The earliest and rarest glass vessel in the museum’s South Asian collection is a flower vase of clear Venetian or façon de Venise glass with enameled decoration, attributed to c. 1670–1700. The hourglass-shaped vase has an irregular, meandering ribbon of peacock-blue glass—a characteristic of Venetian and façon de Venise glassware—encircling the throat at its narrowest diameter. Beneath the trailing ribbon, the vessel flares out into an inverted funnel that curls back to a short, vertical neck above a slightly flattened, bulbous body. The ribbon and the vessel’s distinctive shape help determine the vase’s date and place of origin. Pattern drawings sent with manufacturing orders in 1669-1671 by the London glass dealer John Greene to Allesio Morelli, a Venetian glassmaker specializing in the international glass trade, stipulate such hourglass-shaped flower vases. Greene may have re-exported some of the wares he received or additional flower vases could have been sent from Venice directly to India and other venues in the lucrative Eastern glass market. LACMA’s Indianate flower vase is embellished with enamel designs most likely executed by a European artist working in what was imagined to be an Indian style. The enamel decoration, predominately white with blue accents, features a star pattern on the upper neck, while on the lower neck and body are various animals and hunting scenes, the latter of which are set within a cuspate trellis pattern of split acanthus leaves.

• Markel, Stephen. Mughal and Early Modern Metalware from South Asia at LACMA: An Online Scholarly Catalogue. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2020. https://archive.org/details/mughal-metalware (accessed September 7, 2021).
• Rosenfield, John.  The Arts of India and Nepal: The Nasli and Alice Heeramaneck Collection.  Boston:  Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1966.
• Markel, Stephen.  "Indian and 'Indianate' Glass Vessels in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art."  Journal of Glass Studies 33 (1991):  82-92.