I know, I've been particularly lame about posting in this blog since I started it. Truth be told, I haven't had much time or inclination for historical glasswork in the past few months. Oh, I've been periodically been thinking about things, but I've been focused on getting my business, A Hot Piece of Glass, up and running. Now that it is going, I am turning my attention back to some historical works.
For this post, I want to call your attention to two fantastic period glass resources on the web.
One of them is an online magazine called Vidimus. Vidimus means "we have seen", and it refers to the working drawing medieval artisans used to plan a window. In fact, the vidimus is still used today, although it's more often called a cartoon. It serves as a pattern for cutting and placing glass pieces to form the window. In the medieval period, windows were not made entirely by one person. There were the people who actually made the glass sheets (a glassblower), someone who designed the window and drew the vidimus, and other people who actually cut and assembled the window. The glass painters would do the detail paint work on the window before it was installed by the folks responsible for that aspect of creation.
The other fantastic resource is the CVMA, or Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi. This is an organization of twelve countries that collectively are involved in preservation and research of historical glass. The link is to the site in Great Britain, which is the one I use the most, but links to German and Italian sites of the CVMA are here. One of the benefits of the Great Britain site is that is has archived a zillion photographs of period glass, some of which are pieces that are either photographed close-up, or look as though they are scanned and then uploaded. So, you get a really good look at some really important works. The search function is indispensable for research, as you can search the picture archive by region, CVMA archive number, type, period or site. I love it. It's where I usually start when I am thinking about a new panel project.
All right, I think that is enough for now. What resources do you use, which are your favorites?
