Although most people think of glass as a man-made material, it is found in many forms in the natural world. A range of glasses are found in—and formed by—nature. Volcanoes spew molten rock, lightning strikes desert and beach sands, meteorites pound the earth, and sea sponges and microscopic

Dale Chihuly, who was born in Tacoma, Washington, in 1941, has become an internationally celebrated personality in contemporary art and design whose prominence in the field of contemporary studio glass is unmatched. He is a generous and charismatic individual with a forceful personality, who

A special exhibition of 22 vessels and sculptures by Erwin Eisch (German, b. 1927), one of the founders of studio glass in Europe, was on view at The Corning Museum of Glass from March 15, 2012, through February 3, 2013. The exhibition recognized Eisch for his achievements in developing glass as a

In 1979, the Museum’s landmark exhibition, New Glass: A Worldwide Survey, introduced to the American public the work of a Czechoslovak glassmaker, František Vízner. Nearly 30 years later, the Museum presented Vizner once again at Corning as a studio glass master. Masters of Studio Glass: František

The technology of printing with movable type, which had been invented in the mid-15th century, was still in its youth when Vannoccio Biringuccio’s comprehensive work on metallurgy, De la pirotechnia, was published in Venice in 1540. The phenomenon of the printed book spread knowledge and encouraged

An understanding of the history of glass would not be complete without acknowledging the importance of glass beads both as a products of early manufacture in the medium and as artistic representations of diverse cultures and societies. Glass beads have been found at the earliest glass manufacturing

This article reviews the current state of our knowledge of early Islamic gold sandwich glass and publishes five examples in the Museum's collection. In 1964, the Corning Museum acquired a gold sandwich glass cup [64.1.32] (Fig. 1) that was identified as “2nd–4th century A.D., Parthian or

Before the development of high-speed moving image media, or fiberglass, naturalists and educators faced a quandary: it was often impossible to demonstrate exactly what an invertebrate looked like without a live specimen, because the spine collapses and color leaches out of one preserved in alcohol.

The permanent collection of The Corning Museum of Glass holds sixteen glass panels affixed to light boxes, which were crafted in a mid-20th-century technique that has recently seen a surge in public interest. The panels, made in the 1950s and 1960s, came to the museum in 1993, and are called

The Daphne ewer (55.1.86) was found about 1895. The evidence for its early history consists of a letter from Sch. Hochmann to R. W. Smith (September 1, 1952, copy on file at The Corning Museum of Glass). According to Hochmann, the ewer was found in a niche in a tomb at Kerch (ancient

Executive Summary In October of 2016, The Corning Museum of Glass (CMoG) assembled a group of museum professionals to discuss e-commerce, its role as a platform extending the museum’s mission, and some of the conceptual and pragmatic aspects of commercial transactions conducted on the Internet. The

Interest in the past is not a new phenomenon. Edward Gibbon wrote: “Yet I know the classics have much to teach…the temperate dignity of style, the graceful proportions of art, the forms of visible and intellectual beauty, the just delineation of character and passion…” [1] During the Renaissance,

In April 2005, The Corning Museum of Glass commissioned the artist Josh Simpson to create the world's first 100-pound glass paperweight, which will be part of Simpson's series of solid glass spheres he calls "planets" or " Megaplanets." It will be the 1,000th

The Corning Ewer (Figs. 1-5) is the finest known example of Islamic cameo glass. Shown in London in the 1976 exhibition "The Arts of Islam” 1 the ewer was acquired by The Corning Museum of Glass in 1985. 2 This article describes the object and compares it with other Islamic cameo glasses, with

Among the glass in the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities at The British Museum is a fragment of a late Roman dichroic cage cup. Although the fragment has been mentioned on several occasions, 1 it has never been described in detail. The find-place is unknown. Description The fragment (Fig. 1

A select group of rare books in the Rakow Research Library’s collection serve not only as repositories of early glass knowledge but also as artifacts of fine bookmaking. They were written by ancient authors and printed some 1,000 years later during the first century of modern printing (about 1450

When Johannes de Spira died in 1470, the printing business he had started was taken over by his brother, Vindelinus. Two years later, Vindelinus published Strabo’s De situ orbis, an ancient geographical text consisting of 17 books. A first edition of this work had been issued in Rome in 1469 by

Before his death, Maks Roosma, Professor in the Department of Glass, State Art Institute, Tallinn, Estonia, sent a brief article summarizing the results of his research into the history of the most important early glasshouse in Estonia. Professor Roosma had conducted an archaeological excavation on

In A.D. 301, Emperor Diocletian attempted to halt a rapid rise in prices by issuing his Edictum de pretiis (Edict on prices), which established maximum prices and wages throughout the Roman Empire. Copies of the edict were inscribed in Latin or Greek on marble panels and posted in prominent places.

The basic components of early glasses were soda, lime, and silica. In the Mediterranean region and Western Asia, these three components were usually introduced in the form of two ingredients: either natron (soda) and sand containing shell fragments (silica and lime), or ash derived from halophytic

In his monumental study of documents from the Cairo Genizah, the late S.D. Goitein drew attention to a letter requesting, among other items, "a wickerwork basket with red glasses from Beirut, and if they cannot be had, white glasses." 1 The letter, which is written in Arabic but with

This note discusses the function of a group of Roman glass models of boats. Six boats are known. They were found at Pompeii (two examples, including Fig. 1), 1 Palombara in Sabina, 2 Aquileia 3 and Santa Elena di Melma near Treviso in ltaly, 4 and St. Aldegund near Koblenz in Germany. 5 All of the

In last year's Journal of Glass Studies [Vol. 42], Mark T. Wypyski and the present authors described a fragmentary vessel decorated with silver stain, and concluded that it is Byzantine and of about the 10th century. 1 We compared the fragment with the celebrated bowl with painted ornament in

Dichroic (two-colored) glass is so called because it appears to be one color in reflected light and another color when light shines through it. Only a handful of Roman dichroic glass objects are known to exist. The most famous of these is the Lycurgus Cup, which is opaque green in reflected light

Among the objects from the collection of Ray Winfield Smith that are in The Corning Museum of Glass, one relief-cut fragment has provoked widely divergent views about its identity. 1 The object (Fig. 1), which Smith acquired in Cairo, may be described as follows: Fragment with eagle [55.1.148].

Introduction Chemical analyses and laboratory studies of glasses from the ancient and medieval worlds have provided a great deal of useful information for archaeologists, curators, and historians, 1 but until now, few such studies have been carried out on glasses from more recent periods. One

One of the remarkable periodicals in the Chambon collection, which was acquired by The Corning Museum of Glass in 1983, is entitled La Revanche des verriers: Organe officiel des travailleurs du verre en Belgique. 1 This publication was brought to the attention of the Museum's librarians by two

The Verses of Martial, which were composed between A.D. 83 and 102, mostly in Rome, contain 12 explicit references to objects made of glass (for which Martial uses the noun vitrium or the adjective vitreus), together with two references to "Vatinian cups" (calices Vatinii), which appear

The "Vase des Saisons" is the name given by Jean de Foville to a cameo glass bottle in the Cabinet des Medailles et Antiques of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. (Figs. A, B, C "Alabastron en verre camée" (Camée.623)). The object may be described as follows: H. (as restored) 16

Isaac Newton (1642–1727) is often described as the greatest of all scientific thinkers. He is most famous, perhaps, for having formulated the universal law of gravitation, as well as the laws of motion. However, his interests also included alchemy, theology, mathematics, and the branch of physics