Aleardino's Glass.

The object of this enquiry is a silver-mounted, miraculously unbreakable drinking glass from early fourteenth-century Padua. Known as Aleardino’s Glass, the vessel took its name and status from the fact that it remained miraculously intact despite being cast to the ground by a heretical knight named Aleardino who had publicly challenged the sanctity of St Anthony of Padua. Taking Aleardino’s wonder at his unbroken glass as a point of departure, this contribution explores the interlacing of material properties and conceptual representations that underlies and informs our understanding of the vessel. It considers the status of the glass as a conceptual work, and investigates the relationship between the physical properties of the vessel and its visual attributes. The essay explores the notion of material difficulty mobilized by a glass that does not break and discusses the cleverness of Aleardino’s Glass in terms of the reciprocal relationship between the physical resilience of the vessel and its resistance to interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]