The Glass Room

The itinerary continues with the room dedicated to glassworks. Glass, which can be easily modelled when heated strongly enough, was the perfect material for making equipment used in the pharmacy laboratory. The oldest glass containers are tiny balsam containers (Egypt, 2nd millennium BC). Using the technique of blown glass, after the 2nd c. BC production began of glass objects in different shapes, which were designed according to their function and the personal taste of their craftsman.

Master glass-blowers also used to enamel and decorate the glass, in particular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for example, with cartouches embellished with alchemical symbols, floral motifs, and mythological, religious or other types of scene. The room has an assortment of glass containers, which vary in their shape and transparency depending on the medicines and medicaments they were made to contain, for example, bottles, phials, jars and jugs, as well as laboratory instruments.

Objects of artistic importance are the eighteenth-century glassworks with cartouches and apothecary inscriptions decorated by hand. The complete series of small bloodletting flasks arouses great curiosity. Particularly interesting are the larger objects, such as the very unusual breast pumps and a rare green glass mortar. The information panels in this room describe how medicinal plants have always been present in literature and philosophy, and featured above all in the studies of Leonardo da Vinci.

HISTORICAL PHYLOSOPHICAL EXTENSION >>