19th C. Murano Glass Trade Bead Necklace, Gold Melon Spacers

Southern Europe, Italy, Venice. A rhythmic strand of Venetian wound-glass trade beads, each opaque black ovoid trailed with serpentine threads of yellow, powder blue, white, and russet in the "fancy bead" manner perfected by Murano's lampworkers for the African and Levantine markets. Between them ride fluted melon beads of warm high-karat gold, their ribbed bodies catching light against the matte glass and lending the necklace its measured cadence. Glass of this type left Venice by the ton through Trieste and Marseille, traded inland for ivory, gum, and palm oil, and came home again on the necks of West African women who ranked the patterns by prestige. The ancient beads have been restrung on a modern strand with a hook clasp, wearable now as it was then. Venice held a near-monopoly on furnace-wound glass beads for close to four centuries, and by the 1800s the Murano and Venice workshops were producing thousands of named patterns catalogued in sample cards (the celebrated Levantine and African "campionari") that travelling agents carried to coastal factories. Beads like these were drawn or wound on a mandrel, then decorated freehand while hot: a thin rod of colored glass was touched to the rotating body and dragged into loops and zigzags, so no two examples repeat exactly. The pattern family seen here, black ground with multicolor trailed waves, circulated widely along the Niger and in the Sahelian trade towns, where strands were counted as currency, bridewealth, and rank. The fluted gold melon beads belong to a separate and older Mediterranean and Near Eastern tradition of ribbed goldwork; their assay at roughly 74 to 79 percent gold is consistent with traditional non-Western refining rather than a modern standardized alloy. Item # 205231

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