Lord's Prayer Murrina

Object Name: 
Lord's Prayer Murrina

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Object Name: 
Lord's Prayer Murrina
Accession Number: 
94.4.111 B
Dimensions: 
Overall H: .5 cm, W: .7 cm, Th: .2 cm
Location: 
Not on Display
Date: 
1972
Credit Line: 
Gift of the artist
Web Description: 
In 1972, Marquis completed his master’s thesis at Berkeley with a masterpiece of murrine making: a complex word cane of the Lord’s Prayer. Marquis was familiar with the long tradition of the Lord’s Prayer in American popular culture, and as a fan of Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, he knew that the prayer had been inscribed on the head of a pin. Because the pattern of the hot murrine cane can be infinitely stretched out, the words can be relatively large (that is, readable) or reduced to the size of a Ripley’s pinhead. The Museum owns several examples of Marquis’s justly famous murrine in different sizes, including a tiny piece of cane, enclosed in a cardboard holder, in which the microscopic words of the prayer fit into a space even smaller than that of a pinhead.
Provenance: 
Marquis, Richard (American, b. 1945), Former Collection
1994
Technique: 
Material: 
Primary Description: 
Opaque white, red, "black" glass; fused murrine cane, cut.
Richard Marquis: Objects (1997) illustrated, p. 52, #18; BIB# 59475