In the sixteenth century the interest of our subject centres in the story of the emigration of skilled glass-workers from Venice and from L’Altare, and in the more or less complete replacement of the old methods, as these Italians found their way into nearly every corner of Western Europe. It was technically the victory of the carefully prepared _cristallo_ over the old mediæval _verre de fougère_ or _wald-glas_. From another point of view the revolution was but one phase in the spread of the Italian renaissance. In fact, in one respect it was distinctly a renaissance, for the glass of Venice in composition differed little from that made during the Roman domination: it belonged essentially to the great Mediterranean family of soda-lime glass, prepared, if not from sea-weed, at least from maritime herbs. On the other hand, the indigenous glass which the _cristallo_ replaced was almost without exception of forest origin, a potash glass made from the roughly lixiviated ashes of beechwood or bracken. I have said that these Italian glass-workers carried their new methods all through Western Europe, but, as we shall see, their permanent influence was not the same in each case. In Germany it was in a measure but a passing fashion—neither the Italian designs nor the Italian methods of manufacture ever became prevalent. The _wald-glas_, in an improved form certainly, held its own, and indeed before the end of the next century was threatening the supremacy of its Venetian rival. In France, on the other hand, the victory was in a manner complete; the old _verre de fougère_, it is true, long survived, but in an acknowledged position of inferiority. In the Netherlands the case was more complicated; for while on the one hand at Antwerp and at Liége the typical Venetian _cristallo_ was more successfully imitated than elsewhere out of Italy, on the other hand, in many places in the Low Countries, the old green glass continued to be made, and the old shapes, above all the essentially Teutonic _roemer_, never fell out of favour. It so happens indeed that for the best renderings of examples of both these schools of glass we must go to the works of the Dutch and Flemish painters, rather than to the contemporary pictures of either Germany or Italy. This is an interesting point about which I shall have something more to say later on. As regards Spain, the Italian influence became on the whole predominant, but here the question is complicated by the existence, in Catalonia at least, of a school of enamelled glass of which the Venetian origin is by no means certain, and this school was already well developed before the end of the fifteenth century. Finally, in the case of our own country, the Venetian emigrants who came for the most part by way of the Low Countries, had soon to divide the hitherto almost free field with glass-workers from Normandy and Lorraine.