Intangible Heritage & Botanical Glass

Glass botanical specimens in the Ware Collection at Harvard University

What even is ‘intangible heritage?’ I hear you say.

To really think about it I need to tell you about father and son Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka. Although they were working at their peak near the end of the nineteenth century, their story is relevant today because started with the making of glass eyes.

A collection of glass eyes by Leopold Blaschka

In May The Heritage Craft Association published the HCA Red List of Endangered Crafts. They have added 20 more traditional craft skills to the critically endangered list. Among them are copper wheel engraving, mouth blown sheet glass making and glass eye making.

What makes a craft critically endangered?

Those crafts that are at risk of no longer being practiced in the UK. There may be limited training opportunities, or crafts where there is no mechanism to pass down the skills and knowledge. This also means that some crafts become extinct (gold beating and lacrosse stick making among them).

Do you think ‘Mallory Towers’ would have been quite the same without the lacrosse sticks?

In 1995 I spent a term living in Dublin and studying glass at the National College of Art and Design. Nicola Gorden Bowe was one of my tutors there and sitting in her office among piles of books and papers she showed me some glass slides of the work of Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka in the collection at University College Dublin. As I held each one up to the light I was astonished. I was 19 and I had just discovered a whole new world for the tactile potential of my chosen material.

Acquired in 1885 they represent the most accurate museum artefacts ever made to represent cnidarians, nudibranchs and radiolarians. Some are still used as teaching aids today. These marine invertebrates, creatures that cannot be pressed neatly between the pages of a book were the bane of museum curators, since it is almost impossible to display actual specimens.

So how did they capture nature so perfectly, I hear you wonder?

Harvard’s glass flowers -Lupinus mutabilis – glass flower parts details

Leopold, the father, was a master of a technique called flame working. He melted and shaped glass rods using an alcohol lamp fed by an airstream pumped by a foot bellows. He passed these skills on to his son Rudolf. They worked with the windows closed so that no sudden gust of wind would spoil their work. They began with glass eyes, worked on sea cucumbers and other glass invertebrates for museums. They had an aquarium where they could observe the interaction of sea anemones. They really looked closely at the natural world and translated it into collections of extraordinary glass objects. They excelled at making things, this father and son team who were from a family of glassmakers and jewellers since the fifteenth century. It took time, lots of it. To translate what they saw with their eyes into what they could make with their hands.

By the 1890s Rudolf had the skill to take the primary role in creating the glass flowers at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Funded by Mary Lee Ware and her mother Elizabeth. A contract was signed whereby the Blaschkas would make botanical models exclusively for Harvard, renewed every decade. They now have over 4000 botanical models representing 800 different plants.

Glass flower exhibit in the Ware Collection at Harvard University

Nature opulent and unfurling is kept in perpetual stillness in the glass cases in the museum. Beauty and decay are there along with visiting bees, decaying leaves and fungal infections. As Annabel Dover points out in ‘Florilegium’ these objects designed to aid classification of species, are themselves hard to classify. Should any of these exquisite objects ever leave the museum they do so by hearse.

So this leads us back to intangible heritage, which is defined as knowledge, skills and practices. Whilst the UK has been a world-leader in the preservation of tangible heritage- museum collections, buildings and monuments, it has fallen behind the rest of the world when it comes to the safeguarding of intangible heritage. Of 193 UNESCO members the UK is one of just 13 that have not yet ratified the 2003 Convention on the safeguarding of Intangible Heritage. Maybe because the intangible is difficult to classify, it falls in the gap between agencies set up to support arts and heritage.

I shall leave you with a glass snail, because in the hands of a master craftsman it is a thing of beauty that won’t leave a silvery trail or eat your Nicotiana silvestris seedlings!

Arianta arbustorum (copse snail). Blaschka glass model. Image credit: Grant Museum.