Art: Revival in Venice

For four centuries, the glassmakers of Venice were the greatest in the world. None could match the airy grace of their filigrees, the clarity of their plain glass, or the richness of their painted colors. But runaways spread the Venetian art to the ends of Europe,* and Venice became a dull backwater producing dull imitations of the great old days. Last week the news from Venice was of a new Renaissance.

At the Venice Biennale art show, a pavilion was set aside for glass, and in it were the works of the city’s modern glassmakers. There were dark-colored pitchers with sweeping curves, smoky white vases, clear bottles studded with agate eyes, pieces of rough green glass blown and shaped into portrait heads, vases with interwoven filigrees, bowls that looked as fragile as a lace handkerchief. Some were done in delicate light glass; others were heavy and solidly streamlined, their soft colors worked smoothly into the glass.

To produce its new designs, Venice still uses the old methods it has passed from generation to generation. The glass is still made at Murano, a tiny group of interconnected islands out in a lagoon. Science has given the factories some new tricks, but it still takes master blowers using long, thin blowing canes of Roman design to turn out the glass. They sit on high wooden stools, watch while apprentices make the first rough shape, then step in and blow the final form.

The old Istrian sand is no longer used; instead a fine white sand is imported from France to give a purer, more easily worked glass. But as before, even-burning Yugoslavian beechwood goes into the furnaces to keep the glass at an average 800° C. A master can complete a small animal figure in less than ten seconds, yet it still takes a full day for the large pieces. And sometimes even the most expert craftsman watches his hours of labor shiver into fragments as the glass cools.

Already, Venice’s glassmakers have seen the first signs of success. The new designs are holding their own in world markets with French, Swedish and American. There are now 52 large ovens going night & day. And each year some $1,500,000 worth of fragile art reaches world markets from the new masters of Venice.

* Not without risk. Any Venetian practicing his art abroad was denounced as a traitor, his family was imprisoned, and hired assassins were sent out to hunt him down.