Handpainted Antique Venetian Glass, Silver Earrings.
Venice enjoyed for centuries what was virtually a monopoly in the manufacture of fine glassware; the island of Murano in the Venice Lagoon is and has been for quite a number of those centuries, the centre of that glass production. In the 1200s the city forced all the glass makers onto the islands of the lagoon, fearful of the extreme dangers posed by the furnaces in what was then mostly a city of wood structures. Murano became the major centre of the highly lucrative business of glass making.
The pair in the above Handpainted Antique glass and Silver earrings were created in Murano in the early 1900s, and would have been two of a few dozen such beads, all handblown and handpainted and then fired, and all in the same colours, in a strand made for the affluent European and American travellers of over a hundred years ago.