Murano
By Marielle Brie de Lagerac
Art Historian
This is a revolution.
After many centuries, the unveil secret raise again and Venice is the first to compete nature, creating a material as translucide as rock crystal.
Roman antiquity was definitely a glorious period. Although running water and underfloor heating were certainly not within everyone's reach, glass objects, sometimes of incredible luxury, became popular at the end of the Empire (27 BC-476 AD). Therefore, the prospects of a world of villas with panoramic bay windows and light fiberglass racing chariots were not unthinkable. But the brilliant civilization suddenly shattered in the 5th century, like a too fragile drunkard's bottle shattered on the ground into a thousand pieces. Europe forgot the recipe for glass and, while the population returned to terracotta, the elites used sumptuous rock crystal objects, until its supply became
lacking in the 13th century. At the same time, Constantinople was experiencing great political upheaval. Indirectly, these geopolitical events allowed the development of a luxury glass industry in Venice and the creation of a fine and translucent glass which, from then on, made the reputation of the Serenissima.
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However, this is the very last place where a sane glassmaker would want to set up shop. To make glass, silica and enormous quantities of wood are needed to power energy-intensive furnaces. Not only is the sand of the Venetian lagoon of the worst quality for this activity, but the city of the Doges is to forests what bald men are to hair: a contradiction. However, this is where the oriental
glassmakers took refuge when, like the majority of the human population at that time, they did not travel for pleasure but to save their skin.
Thanks to them, and through expensive imports of siliceous pebbles from Ticino and wood for its ovens, Venice managed to create the first glass as translucent as rock crystal: cristallo. This first glass, often attributed to Angelo Barovier (d. c. 1480), is not our modern lead-based crystal. It is a fragile but astonishing glass for the time, so much so that its manufacturing secret became a matter of state. Venice sequesters the glassmakers on the island of Murano and simply puts to death those who dare reveal the secret of the recipe.
Today, all that remains of the first cristallo is its representations in painting. First blown without decoration, the glass objects were soon decorated with gold threads and motifs. Then, the cups flared thanks to the invention of the soffietta, a tool used to make the famous conical glasses, still emblematic of Murano glass today. From the 17th century, cristallo took on the dazzling Venetian palette and only imagination limited the baroque shapes of the objects. Marble, aventurine or jasper were imitated before cristallo was in competition with Bohemian and then English and French crystal in the 19th century. Today Murano glass has returned to the shapes and colors that made and still make its splendor, to the point that no collection worthy of the name can ignore glasses, chandeliers or decorative objects art in cristallo, the prestigious Murano glass.
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