Arceau Millefiori - Flowers bloom from crystal art glass
Arceau Millefiori - Flowers bloom from crystal art glass
Within its Arceau Millefiori models, Hermès encapsulates an unusual encounter between watchmaking and glassmaking. Its exceptional wristwatches and pocket watches, beating to the tune of mechanical calibres produced in the Swiss workshops of La Montre Hermès, are lit up by dials and covers inspired by 19th century paperweights, crafted by the Cristalleries royales de Saint-Louis.
Today, just as in the past, everything at Saint-Louis begins with the glass-melting furnace known as a pot furnace. The gatherer or ball-maker dips a punty (metal rod or blowpipe) into the mouth of these pots, each containing a colour of crystal or enamel, and twirls the molten matter to form a homogenous bubble-free mass known as a gob. Thus begins the patient work of the master glassmakers, performing a silent ballet known to them alone. The punty is passed on from hand to hand, from breath to breath and from workshop to workshop, until a monochrome crystal sprue is formed which will serve to create the canes that will in turn give rise to the ‘millefiori’ motif (a combination of Italian words meaning ‘a thousand flowers’).
Crafted by applying successive layers of crystal to enamel to reveal the colour, these canes resemble barley sugar candy canes. They are in some cases assembled to form ever-richer patterns. Whatever their colour or design, the process itself remains identical.
A glassworker takes a gob of molten crystal to which a second artisan applies his punty, before moving away as far as the temperature of the mat ter permits. He pulls or draws with him a several metre-long thread measuring just a few millimetres in diameter, and which will then be broken into several sections.
The canes thus created are cut into small ten-millimetre port ions that are then vertically placed in a castiron bowl, where they form a bed of flowers.