European glass in the Venetian style 1500-1750

Magazine Antiques, August, 2004 by David Whitehouse

In these our daies, wherein gold and silver most aboundeth ... our gentilitie ... do now generallie choose rather the Venice glasses, both for our wine and beere. (1)

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For nearly three hundred years, beginning about 1450, Venetian glass captivated Europe. The careful selection and use of the raw materials, technical virtuosity, and a flair for design that combined opulence with refinement led to the creation of an unprecedented array of luxurious glassware for display and use on special occasions. The term facon de Venise (in the manner of Venice) was already current in the sixteenth century, and it is still used to refer to glass made outside Venice but in the Venetian style. After a generation or two of admiring Venetian glass, European glassmakers decided to do something about the local availability of the facon de Venise.

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The first characteristic of Venetian glass was the glass itself. Northern Italian craftsmen had discovered how to produce colorless glass in the thirteenth century, but it was not until the fifteenth century that one particular kind of colorless glass, which the Venetians called cristallo, began to attract attention all over Europe. Inspired by the clarity of rock crystal, cristallo was developed by carefully selecting quartzite pebbles from the Ticino River (to provide an unusually pure form of silica) and plant ash from the Levant (to provide the alkali that reduced the temperature at which the silica melted). These ingredients produced glass that, when heated to the appropriate temperature, remained soft and workable for longer than most other glass mixtures. Despite careful preparation, cristallo was not always colorless, and it can be somewhat bubbly. Nevertheless, in the hands of master glassblowers, cristallo could be transformed into objects of breathtaking grace and fragility (see Pl. I).

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In addition to cristallo, Venetian glassmakers developed calcedonio, which imitated the variegated semiprecious stone chalcedony (see Pl. IV). And Antonio Neri (1576-1614), the Florentine priest and chemist who published the first book-length study of glassmaking in 1612, included numerous recipes for types of colored glasses that range from opaque white (copying Chinese porcelain) to emerald green and opal. (2)

The Behaim Beaker (Pl. VI) is an outstanding specimen of Venetian cristallo that demonstrates clearly why glass from Venice commanded attention abroad. It bears the coat of arms of the Behaim family of Nuremberg, and in the flanking panels are the Archangel Michael killing a dragon and Saint Catherine of Alexandria. This combination of figures has no religious significance, but Nuremberg's archives reveal its historical meaning. On July 7, 1495, Michael Behaim (1459-1511), the son of one of the city's patrician families, married Katharina Lochner, the daughter of a rich Nuremberg merchant. (3) The Behaim Beaker and a similar object in a private collection in Germany celebrate this marriage and provide a striking example of Venetian craftsmen filling special orders for foreign customers.

The Behaim Beaker also illustrates another feature of the finest Venetian glass: rich ornament, often in the Renaissance style, carried out in gilding and enamel. The Venetians began to decorate glass with vitreous enamel in the late thirteenth century, and documents of the period between 1280 and 1346 refer to "painters of beakers." (4) These early Venetian examples of enameling on glass, often known as the Aldrevandin group after an object signed by "Master Aldrevandin" in the British Museum in London, (5) only hint at the explosion of gilded and enamel ornament in the mid-fifteenth century and thereafter. Suddenly, figural scenes, coats of arms, and arabesques entered the vocabulary of designs that Venetian decorators and their European imitators applied to cristallo and other decorative glassware, using eye-catching combinations of polychrome enamels and gold foil, generally with scratched details (see Pl. V).

A third characteristic of Venetian glass beginning in the fifteenth century is the use of canes and slices of canes (see Pl. III). Canes are rods of glass of two or more colors combined so that the patterns they form are visible either in elevation or cross section. Glassmakers in the ancient world used canes to make a wide variety of mosaic glass, but thereafter the technique was neglected until, in the second half of the fifteenth century, Venetian glassmakers began to make canes in large quantities and used them both to make beads and to decorate vessels. Slices of multicolored canes were used to decorate millefiori, literally, thousand flowers, glassware, while a far greater quantity of bichrome canes were incorporated into vetro a filigrana (glass with filigree decoration). Venetian filigree glass was copied from Central Europe to Spain.

Vetro a filigrana usually consists of glass with colorless and opaque white canes, although from time to time blue or red stripes are found (see Pl. VIII). These canes were embedded in the surface of the partly formed vessel, giving it a distinctive appearance that became one of the hallmarks of the Venetian style. Although the Venetians produced a multitude of different patterns, most filigree glass falls into one of three broad categories: Vetro a fili (glass with threads), which has a pattern of individual stripes; vetro a retorti (glass with twisted threads); and vetro a reticello (glass with a netlike pattern of threads).