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Vitrum Annulare, Pastes

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ENAMELS.
359
likewise gilt and diversified with colours. These colours, : it is said, the barbarous nations (of the West) dwelling upon the ocean pour into the copper when red-hot, so that they become like a stone when congealed, and retain the position traced out for them." An ambiguous account of the process, which shows how little was known about it in Rome at the time he wrote, the reign of Severus. But in Britain the art had been carried to perfection long before this, as is attested by the Remarkable incense-burner—its surface covered with a tasteful ßoriation in red and blue—found with the other relics (a curule-chair and bronze vases of Greek workmanship) in the tomb-vault of one of the Bartlow Hills. Numbers of fibulas, similarly decorated and of British origin, are to be seen in collections. All these are done by the cliamp-levé process : that is, the patterns have been cut out to a con­siderable depth in the metal, and these beds filled up with the fused enamel, afterwards polished down to a smooth face. Such also was the mode in use with the Gothic artificers throughout the Middle Ages, as the innumerable reliquaries, coffrets, and tablets of French and German manu­facture, sufficiently testify. But the Byzantine jewellers took it up and applied it to gold, inventing the cloisonne method, more exactly imitating the old ëéèïêüëëçôá, each colour being contained in its distinct compartment of thin gold-plate set on edge upon and soldered down to a stouter basis, the thin lines of the gold serving for. the outlines of the whole design, which is often a singularly complicated piece. This Byzantine art was adopted by the Persians in the East, as the wonderful cup of Chosroes (to be de­scribed hereafter), in the Bibliothèque Impériale, remains to declare, and by the Anglo-Saxons in the West. The very elaborate jewel made by order of King Alfred mani-
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