The Broader Context of the Cartography Engraved Roemer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Figure 1: Roemer, Dutch, probably late 17th early 18th century, Metropolitan Museum Of Art, New York.
Each material culture artifact is a testament to the historical and socio-political context of its time. Moreover, each object is also evidence of the environment, the materials and technological advances at the disposal of its creator, and of the values and social customs that a specific society assigns it. Ideas always precede the existing of an artifact. Their conception started as a thought and they might be a product of a single mind or an evolutionary construction of the collective. Artifacts also contain a muted narrative that the historian or the anthropologist might have access to, deciphering it through observation and research. Most research material is endemic to a very specific time and space reference and if it is written in a language mostly not universally spoken, like in the instances of the Dutch and German languages, its history remains known only within the confines of the geographical boundaries that the artifact belongs to.
Such is the case of the cartography-engraved Roemer, the item from which stems the analysis of this essay and which upon simple observation does not convey any decipherable meaning to the common observer. This Roemer is a type of goblet from the Dutch seventeenth century which is part of the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s extensive post-medieval glass-made objects (Figure 1). The present paper proposes an effort to understanding this typology of artifacts, and this particular cartography-engraved Roemer, through the different elements observed in it, and conveys a wide-ranging view of it and its category, including its historical context, its evolution as a kind of glass vessel, and its materials and mode of fabrication, in an attempt to unravel the many historical components that it contains. The paper also includes a short review of the engraving technique utilized in the decoration of the Roemers, the predominance of its use connected to the drinking habits of the people, and the representation of Roemers in the fine arts of its times. This Roemer is an interesting example of a class of product of mutative collective conception inserted in the history of the Netherland and part of the German territories of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. The final goal is to uncover as much information as possible to make the reading of the artifact more accessible to the observer and revealing the muted narrative contained in it.
Description of Roemer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
The cartography-engraved Roemer at the MET is about a foot tall and six inches wide at the top, and is made out of thick glass with a slight blue-green tint. It has a tower-like base that develops into a round vessel. The base is a hollow cylinder of about five inches tall by four inches in diameter that distends upwards and turns into a convex receptacle of seven inches tall by six inches diameter at the top. The Roemer’s at the Metropolitan Museum was presumably fabricated in Amsterdam in the early seventeenth century.
The decoration on the upper part of the artifact is a transfer of a cartographer’s map of a section of the Rhine River running from Mainz to Utrecht inscribed with a highly accomplished diamond-point engraving technique. The decoration on the tower base is composed of over a dozen prunts, drops of glass applied to the surface (about ¾” to an inch in diameter each), that have both decorative and functional purposes. The main function of the prunts is to provide an extra grip for the user’s handling at a time when cutlery did not exist and people used their hands to eat.
The Roemer and its historical context
This cartography-engraved Roemer is part of a broader typology of drinking glass vessels that developed in the Northern Netherlands around the time of its fabrication. Many glasshouses were operating in Amsterdam and other Dutch cities by the late seventeenth century when the birth of a world of consumption for luxurious glass items and decorative arts objects came into being. Among them, drinking vessels such as the Roemer became emblematic of that period and the use of the technique of engraving on glass was widely applied to them.
In the Low Countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the words “Netherlands” or “Northern Provinces” refers to eight Northern Provinces (Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Gelderland, Groningen, West and East Friesland, and Overyssel) that gained legal independence from Spain in 1648. The southern nine provinces (Brabant, Limburg, Luxemburg, Flanders, Artois, Hainaut, Namur, Zutphen, Mechlin) are referred to as “Southern Provinces” or “South Netherlands.”
Before hostilities with Spain began in 1568, no glasshouses were operating in the Netherlands, however for most of the sixteenth century, Antwerp was known as a haven for merchandising and trade, laying a solid base for commerce. The beginning of the Dutch glass industry can be traced to the second half of the sixteenth century on the Southern Provinces, when Antwerp became, after Venice, the most important center for glassmaking in Europe. In 1541 the glass industry began to bloom after the arrival of trained Italian glass blowers when Venetians founded the first furnace at Antwerp. However, this came to a halt when Philip II of Spain was given the seventeen Dutch provinces, Spain, and the Italian possessions of the Hapsburg by his father Charles V after his abdication in 1556. With the determined efforts of Philip II to combat the Calvinists in the Dutch territories during the seventeenth century, a period of sustained clashes began, driving tens of thousands of merchants, artisans, and craftsmen—among them glassworkers—from the Southern Provinces to the North, which was friendlier to the Protestant faith.
Before the uprisings against Philip II, the Southern Provinces were economically booming, and Antwerp, Brussels, Ghent, and Bruges were predominant cities in Europe. In 1568 a religious insurgency began, and lasted for almost forty years until a twelve-year truce was settled between Spain and the Northern Provinces. The war led to the decline of Antwerp, aggravated by the fact that the Dutch occupied the mouth of the Scheldt River and refused to allow vessels to proceed from or towards Antwerp or Ghent, interrupting their commercial exchanges.
As a consequence, the sustained violence in the South and the search for religious and economic freedom produced a large-scale migration from the South to the North. It was during this period that a significant transfer of wealth and commercial activities to Amsterdam occurred, followed by an outstanding era of prosperity. And it was also during this period that the city of Amsterdam saw an exponential increase of its inhabitants.[1] This population growth also included other immigrants coming from oversees, further explaining the dramatic changes that the city underwent.
In the Northern Provinces the Calvinist doctrines were free to be exercised. Its concept of “calling” meant that a man’s labor had religious dignity and that any form of honest work was pleasing to God. These ideas created great synergy with the entrepreneurial opportunities of the times. A significant number of the people relocating during that phase were financiers, merchants, and highly skilled artisans, bringing with them their capital and knowledge to the North, and especially to Amsterdam. They were traders in wholesale cloth, glassmaking, diamond cutting, jewelry, goldsmith work, leather crafts, and sugar baking. It is this way that Amsterdam at the beginning of the seventeenth century grew from being a small port, based in small fisheries and the more local Baltic trade, to becoming the ultimate shipping and trade center of Europe. Commerce and production thrived, and standards of living rose, creating a prosperous middle class whose social position was not determined by noble birth but by secular success, and its emblem was the bourgeois’ home, which was to be furnished with the luxury products now at the disposal of the affluent, such as glass products among many other goods.
Large-scale production of glass in the Netherlands dates from this late sixteenth century period, providing the internal Dutch market with a supply of more affordable glass products. Glassmaking began in Amsterdam in 1597, and was encouraged by city authorities in all the Northern Provinces who offered a variety of fiscal incentives. These incentives included tax exemptions, lump-sum payments, and annual salaries for the master traders, shipping privileges for the import of new materials, interest-free loans, tax-exempt fuel, free firewood, monopoly production rights, and restrictions on glass of external provenance. Most cities had prohibitions on industrial activity in rural areas in order to stimulate economic activities in urban areas. However, despite this, and the fire hazard glassmaking posed, authorities allowed glasshouses to be located within cities. All these incentives culminated in a period of rapid economic growth for the glassmaking industry in Amsterdam.
Figure 2: Roemers in Allaire Collection
The Roemer as a Typology in the Low Countries and its Evolution
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Roemer, in its morphology and function, had a distinct place in Dutch history and evolved into a particular typology of drinking vessels (Figure 2).
A Roemer is defined as “a type of drinking glass which was most popular around the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and typically has a wide bowl on a short-decorated stem.”[2] The actual origins of the term “Roemer” is still unknown but it has three possible provenances:
The Roman glass from which the Roemer is derivative.
The last name of a famous diamond-point engraver Dutch woman named Anna Roemers Visscher (1583-1651), who was also a poet and a calligrapher.
A term in Dutch, “roemen,” which means to boast.
The Roemer’s area of fabrication and distribution was limited to central Europe, Northern and Western Europe, and notably Germany and the Netherlands. It is a category of glass vessel whose origin dates to the first century, in ancient Rome, with the invention of glass blowing glass vessels becoming standard household items. Until then, drinking vessels were made out of ceramic and metal.
Figure 3: The development of the prunted beaker into the Roemer.
It was in the onset of the sixteenth century in Northern Europe that these vessels developed into different forms of drinking glasses. One of them was the “Krautstrunk,” the most important late medieval Germanic type of drinking glass, which had a convex conical lip and was decorated with pointed prunts (Figure 2). This type of glass is the precursor of the conical beaker, which in the Netherlands was called the “Berkemeir,” and whose distinction was that it was decorated with pointed prunts only on the lower half of the wall of the vessel. Around the year 1600, the “Roemer” began to surface, with its prunted part becoming more cylindrical and evolving into a stem while the conical bowl part began to be replaced by a convex bowl. Both the Berkemeir and the Roemer kept a stem with pointed prunts and had tentacle-grooved foot rings, which, around the year 1600, were replaced by a fused coiled glass thread. Around this time, the common prunts could also be manufactured with raspberry prunts, a distinct type of protruded molten glass welded to the surface with a texture reminiscent of raspberry skin (Figure 3). By the middle of the seventeenth century, the grooved foot rings were no longer in use, and the Berkemeir had disappeared from circulation. In the first half of the seventeenth century Roemers with their egg-shaped bowls and their looped foot became popular.
Figure 4: Rasberry Prunts on Roemer
In addition, Harold E. Henkes and Julian Henderson in an article called “The Spun-Stem Roemer, a Hitherto Overlooked Roemer Type: Typology, Technology, and Distribution,” argue that there was a later type of Roemer in addition to the typically acknowledged one, which they call the spun-Roemer, which had a higher stem and a more rounded upper part.[3] It is a type of vessel of the late sixteenth and the seventeenth century found only in the Netherlands and Flanders, and which is unknown to the German regions.
The Roemer and its Fabrication
During the sixteenth century “Berkemeirs” and Roemers were fabricated in Germany and the Southern Netherlands. In the seventeenth century, large numbers of them were made in Germany for the Dutch population, a testimony to their increased demand and expanded use in this geographical area.
The Northern glasshouses mainly produced window glass and large drinking vessels. These glass products were made out of forest glass, a late medieval type of glass proper to Northwestern and Central Europe. They were made in glasshouses located in forest areas, where the primary raw materials used were wood ash and sand. Some studies have suggested that other woodland plants, such as fern or bracken, were also used. These ingredients affected the coloration of the material. Forest glass, or “Waldglass” in German, produced a particular variety of greenish-yellow colors due to the existence of iron oxide coming from either the sand or the plant ashes, or both. However, the forest glass of the Northern Provinces had a distinct blue-green tint. Harold E. Henkes and Julian Henderson detected a distinct type of glass in its chemical composition proper to the Low Countries with “a dolomitic source of lime, imported soda-rich plant ashes for the alkali, and a sand source high in alumina,”[4] which gives the resulting glass material a blue-green type of hue. It is important to highlight that the cartography Roemer at the Metropolitan Museum also has a blue-green shade, a proof of its Low Countries provenance.
In contrast, in Southern glass fabrication centers such as Venice and Altare near Genoa, glasshouses used ashes whose provenance was from selected marine plants (i.e., Barilla). These ashes were washed to filter impurities, resulting in a more expensive and fashionable type of colorless Venetian glass called "Crystallo” that was in high demand by Northern European countries during the sixteenth and seventeenth century.
Diamond-Point Engraving in the Netherlands
The decorative technique utilized in the upper body of the cartography Roemer is diamond-point engraving, a technique widely used in the Low Countries at the time of its fabrication. It involves grooving the surface of a glass object with diamond tipped tools to produce very fine and sophisticated designs. Diamond-point engraving achieved exceptional levels of artistic mastery in the Netherlands during the seventeenth century, eventually replacing enameling as the decoration of choice on the surface of glass.
Diamond-point engraving was first practiced in Venice and during the sixteenth century it was introduced to the Netherlands by Venetian glass workers. It was first exercised by skilled amateurs and was associated with the pursuit of calligraphy and poetry. During this period, calligraphic inscription on glass was used nowhere else in Europe but in the Netherlands. Frequently, the motifs engraved on glass were heraldry phrases, poetry, sayings and guiding maxims of either moral or nationalistic nature. Motifs such as armorials, abstract or figurative ornaments, flowers, and leaves, were also used.
Claire Finn in her article notes that engraved glasses were often commissioned and personalized as gifts. She states further that “other decorative themes found on engraved glassware included popular Dutch themes like hunting and fishing, poems or love messages, as well as symbols of religion” and that “the ideal of the drinking glass is condensed into a symbol of group identity, pride and belonging.”[5] She argues that the drinking vessels with their association with language through calligraphic inscriptions served to build the nascent Dutch identity. It is important to note that the motif used in the cartography Roemer, the map of a section of the Rhine River from Mainz to Utrecht, is extremely unusual and original. Of the many Roemers present in important glass collections around the world, the only Roemer engraved with cartography that the author could find.
Figure 5: An important Dutch green tinted calligraphic Roemer by Heemskerk, dated 1678 - Bonhams
Notes on the map decoration of the Goblet at the Museum of Modern Art
The decoration of the goblet at the Metropolitan Museum is a map representation of the course of the Rhine river from Mainz to Utrecht, copied from an illustrated map by Caspar Vogel, a notorious mathematician and cartographer, and which was published in Cologne in 1555. No information was found about the author of the diamond-point engraving decoration itself, but it is noteworthy to discover that the Netherlands occupy a prominent place in the history of cartography in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Furthermore, the Netherlands also occupies an important place in the history of trade and navigation which indicates that maps had a prominent place in the Dutch cultural sphere of this era. Leo Bagrow in his book “The History of Cartography” asserts that “trade, no less than exploration and discovery, stimulates the spirit of enquiry and provides channels for the transmission of geographical information.”[6] And most interestingly he highlights crucial information about the printing of maps in the Netherlands when he says: ”As copper-plate engraving came to assert itself as the most suitable medium for the printing of maps, the aptitude of Netherlandish craftsmen for metal-working created a vigorous industry for the production of maps, centered originally at Antwerp and later, from the 1590's, at Amsterdam.”[7] It is not a stretch to conclude that maps as a graphic medium had an important presence in Amsterdam’s culture where the Metropolitan Roemer could have been originated and at least vaguely explains the presence of this unusual iconography in this particular glass vessel.[8]
Drinking Habits of the Dutch People in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
During these times, Northern European glasses were heavy and large. The beer drinking habits of the North required large capacity and robust vessels. Associated with this fact are specific systems of beliefs and customs proper to that society at that time. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the Low Countries, whereas water was thought to be a carrier of diseases, alcohol was believed to have medicinal properties. Furthermore, alcohol provided comfort in the face of adversity, and the low temperatures proper to the region, and as a consequence heavy alcohol consumption became a common practice. All members of the community indulged in this practice including men, women and children, a fact that appalled many foreigners.
In the Northern Provinces, beer was the most popular drink, and it was produced in large volume throughout the Netherlands, making it affordable to everyone. Wine was equally popular but since there were no vineyards in the Netherlands it had to be imported, making it more expensive and affordable only to the upper classes. However, a growing trade for its import burgeoned during the sixteenth century and developed even further during the seventeenth century. Eventually, with the increase in wealth and trade during the economic prosperity of the Northern Provinces, wine became an essential staple of the middle-class Dutch diet. At first, wine was obtained from the Rhineland region and subsequently especially from France, but also from Italy, Spain, Madeira, Greece, the Moselle, and the Meuse regions, the Canary Islands, Sicily, and Portugal.
Besides attesting to the drinking habits of the Dutch population, the Roemer also served additional purposes. These glasses, especially the larger ones, were not practical for everyday use. They might have been used for specific ceremonial occasions. Claire Finn writes that these items would have represented to their contemporary users an ideal of hospitality and alcohol consumption that was based on the sharing of family good fortune and communal enjoyment of bounty. Taken to such extremes, the glass is no longer a practical object, but a symbol for community and household interaction with guests.[9]
The Roemer in Dutch Paintings of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Recurring representations of material culture in the fine arts can provide a window to the type of objects and their historical uses. The frequency with which certain objects recur in such representations can act as proof of their importance in the everyday lives of the people of a particular time and place. The Roemers were frequently represented in Dutch still-life painting of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One such example is the work of Pieter Claesz (ca, 1597-1660) (Figure 6), in which Roemers are frequently depicted.
Figure 6: Pieter Claesz, Covered Table with Pie, 1630, Frans Hals Museum
In 1952, The Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, organized an exhibit called “Glass Vessels in Dutch Painting of the Seventeenth Century”, relating glass objects, historically and aesthetically, to the achievements of the Golden Age of Dutch painting. According to the catalog of the exhibition, Roemers of various designs were the most common of the glass vessels depicted by painters of the era. The catalogue of the exhibition states that “from a pictorial research standpoint, the genre of paintings of the period are most helpful in learning how the Roemers were used,”[10] and concludes that the vessels used to be gripped by the base, and that they were used in homes and in public places such as taverns. The author also concludes that this type of vessels was not only used by the upper-classes but also of use by people of all social strata, except for the large-bowled Roemers, which were typically illustrated in more luxurious surroundings.
Conclusion
After this panoramic historical analysis of the Roemer as a category of artifact and assisted by this research, we may now conclude that the cartography-engraved Roemer was fabricated in Amsterdam at the peak of its glorious economical period when glass manufacturing profited from the experienced craftsmen coming from the Venice. Its morphology is part of a lineage of a category of drinking glass and fits into this type of glass vessel most appreciated by the people in the Netherlands at that time. It was made with the most idiosyncratic local material, forest glass, and its slight blue tint might be due to the chemicals used proper to the Low Countries region. Although it has not been determined with certitude, the size of this particular Roemer suggests that it might have been used in social celebrations or rituals. In addition, it might have belonged to members of the upper classes and might have been commissioned as a gift. The meaning of the iconography used in its decoration—the engraved cartography of a section of the Rhine River from Mainz to Utrecht—remains a mystery, but it could have been chosen for a particular person, for a singular reason. And the fact that Roemers are so present in still-life painting in the Netherlands during the seventeenth century attests to their central role in Dutch culture as a fixture in the construction of the Dutch identity.
Notes
[1] Richard Paping, “General Dutch Population Development 1400-1850: Cities, and Countryside,” University of Groningen/UMCG research Database (2014): 13, http://www.rug.nl/research/portal; Amsterdam saw an increase of its inhabitants “from about 100,000 in 1620, to 175,000 in 1650, to 200,000 in 1665 and to 240,000 around 1730.”
[2] See “Definition of roemer,” Collins English Dictionary, accessed December 5, 2018, https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/roemer.
[3] Harold E. Henkes and Julian Henderson, “The Spun Stem Roemer, A Hitherto Overlooked Roemer type: Typology, Technology and Distribution,” Journal of Glass Studies, Vol. 40;(1998): 89-103, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24190503.
[4] Henkes and Henderson, “The Spun Stem Roemer,” 103.
[5] Claire Finn, “Drinking Glasses and the Construction of Identity in the 17th Century Dutch Republic”. Annales de 19eme Congres de l’Assosiation Internationale pour l’Histoire du Verre, Piran (2012): 501.
[6] Leo Bagrow, The History of Cartography. New York: Routledge, 1951, Chapter 12 “Maps workshops and the world map of the sixteenth century,” 1. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9780203790007/chapters/10.4324/9780203790007-12
[7] Bagrow, The History of Cartography, 1.
[8] “Goblet (Roemer), Early 17th Century,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, accessed November 25th, 2018. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/188923.
[9] Finn, “Drinking Glasses,” 502.
[10] The Corning Museum of Glass Catalog, Glass Vessels in Dutch Painting of the 17th Century (New York: The Corning Museum of Glass, 1952), 16.
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