These very rare, interesting, early, antique Venetian trade beads combine lampworked stripes in white and brick with small clusters of green chevron murrine. The overall effect looks a little like flowers in flowing water.
Sizes: one 23x14mm, and two 21x15mm
See also AFE-957 for a single bead of this type
Trade beads almost always have holes big enough for 2mm leather cords
Millefiori, the Italian name for these colorful beads, means 1000 flowers
The beads are decorated with slices of glass canes created either, by bundling super thin glass rods together to form the pattern then fusing them, or encasing round or star pattern canes in concentric layers of different colored glass.
The canes are sliced into murrini, which are laid out on a hot surface as the semi-molten glass cores of the beads are rolled over them, picking up the slices.
Made in Venice, Italy for the African trade mid-1800s.
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