Venetian Glass

Venetian glass

Ewer made of calcedonio, Venice, early 16th century; in the Museum für Kunsthandwerk, …

(credit: Courtesy of the Museum fur Kunsthandwerk, Frankfurt am Main, Ger.; photograph, Foto Marburg-Art Resource/EB Inc.)

Variety of glassware made in Venice from the 13th century to the present. In the 15th century efforts were concentrated on the perfection of cristallo (clear glass that approximated rock crystal in appearance). By the 16th century Venetian glassmakers mastered techniques of adding colour and of removing the smoky tint produced by metal in the glass material. These and other secrets were guarded closely, and defecting workers were severely punished. But eventually many Venetian glassmakers did defect, and the techniques became common knowledge in France, Germany, The Netherlands, and England.

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Venetian Glass 

artistic, primarily blown vessels, often with superimposed decorations, and also such items as beads and mirrors, whose production began at the end of the 13th century in Venice, mainly on Murano Island, where Syrian and Byzantine artistic glassmaking had been assimilated. The earliest samples of Venetian glass that have been preserved (15th-century bowls and goblets of colored glass decorated with enamel) have shapes influenced by the Gothic style. From the 1530’s extremely fine and slender goblets and vases, sometimes in the form of birds, galleys, and sea monsters, predominate. Some were colored and some were not; some were filigreed (glass threads embedded in the glass) or crackled. In the 17th century and especially in the 18th, glassware made of colorless glass, agate glass, brown glass with metallic sparkles, or mosaic glass (vessels, chandeliers, and engraved mirrors) became pretentious and their decorations garish. In the mid-19th century the workshops and the plant, also situated on Murano Island, began to produce articles based on 16th–17th century models and in the 1950’s, cast vessels of new shapes (the work of P. Venini, F. Poli, and others). Imitations of the Murano glassware of the 16th–17th centuries which have been produced in other countries since the 17th century, are often called Venetian glass.

REFERENCES

Kube, A. N. Venetsianskoe steklo. Petrograd, 1923.
Schlosser, J. Venezianer Glazer. Vienna, 1951.
“Three Great Centuries of Venetian Glass” (exhibition). Corning, N. Y., 1958.