The Murano artistic glass
A thousand year old history
The first known date concerning Venetian glass is the year 982, to which dates the first document in which appears the name of a glassmaker active in Venice. This paper is based on the statement that Venetian glassware is more than a thousand years old and that it is the oldest art glasswork in the world, still flourishing.
After the Domenico of 982, other glassmakers appeared in the Venetian maps but, in the 13th century already, those glassmakers were no longer set in Venice but in Murano. In fact, the glassworks had spontaneously concentrated on that island, so much so that in 1291 the Venetian State appointed the destruction of all of the glassworks factories eventually built in Venice. Since then, Murano has been known as the island of glass and the glass was the main, almost exclusive, activity for the Murano people, among whom true glass dynasties were highlighted. Some have remained continuously active from the Middle Ages to the present.
Murano, the eldest artistic glass center of the world
Venice is located on the coast of the upper Adriatic, in an area which, even in pre-Roman times, constituted the terminus of regular maritime transport from the eastern coasts of the Mediterranean. Among the precious goods that arrived from the East, glass played a leading role. (…) Today excavations conducted in the city, on the occasion of the restoration of historic buildings, prove the existence of settlements already in Roman times, while tradition made the foundation of the city coincide with the flight of the inhabitants of the Roman cities from the coast towards the islands upon the arrival of the barbarians. On this basis we can perhaps assume that Venetian glassmaking is a direct daughter of the Roman glassmaking of the upper Adriatic. The oriental contribution in the Middle Ages was however fundamental for the development of Venetian glassmaking towards an elite art.
From the oriental tradition, the Venetian glassmakers derived their loyalty to soda glass, suitable for complex hot processes, in which they progressively distinguished themselves as the most skilled artists, their love for polychromy and a specific aesthetic approach. It is based on the belief that glass is a very particular material, suitable for being blown into thin thicknesses and shaped in an incandescent state and that these specific manufacturing processes must also be evident in the finished product. The Mediterranean glassmaking tradition is therefore in open opposition to the Nordic tradition which sees glass as a substitute for hard stone, to be enhanced by cutting.
A brief history of Murano glass
While in other countries glass factories were built near the places of supply of raw materials or fuel, Venice and Murano have always had to import vitrifying silica sand, melting soda and other raw materials from very distant locations. Even wood, used as fuel until fifty years ago, came from Istria and Dalmatia. The true wealth of Murano was its men, the expert technical composers, who perfected the quality of Murano glass and always invented new refined colours, and the master glassmakers, who developed an exceptional skill in modeling incandescent glass.
They are the ones who have been called abroad since the Renaissance and have exported their technology, thanks to which younger glassmaking traditions have arisen elsewhere. The master came to master his art after long years of apprenticeship in the furnace but soon a glass school will be active in Murano, which will introduce young people to this ancient craft in a more modern way, even if the experience of working in the glass factory will always remain fundamental . Already appreciated and exported in the Middle Ages, Murano glass became a product highly sought after by the highest social classes in Europe during the Renaissance, starting with the invention of crystal and other precious types of glass in around 1450.
The hot working and decoration quickly reached an exceptional level of refinement, the shapes adapted to the noble elegance of the Italian Renaissance.
In the Baroque period, extravagance dominated production but also determined the search for new effects in glass and new models. In the 18th century, however, the innovations were truly sensational, the chandeliers, the figurative table centrepieces, the enamel-decorated lattimi did not look out of place next to the beautiful 18th-century Venetian furniture, and this in an era in which Venice was living in a profound crisis and was heading towards the fall of his Republic.
After the end of the Republic of San Marco in 1797, the rebirth of Venetian glassmaking occurred in the second half of the 19th century and the glassmakers who were involved then founded glassworks which today enjoy considerable prestige but above all they developed techniques which are the basis of the modern glassmaking.
Modern glassmaking took off in the first decade of the 20th century and very soon, from the 1920s, the collaboration of well-known designers with glassmakers began. Today Murano glassmaking is probably the most up-to-date Italian artisan tradition, more linked to the world of art and design and at the same time more respectful of the typical manual skill of craftsmanship.
The sixteenth century
In this century, Murano glassmakers preferred pure and transparent glass on which they worked with different decorative techniques.
An alternative to transparent white glass is given by opaque white or “milk” glass, which is sometimes decorated with hot enamels but is more often used in the form of long and thin rods incorporated in various ways into the colorless glass, giving rise to filigreed, one of the most original glass fabrics of the Renaissance Murano glassmakers.
Another type of decoration used from the mid-sixteenth century onwards is diamond-point or flint-point engraving, which barely scratches the surface according to a previously traced design.
This decoration, which was created by Vincenzo di Angelo Dal Gallo around 1534, was used for extremely light floral and animal motifs which make the crystal on which they are traced appear as if wrapped in lace.
Another type of glass typical of the sixteenth century is so-called “ice” glass, characterized by a wrinkled and apparently cracked external surface, and therefore translucent but not transparent, similar to that of ice.
The return to pictorial decoration is characterized by the cold drafting of the color applied to the reverse side of the objects in order to exploit the transparency of the glass.
The subjects are very often taken from paintings by famous artists such as Raphael and Primaticcio. Proof of this is the plate with “The two sleeping women” which clearly refers to an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi taken from a painting by Raphael. Towards the end of the century, “pen” decorated glass also appeared, obtained with the technique of winding milk threads “combed” into festoons with a special tool.
In the second half of the sixteenth century the shape of Murano products tended to abandon the previous simplicity and functionality, seeking a more complex articulation with the addition of plastic elements obtained in various ways with rapier work, the use of which would become more frequent in the following century. In the 16th century the fame of Murano glass spread throughout Europe and the first emigrations of masters called to work in foreign glass factories began, especially in the Netherlands, Germany, England and Spain.
The best-known families of glassmakers from the second half of the 15th century are, in addition to the Baroviers, those of the Mozetto and Della Pigna.
In the 16th century we can even speak of dynasties such as that of the Ballarin, the De Catanei of the “Sirena”, the D’Angelo from the “Gallo”, the Bortolussi, the Dragani.
The seventeenth century
The seventeenth century did not mark any particular technical innovations in the art of glass, but, from the point of view of form, it was the typical century of the so-called à la façon de Venise glass produced abroad, in imitation of Venetian glass, by local workers or, much more often, by expatriate Murano workers. To please local taste, they accentuated those plastic decorative motifs also in colored glass (ridges, serrations, fretwork and threads manipulated in various ways) which had already, albeit subtly, appeared in the previous century.
Proof of this are those glasses called “winged” glasses due to the characteristic shape of the elements that decorate the stem. The seventeenth century was the century of the great diaspora of Murano masters, whose presence is documented in Antwerp, Liège, Brussels, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Berlin, Munich, Cologne, London and Paris, the in which they had been driven more by the poverty caused by the too rigid application of some laws of the Republic than by the attraction of larger profits. In the last quarter of this century the first signs of decline in the art of glass were felt, although there was no shortage of very talented artists.
In fact, Bohemian glass was progressively establishing itself on the markets, the production of which was achieved by Bohemian glassmakers in the 1970s and 1980s. This glass, clearer and heavier than the Venetian one, was better suited to carving and even deep engraving, no longer with a diamond but with a wheel. In fact, in the last years of the century in Venice people began to imitate the wheel engravings of Bohemian glass.
Nonetheless, the seventeenth century remains in history the century in which Venetian glass reached the highest point of its fame.
The eighteenth century
The fate of glass art seems seriously compromised at the beginning of the 18th century. The merit of having taken the first step to try to get out of the crisis must be attributed to Giuseppe Briati from Murano who, despite the harsh opposition of his fellow citizens, managed to start a production of glass that had a chemical composition similar to that of glass Bohemians, in order to crush their competition, without however reducing their works to mere imitation.
The same is not true, however, for those glasses no longer engraved with diamonds but with wheels which, thanks to this new technique, also borrowed from Bohemia and made possible by the new quality of Murano crystal, echoed very often, albeit with witty variants, decorative motifs of that country, so much so that they are called “Bohemian crystals”.
Giuseppe Briati’s production, “privileged” by decree of the Council of Ten in 1737, was enormously successful. In this context, especially the “chiocche” must be remembered, that is, the chandeliers with multiple crystal arms decorated with festoons, flowers and leaves. Alongside them, the “deseri”, or table triumphs, play an important role, whose subjects are often taken from architecture, mythology, theater scenes, parties or games and must be remembered for their ornamental richness, even the Murano mirrors in colored crystal.
A genre that gained widespread popularity in the eighteenth century was “lattimo”, opaque white glass imitating porcelain. In Murano it found great impetus thanks above all to the Miotti family, whose enamel-decorated production is sometimes marked or signed; and of the Bertolini brothers who in 1739 had obtained from the Republic the “privilege”, or exclusive, to decorate it with gold.
In this century, numerous types of mimetic glass were also produced in Murano, such as “chalcedony”, in use since the Renaissance era, and “aventurine”, which appeared since the mid-17th century.
Not even the ancient fifteenth and sixteenth century technique of blown glass decorated with hot polychrome enamels has been forgotten; Osvaldo Brussa and his son Angelo applied it, especially in the second half of the century, using a vast range of subjects: flowers, fruit, animals, sacred and profane scenes which reached the early nineteenth century. Glass with variously colored plastic applications also plays an important role in a whole range of household objects: oil and vinegar cruets, so-called “Florentine” table lamps, composters, trays, baskets, etc.
Glass with its variety of colors is also used as a decorative material for furniture, armchairs, tables and frames. For much of the eighteenth century the Venetian mirror enjoyed great fame: it was framed by rich frames covered in glass decorated with enamels or with wheel engravings which often also appeared on the mirroring surface. It is in this way that it also takes on a decorative character in home furnishings.
Famous glassmakers of the eighteenth century were the successors of Giuseppe Briati (Giacomo Giandolin, Lorenzo Rossetto and Zuane Gastaldello), Vittorio Mestre, the “Company of fine crystals for use in Bohemia”, Antonio Motta, Vincenzo Moretti and C.
The nineteenth century
In 1797 the Republic of San Marco fell and a succession of political events began in Venice which exacerbated the problems of the lagoon glass industries, for which employment opportunities were reduced.
In 1806, following the Napoleonic decrees, the craft guilds were abolished and therefore even the glassmakers’ guild was no longer bound by the provisions of the guardianship magistracies contained in the Mariegola dell’Arte.
The common glass furnaces did not have an easy life due to the competition from the glassworks of Bohemia, Styria and Carinthia, whose products flooded our markets after 1815.
To this must be added the emigration of glassmakers, with the consequent diffusion of manufacturing secrets, and the high duties that must be paid on imported raw materials and on products to be exported.
Even artistic glass between the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century shows signs of decline both on a technical and aesthetic level, continuing, very crudely, the tradition of the Brussa’s enamel-painted glass.
But Domenico Bussolin, in 1938, and Pietro Bigaglia, in 1845, resumed the production of filigreed glass with beautiful fabrics in bright colors and a great variety of weaves.
Pietro Bigaglia also deserves credit for having resumed the production of the “aventurine”, while Lorenzo Radi excelled in the “chalcedoni”.
The first signs of rebirth of Murano craftsmanship were felt after the middle of the century, when the Fratelli Toso factory was founded and, in 1859, Antonio Salviati’s laboratory.
He actively collaborates with Abbot Zanetti in the foundation of an archive, with an adjoining drawing school for glassmakers, in which all the available documents on the history of Murano glass are collected.
It will soon become the Glass Museum, directed by Zanetti himself.
The connection between school and Museum is not accidental if we consider that the models offered to students are often pieces from the Glass Museum and that this is the era in which craftsmanship believes it can be fully realized if it knows how to faithfully reproduce ancient objects.
At the end of the 1866 war, with the union of Veneto with Italy, the political and economic situation became favorable to the rebirth of Murano activity.
It was precisely in 1866 that Antonio Salviati decided to try again the production and trade of blown glass, which seemed to enjoy new popularity abroad, especially in London.
One of the problems, among others, that the Muranese faced around the 1970s, was that of the reproduction of Roman mosaic glass, works in which Vincenzo Moretti excelled, becoming, since then, the creator of the “murrini” glass of the ” Company of Venice and Murano”.
The attention of Murano artisans was also attracted by the early Christian gold leaf glass, which was skilfully imitated and exhibited at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1878, and by the enamelled glass for which the cup called “Barovier”, still today preserved in the Museum, it constitutes the main model.
As part of the technique aimed at reproducing excavated ceramics in shape and effect, mention should be made of the “Corinti” glass in mottled opaque pastes, on a dark background, in gold, silver or green; the “Phoenicians” produced by the “Compagnia di Venezia e Murano”, by “Salviati” and by the “Fratelli Toso”, in imitation of pre-Roman friable core glass and, finally, the “cameo” glass vases.
Towards the 1990s, the era of revivals was coming to an end throughout Europe and innovative movements were being born that advocated the abandonment of historical models while Murano continued to produce nineteenth-century types.
Only the Barovier Artists had created, in 1895, in conjunction with the First Venice Biennale, very light glasses with a spiral stem of evident Art Nouveau spirit.
The twentieth century
The 20th century opens in Murano in line with tradition, contrary to what happened in other countries, in which modern glass production is characterized by new manufacturing processes, on the island of the lagoon it is the techniques experimented for centuries that give shape to more modern style glass.
An innovative character was unanimously recognized in the two very light glass bowls decorated by Vittorio Toso Borella with herons and aquatic flowers in transparent enamels, dating back to around 1909.
The merit of having brought a breath of modernity to the island must be attributed to Vittorio Zecchin, an artist linked to the secessionist group of Ca’ Pesaro; he was responsible for the most original glass-mosaic creations which were created in the Barovier furnace, one of which, Giuseppe had presented the “murrina del Pavone” at the Ca’ Pesaro exhibition in 1913.
The “Barbaro” plate dates back to 1914, precious for its bright blues and yellows, and the other, designed by the painter Teodoro Wolf Ferrari, which features a floral decoration.
After the stasis caused by the events of the First World War, the furnaces resumed their activity, adopting the indications of rationalism which advocated characteristics of simplicity, essentiality and functionality.
In the immediate post-war years, the collaboration of artists with the furnaces became frequent in Murano; Vittorio Zecchin became artistic director of Vetri Soffiati Muranesi Cappellin Venini & C., founded in 1921, and proceeded to recover the pure forms of sixteenth-century glass, taken from Renaissance paintings, such as the large ribbed chalice or the “Veronese” vase. Other artists such as the painter Guido Cadorin and the sculptor Napoleone Martinuzzi occasionally collaborated with the Murano companies. The latter, when Cappellin and Venini split in 1925, became artistic director of the new “Vetri Soffiati Muranesi Venini & C.” where he remained until 1932. In those years the artist created new forms for glass that reflected his experience as a sculptor, such as the filigree glass ducklings of 1929, and created, with a new type of opaque glass, incorporating bubbles of air, or puleghe, and therefore called pulegoso, plastic forms of severe body, such as fruits, mushrooms, succulent plants and vases decorated with heavy ribbons or numerous mouths.
The experiences in the glass field of Umberto Bellotto also date back to the early 1920s, as he combined glass with wrought iron, of which he was a skilled forger, first making use of the collaboration of Vittorio Zecchin and the Barovier Artists for glass and then designing glass for Pauly & C.
Very active between the 1920s and 1930s were the Vetreria Artistica Barovier, which had Ercole Barovier as a great animator, as a technician and designer; and the S.A.L.I.R., which was an important point of reference for engraved glass, for the the etcher Guido Balsamo Stella worked as designer, while the engravings were made by the Bohemian engraver Franz Pelzel.
At the beginning of the 1920s, Salviati reopened its doors, with which, among others, Dino Martens and the painter Mario De Luigi collaborated.
During the fourth decade of the century, thick glass was also welcomed in Murano as an integral part of the island’s tradition, while the splendid glass fabrics that Carlo Scarpa created for Venini date back to the end of the 1930s.
In the immediate post-war period, once the period of forced stasis had passed, the Murano furnaces resumed their activity with renewed vigor, focusing above all on the study of the chromatic effects of glass. In this context, the creations of Ercole Barovier and those that Giulio Radi created for AVEM, using metallic dyes, are important.
Glass in its possible plastic expressions was the subject of investigation by Alfredo Barbini who hot modeled a whole series of sculptures.
Archimede Seguso turned his attention to techniques as traditional and ancient as the art of glass and, starting from the 1950s, he created numerous refined and complex fabrics with filigree.
A great fervor animates the Murano furnaces from the 1950s onwards; Paolo Venini’s furnace, directed since 1959 by his son-in-law, Ludovico Diaz de Santillana, has hosted designers of all nationalities and Ludovico’s two children, Alessandro and Laura, have also dedicated themselves to glass, who created glass mosaics, among other things, a series of dishes of singular beauty.
A large number of artists also contributed to strengthening Salviati’s image, of which the most assiduous collaborator was the painter Luciano Gaspari, who gave very personal interpretations to centuries-old techniques, expressed with a rare sense of balance.
Alongside a production, often of the highest level, but always mass-produced, which has also seen the flourishing of furnaces dedicated exclusively to the production of table glass (among which Nason & Moretti and Carlo Moretti deserve mention), in Murano, today, the development of glass as an expression of pure art to which those artists who create their works using the island’s furnaces, but without being bound by serial production ties, is of great interest.
Vittorio Zecchin – The youthful years
Vittorio Zecchin was born in Murano in 1878. The son of a glassmaker, he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. Impatient with the late nineteenth-century realist culture that he encounters here, he feels rather attracted by the stimuli offered by the Venetian Biennials that he frequents, coming into contact with symbolist research and the environment of the Viennese secession. The encounter with the mystical and symbolist painting of Jan Toorop in 1905 was fundamental in this period.
1906-1915
Starting from 1909 he shared the experience of the group of artists linked to Ca’ Pesaro and participated in their exhibitions. And the other fundamental encounter with the refined production of Gustav Klimt dates back to 1910.
In this context, his friendship was born with the painter Teodoro Wolf Ferrari, with whom he shared a growing interest in the applied arts: together with him he undertook in particular significant research on the expressive potential of mosaic glass, the results of which were presented in Munich in 1913 and at the Venice Biennale in 1914.
Zecchin’s singular presence at the annual Ca’ Pesaro exhibition also dates back to the same 1913, where in a dedicated room he created the decoration The Garden of the Fairies, in extreme harmony with the glassware exhibited in the same space by Giuseppe Barovier. In the same year he participated with pictorial works in the first exhibition of the Roman Secession and in the subsequent editions of 1914 and 1915.
The extraordinary pictorial-decorative cycle on canvas The Arabian Nights, created for the Hotel Terminus in Venice and already defined as the “masterpiece of Art Nouveau painting in Venice”, must also be dated to 1914.
1916-1920
Increasingly interested in the applied arts, during the war Zecchin organized a tapestry and embroidery workshop in Murano, mostly executed with a stitch of his own invention (“punto mio”) which imitates the brushstroke. Thus, re-proposing and taking inspiration from some of his paintings, he created a rich production of fabrics and tapestries, to which he devoted himself extensively even after the war and during the 1920s. Also from those same years was his fruitful collaboration with the embroidery workshop of Countess Pia di Valmarana for whom, among other things, he designed works that participated in the most important decorative art exhibitions of the time.
At the reopening of the Ca’ Pesaro exhibitions in 1919, Zecchin presented a dozen tapestries and embroideries and a small series of enamelled glass. Also the following year in Milan at the Pesaro Gallery he exhibited tapestries and mosaics together with glass decorated with enamel and gold, thus testifying to his growing interest in the world of glass.
The Murano glass museum
The Murano Glass Museum was founded in 1861, when, having overcome the darkest period that the history of Murano glass remembers, after the fall of the Republic of San Marco (1797) and the long years of foreign domination, Antonio Colleoni (1811-1855) , then mayor of the island, and the abbot Vincenzo Zanetti (1824-1883), expert in glass art, managed to get the project to establish an archive in which all the evidence available for the purposes of to illustrate the history and life of the island.
The museum part soon took over the archive, by virtue of the numerous donations of glass produced on the island in the past centuries, and of contemporary glass, by the owners of the furnaces who, in the second half of the nineteenth century, began to work again with intense commitment.
Vincenzo Zanetti, in 1862, also established a school, attached to the Museum, which the glassmakers attended on holidays, studying not only drawing but also the models of glass blown in the past and preserved there.
After the annexation of Murano to the Municipality of Venice in 1923, the Glass Museum became part of the Venetian Civic Museums; its collections were, in fact, subject to a reorganization, carried out in 1932 on the basis of more modern exhibition criteria by Giulio Lorenzetti and Nino Barbantini and were increased by the addition of glass from the Correr, Cicogna and Molin collections, which include, among other, the most beautiful Renaissance pieces in the Museum.
Subsequently, the deposits of the Archaeological Superintendency allowed the establishment of the archaeological section, of which the most prestigious elements are the glassware from the necropolis of Enona (Zara).
Even today, the Museum’s collections, as well as through purchases, are increased by donations from the island’s kilns, which above all enrich the contemporary collection.