A rare Venetian millefiori ball or sphere, 16th century or early 17th century


The millefiori core set within clear glass and formed from an assortment of composite canes in blue, red, green, white, turquoise and yellow and with a small gold foil inclusion, the ball 3.5cm diam, pierced through the centre and mounted on a gilt metal pedestal and surmounted with a gilded figure of a Bacchic boy on a barrel, 12.9cm high overall (the glass ball fractured)
|Related millefiori balls are in a number of collections including the British Museum, ref. no. WT.1154 (with identical canes to the present lot). Others in Veste Coburg are discussed at length by Anna-Elisabeth Theuerkauff-Liederwald, Venezianisches Glas der Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg (1994), pp.62-67. Two further examples were sold by Bonhams on 3 November 2016, lot 22 and 15 November 2017, lot 1.