Glass was first discovered in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia around 2,500 years B.C. It was used initially for making beads and decorative objects, then later, around 1,500 B.C., the first glass vessels for holding liquids began to appear.
Undoubtedly, the greatest innovation in working glass was the technique of glass blowing, developed in Palestine and Syria, around the beginning of the Christian era.
Naturally enough, the art of Ship bottling is closely linked to the availability of clear glass bottles of sufficient quality, to do the model justice. Yet, in modern times, it was not until the 17th and 18th centuries that bottles of this calibre were to hand. Even so, the first subjects to be bottled, around 1744, were not ship models at all, but mining scenes, depicting the extraction and smelting of gold. These “patience bottles, as they were called, originated in central Europe, that is to say: the region of Bohemia and neighbouring states.
On a time line, it is possible to trace the art of bottling ships and other objects back to these first patience bottles, which were fashioned at an earlier date, with very different motifs. Crosses and crucifixes abounded, but mining scenes, workshops, and niddy noddys were popular too. Yet, what of ships in bottles? When was the first ship in a bottle built? The oldest known ship in a bottle is in the Museum of History of Art and Culture in Lübeck, Germany, and is signed Gioni Biondo, but experts maintain that the maker was no seafarer. According to the inscription on the ship’s sail, the model dates from 1784, but this is the exception, rather than the rule, and it is very unusual, for ships in bottles to be signed and dated at all. More often than not, our only hope of assessing their age is to examine the bottle for evidence of when it was made, by looking at the marks, tooling, and method of manufacture. Yet even so, it is impossible to tell with any certainty, whether or not, a model is genuinely old, or a new model, in an old bottle that has been dusted off and resurrected to make it look like the genuine article. The next oldest known ship in a bottle is also by the Italian Gioni Biondo, and can be found in the Maritime Museum, Lisbon, Portugal. It is a model of the Fama, and is dated 1792. Apart from the marble plinth upon which it sits, it is very similar in appearance to the Lübeck model. Close on its heels, dated 1795, in the maritime museum, Rotterdam, there is a model of a small Dutch sailing barge with a short mast and leeboards, so typical of the Netherlands. The ship is modelled in an upright bottle with a puzzle closure, the ship being suspended in mid air from threads attached to the stopper.