terracotta, and in the case of the blue bowl, had three pieces fitted together. They were lined with ash to keep the glass from sticking. Then the tube with the molten glass (called the "gather") was inserted into the top of the mold and quickly blown into it. The mold was separated, and the bowl was then hand-trimmed. The handles were attached last. The incredible thing is that the whole process took about one minute in the hands of skilled workmen. Glass cools very quickly, and evidently you've got to work fast.

At that point, the bowl went into an annealer that cooled it slowly over 24 hours. If the glass cools too quickly, it cracks.

 

Thanks for the link, JA, that really is some amazing stuff!

 

that's petty dang awesome! a visit to a museum that had a roman art exhibit several years ago started me on the path to collecting ancient coins just a few months later.

i remember hearing that glass can still "flow" and wondered if these thing have been warped over the years in any way...but i guess that's a myth. interesting!

http://www.cmog.org/article/does-glass-flow

 

Very nice. My father took me many years ago when I was a teenager. Not sure how long ago that was. Love the picture of the cobalt bowl. Glad you had a nice time and enjoyed the trip.

I have managed to pick up several Roman Glass Vases and some chards, which are used for jewelry. I have 2 nice sets of earrings but I don't wear them.

 

Of course glass flows. Look at any old window and you will see that. However, think how thsee were buried. They were supported in all directions, so no need to flow towards gravity.

 

This is way cool Big John, i love to see them in action. i'm sure you wouldn't want to inhale.

 

Actually, as it turns out, glass at normal temperatures doesn't flow. At least, not according to the experts at Corning. Old windows have uneven thickness because of the way they were manufactured. If stained glass flowed over centuries, the lead used to bind the glass in the windows would flow much more quickly -- it's something like a billion times less viscous than glass.

 

yeah, it appears that glass does not flow at room temperature. there are several sources that say this is true, here's a brief little article from MIT.

http://engineering.mit.edu/ask/how-does-glass-change-over-time

here's a bit more detailed explanation...

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/Glass/glass.html

 

Maybe the experts say it's not true but I removed about ten glass windows from a 1840's farmhouse. Every single one had much thinner glass at the top, and thicker glass at the bottom. If it's a random manufacturing issue, it's weird why 100% were oriented the same way.

 

Well, I wasn't there, of course. But I would think a window would be stronger and less prone to breakage if it rested on a thicker rather than a thinner edge. Some people who have looked at lots of old windows say most windows are mounted with the thickest part at the bottom, but some are the other way around!

If glass could flow toward the bottom of a vertically mounted window in less than 200 years, I'd think the center of a horizontally supported window would sag in much less time, because the stresses on it would be much greater. I know of no examples where that's happened.

 

FWIW, I made a glass counting machine that simply counts the number of pieces of glass (lites) in a stack. We sold it to virtually all the float glass plants. We stopped manufacturing it a half dozen years ago. As the engineer, I attended a few big glass shows and visited maybe a dozen plants. I quickly found that not all glass is created equally. Pilkington, Glaverbel, Guardian, AFG, Vitro, etc all have interesting products that I will not pretend to understand. (They would show me their float plants & I just showed them how to count lites). Pilkington was introducing a self cleaning glass at one show! They all talked of glass as if it were not solid.

There are many companies that fix chips by applying force & friction to flat glass products causing the glass to flow filling the chip.

I did notice that most of the people I worked with in the glass industry had been in the industry for a long time.

This is how my little lite counting machine worked: We shined a little laser spot onto the glass & just monitored how the reflected spot wiggled around. Every time the spot passed the edge of a lite, the spot would wiggle faster. The processor did a FFT on the wiggle signal & we simply noted where all the high frequency events occurred. At the end of scanning the stack, the processor then calculated the thickness & number of lites that satisfied the data (all the little high frequency bursts). It worked but not as well as we had hoped. The s/w engineer moved away & we lost a member of the team. The machine was useful at the float plants but not all the thousands of glass distributors where we wanted to sell it.

[Look out your window. There is a lot of glass in the World].