bead

The most widely known type of Venetian-made lamp beads is mosaic or millefiori (thousand flowers) beads. The mosaic technique, which the Venetians took from the Romans, was reinvented around the 14th century, but it was not used to a great extent until the 19th century. The beads were decorated with pieces of compound and composite canes. The matrix of the bead was usually very dark blue or almost black, and many murrine (slices of complex canes) were laid upon it to form the allover decorative motif. The Venetians employed cane slices with such great precision that they almost eliminated the space between them, greatly obscuring the dark matrix. Millefiori beads were some of the most popular beads for the African trade, and Venetian beadmakers developed an enormous range of designs, from true floriated to cellular examples in various shapes, to satisfy diverse stylistic demands. Women were the makers of these beads in Venice, as they were of most lamp-made beads. It was a cottage industry, in which women could produce up to two beads per minute, thus allowing millefiori beads to attain a large scale of production as demand increased. The bead shown here is particularly attractive. It was made with two types of murrine that differ both in color and in form, producing a well-conceived and symmetrical pattern. The floriated and star-shaped cross sections of the murrine created what is considered to be a true millefiori or flowerlike design.