OVERVIEW OF ARTISTIC STYLES
All of these styles are represented in our collection.
1712–1810 – Baroque, Rococo, and Classicism
The Baroque style in glassmaking was characterized primarily by the production of thick-walled conical goblets featuring engraved and painted figurative and floral decorations. The production of lead-glass was complemented by certain types of colored glass, including ruby glass and opal glass. The surfaces of the glass pieces featured not only scenes from the Old and New Testaments, but also mythological scenes, allegories of virtues, continents, and the hours and seasons of the day. As in the Renaissance, scenes depicting the everyday life and entertainment of aristocratic society were particularly popular. Very often, the walls of objects were adorned with hunting scenes, the prevalence of which attests to the last great heyday of hunting as a collective celebration of the Baroque era. However, very few written sources from this period have survived, and so Baroque production remains more or less anonymous, as it is very difficult to determine from which specific glassworks the glass originates.
The seamlessly following Rococo period further refined the painting techniques of the time; artists increasingly used vibrant colors and gold, and the color palette of the glass shifted from predominantly rich tones to lighter, muted hues, dominated by shades of pink to violet, light green, light blue, and white.
Like the Rococo, Classicism also appeared on Czech glass with a certain delay. In many cases, it long intertwined with the Baroque; sometimes it appeared in the form of Classicist geometric decoration on Baroque shapes and vice versa, for example on cylindrical, thin-walled goblets adorned with borders featuring elements of the fading Rococo. Classicism had been taking shape since the mid-century as a reaction to the Baroque and especially its late phase—the prevailing, exuberant Rococo style. Fueled by an interest in the classical ancient ideal of beauty, sparked by Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s discoveries at Herculaneum and Pompeii, it favored objects made of high-quality materials, featuring clear cylindrical, teardrop, and egg-shaped forms, with decoration in the spirit of the legacy of ancient art and architecture.
