Venetian art nouveau glass

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 2000 by Sheldon Barr

Among the unlikely glass creatures to survive is the griffin -- a bird-beaked, fish-tailed, winged creature with bird's legs that forms the base of the strange candlestick shown in Plate XVII. The elaborate vase in Plate XIV is supported by three more of these bizarre creatures. The scissor-cut bowl is a lexicon of elaborate glassmaking techniques. Sandwiched between the layers of rubino (ruby glass made with gold) are bits of fragmented silver leaf. The surface of the bowl is encrusted with masks, berries, and applied clear-glass trailing. The rare cornucopia shown in Plate XVI is embellished with free-floating murrhine and entwined with a seventeenth-century-style crested serpent. The mold-blown scallop sheel vase in Plate XIII is decorated with festoons reminiscent of Phoenician glass. The seemingly realistic seahorse perched on the edge of the vase is in fact an odd mutuant, for it has sprouted eagle's wings. The elaborate opalescent glass compete in Plate XV is obviously by the same hand as the vase in Plate X. The bowl in the shape of a poppy flower is supported by an opalescent, pink-tongued Chinese dragon with five claws and angel's wings. Symbolic of the external struggle between gold and evil, the Chinese dragon, which was considered beneficent and identified with the Chinese emperor, is engaged in mortal combat with a turouoise blue serpent, a creature of the devil.

The price lists of the period indicate that each object could be ordered in a variety of colors and degrees of technical elaboration. A complex dragon vase executed in monochrome glass was the least expensive. Multi-colored and vetro a retorti versions of it cost more. The highest price was reserved for the object realized in vetro a reticello or blown aventurine glass, both difficult to work.

A careful study of surviving factory and retail shop catalogues can help assign a factory to a given example of late nineteenth-century Venetian glass, but attribution to an individual artist is much more difficult. True to the medieval guild tradition. Murano's glassmakers regarded themselves as artisans, not artists, and worked in almost total anonymity. Only occasionally was an individual glassmaker singled out for a special honor at an international fair or was mentioned in Abbot Zanettis newspaper La Voce di Murano. In this way we know that Gasparini designed the 1881 Salviati fountain. And since the brothers Giuseppe and Benvenuto Barovier (1855-1932) were Salviati's master blowers at the time, it is not unreasonable to assume that they created the fountain's blown-glass elements. In addition, the collections of Barovier family members contain several exotic-animal vases, which family tradition attribute to either Giuseppe or Benvenuto. By comparing these vases with other surviving examples, tentative attributions can be made. However, for the time being the master blowers at other glasshouses remain unknown.

In the early years of the twentieth century, reflecting the world's growing apathy to art nouveau, the taste for dragons and other elaborate creatures gradually diminished. Nonetheless, elaborate glass objects continued to be made at Murano's glasshouses until the eve of World War I. When the Austrians began bombing Venice in 1915 the glass factories closed and the glassmakers fled to either Livorno or Naples. On their return after the war they quickly realized that the simplicity of the art deco style was the new order of the day. In a typically Venetian response to change, Murano's designers and blowers once again delved into Murano's past for inspiration. They found it in the simple designs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Dragons and other exotic creatures became rare, and by the 1930s had disappeared completely.