Jim Peake
Head of Department
Lot 94
A very rare Pietro Bigaglia scrambled millefiori paperweight, dated 1845
29 September 2020, 10:30 BST
London, KnightsbridgeSold for £765 inc. premium
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A very rare Pietro Bigaglia scrambled millefiori paperweight, dated 1845
Of tapered square form with chamfered edges, containing a variety of composite and silhouette canes including the date cane '1845', amidst short lengths of twisted ribbons and latticinio, 5.5cm square, 5.4cm high
Footnotes
The first millefiori paperweights are thought to have been produced around 1843 and Pietro Bigaglia was among the first Venetian craftsmen to make them. The earliest dated examples are from 1845, the year in which Bigaglia exhibited paperweights for the first time at the Exhibition of Austrian Industry in Vienna. These rare weights are of the scrambled millefiori type and usually of traditional spherical form, a type known as the 'Venetian ball', see for example that from the Baroness de Bellet Collection sold by Bonhams on 19 May 2010, lot 63. Cylindrical and square weights are amongst the rarest and earliest examples, with dated specimens being particularly scarce, see Paul Hollister, Encyclopedia of Glass Paperweights (1969), pp.18-9 for a discussion.
A comparable square weight dated 1845 in several places is illustrated alongside a dated cylindrical weight by Herbert W L Way, Mrs Applewhaite-Abbott's Collection of Coloured Glass, in The Connoisseur (December 1922), p.217, fig.4. Compare to the domed paperweight signed 'POB' and dated 1845 in the Corning Museum of Glass (accession no. 78.3.143) and the example dated 1846 (accession no. 83.3.64), both of which contain a number of identical murrine including silhouettes of a duck and a horse.
