This loaf of colored glass may not look like much from the outside, but slice into it and you’ll find an incredible recreation of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting Virgin on the Rocks. Self-taught glass master Loren Stump has adapted a 4,000-year-old Middle Eastern technique to produce detailed images that are only seen when the glass ‘cane’ is cut into cross-sections.
Murrine may be centuries old, but typically consists of abstract or floral patterns, which are much easier to create. Stump creates his intricate images by layering hundreds of tiny glass rods in various colors and thicknesses, resulting in a ‘loaf’ that can sell for $5,000 per slice.
The artist also creates individual smaller-sized faces that are sliced into pendants for jewelry and also manipulates two-dimensional murrine slices into three-dimensional forms. Watch a demonstration in the video above.
