This Passglas, or beaker, displays the Electoral and Saxon double coat of arms with the crossed swords of the Imperial Arch-Marshal and the green crancelin, underneath an elaborate jeweled crown and backed by a royal ermine robe. Above, the initials A.K.C.U.H.Z.S. stand for “August König Churfürst und Herzog zu Sachsen” (Augustus King Elector and Duke of Saxony). Glass artists achieved the bright colors of this decorative scheme with enamel paints. They combined crushed clear glass, pigments, and a gum binder that allowed the mixture to be brushed onto a glass vessel, which was then fired to fuse the applied powder to the body. Firing the enamel revealed its colors and made the decoration durable and stable.
The Passglas is a communal drinking glass, used to play drinking games in sociable contexts. The red and yellow bands that ring the glass divide it into sections marked one through five. When drinking beer or wine from such beakers, the drinker has to drain the exact measure, called a Pass, in one gulp. If he fails, then he must try again to reach the next measure line. Commissioned for a ducal cellar, or Hofkellerei, this Passglas was likely used by elite courtiers. Such glasses represented the unity of the empire and signaled the owner’s allegiance to centers of power. Toasting was an important custom in early modern drinking culture. Individuals of the lower aristocracy and professional classes often owned tankards decorated with symbols of the professional, religious, or political affiliations to which they would toast during community gatherings.
Initially, Venetian glassmakers produced vessels with heraldic motifs for a Northern European market, even after enameled glass fell out of fashion in Venice. As craftspeople and their techniques migrated north, Bohemia and Silesia—part of present-day Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic—became known as centers of glasswork in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Additional glassmaking districts formed near Potsdam and Dresden, in Saxony, where this beaker was produced, with specific sites determined by the availability of wood for fuel. Because glassmakers circulated between these centers of production, it is now difficult to attribute works to a specific manufacturer.
In the twentieth century, William Randolph Hearst amassed a collection of medieval and early modern European art. He displayed such enameled glass at Wyntoon, the Hearst family estate near Mount Shasta, which was decorated in a Germanic style.
Cynthia Kok
2025
