Venetian art nouveau glass

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 2000 by Sheldon Barr

In the latter half of the nineteenth century the revolutionary design concepts style swept across Europe and the United States. Artists everywhere abandoned the Victorian revival movements in favor of the new style. Even in tradition-bound Venice a startling and dramatic new style of glass began to be produced. Fabulous monsters, especially winged dragons, materialized on the luxurious glassware that had captivated the world for centuries. Beautifully crafted, these beasties were destined to embellish Venice's art glass for the better part of three decades. Although never classified as such before, this body of work can now be regarded as the idiosyncratic Venetian contribution to the art nouveau style.

The many different national and/or regional manifestations of the art nouveau style [1] share two essential features, the first philosophical and the other tangible. Each variation self-consciously strove to create something new and each was influenced by one or more contemporary aesthetic fads, such as naturalism, symbolism, or Japanese art, Venice's claborate fin-de-siecle creations fall neatly into these categories.

By the mid-nineteenth century one of the more obvious results of the political and economic turmoil following Napoleon's conquest of the Venetian Republic in 1797 was the imminent destruction of the glass industry on the island of Murano, its center since the thirteenth century, Control of the Venetrian territories passed back and forth between France and Austria, but in 1815, after Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo, Austria once again gained control of Venice and mounted a determined effort to destroy what was left of the Venetian glass industry in favor of its own. Austria enacted ruinous tariffs on the importation of the raw materials necessary for glassmaking, of which Venice had almost none, and on the export of the finished glassware. The first casualty of this double taxation was luxury glass, the city's traditional export. The glass industry was reduced to making beads for Austria's colonial trade and poor quality utilitarian glassware for local consumption that was occasionally enameled with anti-Austri an sentiments.

With its economy in shambles and unemployment rampant, Venice remained under Austrian control in the 1850s. At that time three dedicated Venetians banded together to revive the glass industry. They were Antonio Colleoni (1810-1885), the mayor of Murano; the abbot Vincenzo Zanetti (1824-1883), a visionary glass historian; and Antonio Salviati (1816-1890), a lawyer turned entrepreneur. Salviati opened his first glass factory and shop in Venice in 1859, and others soon followed his lead. In the early years Salviati concentrated on mosaics, glass tiles, and a very limited amount of blown chalcedony glass, a type of glass that imitated stone.

In 1866 Venice became part of the newly formed kingdom of Italy, and the local authorities, capitalizing on the unique attributes of the ancient city, decided to promote tourism. In the nineteenth century run-down Venice held great romantic allure, and the British in particular came in droves. Tourism soon became the lifeblood of the city. The legions of wealthy tourists pouring into Venice desired nothing more than to return home with a glass souvenir evocative of Venice's fabled glory days. Murano satisfied their need with faithful reproductions of early Venetian glass, which were sold with great success in large shops called stabilimenti. [2] The work was so fine that from the first it was widely believed to be indistinguishable from the antique. In 1866 the Art Journal cautioned:

It is necessary to wam collectors that many of the modem productions of Salviati are selling as veritable antiques. Those who are not experienced connoisseurs may be easily deceived, for the imitations - or rather the copies - cannot be at once distinguished from the old. They are as light and as soft to the touch, the semi-transparency has been preserved, the colours are often as brilliant, and the designs are, in nearly all instances, after veritable models. [3]

In 1867 Salviati exhibited his blown glass at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. His impressive presentation was anchored by two large pyramidal glass cases set up against walls covered with examples of the firm's mosaics. As Abbot Zanetti described the Salviati contribution, there were

glasses, chalices, amphoras, cruets, vases, delicated tinted vessels harmonious with combinations of filigree [retorti] and reticello, bands of enamel graffito, dazzling with aventurine, ruby, aquamarine, and opal, with borders, flowers, butterflies, serpents, dolphins, swans, initials, masks. [4]

Zanetti later wrote: "of the blown-glass objects sent to Paris [by Salviati] not one returned to Venice; there was instead an indescribable rush to buy what was there and to order new works. " [5] The firm won a gold medal, three silver medals, and four honorable mentions.

One of the objects Salviati exhibited was a complex pink cup, unfortunately now lost and known only from contemporary descriptions. It stood twenty inches tall and was embellished with glass fruits, leaves, and swans. Created especially for the Paris exhibition by Antonio Seguso (1829-1903) and the fourteen-year-old Giuseppe Barovier (1853-1942), it was the forerunner of the intricate tours-de-force, laden with glass swans and dolphins, that distinguished Murano's later production. However, animal motifs, as evidenced in the Salviati objects illustrated in the Art Journal catalogue of the 1867 exposition, remained rare.