European glass in the Venetian style 1500-1750

Magazine Antiques, August, 2004 by David Whitehouse

In Austria and neighboring regions, glassmaking enjoyed royal patronage and the Venetian style was introduced with royal support. Ferdinand I, king of Hungary and Bohemia (r. 1526-1564), and later emperor of the Holy Roman Empire (r. 1558-1564), hired glassmakers to set up Venetian style factories at Laibach (now Ljubljana, Slovenia) in 1526; Hall in 1534; Innsbruck in 1540; and Vienna in 1552. His second son, Ferdinand II (1529-1595), archduke of the Austrian Empire, established a private glasshouse at Innsbruck in 1570 and reputedly tried his own hand at glassblowing.

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It would be wrong to assume that the use of Venetian and Venetian style glass was confined to the rich and famous. Archaeologists excavating the cesspit of a sixteenth-century tavern at Salzburg discovered numerous Venetian style wineglasses that were either imported from Venice or made at Innsbruck or Hall.

In France the royal family began to import Venetian glass in the fifteenth century. Some of the earliest datable Venetian or Venetian style glasses from France are enameled with the coat of arms of Louis XII and Anne of Brittany; (8) they were made some time between their marriage in 1499 and her death in 1514 (see Pl. XIII). Excavations at the Louvre in Paris and elsewhere in France have revealed a wide variety of Italian style glass. Much of it was made by the so-called Altarists, glassmakers from Altare in Liguria, Italy, who were working in Lyon as early as 1511. Their compatriots established workshops all over southern and central France. Indeed, the most celebrated French glassmaker in the seventeenth century, Bernard Perrot of Orleans, began life as Bernardo Perrotto of Altare (see Pl. XI).

In the Low Countries, the manufacture of facon de Venise glass had a different origin. Sixteenth-century Antwerp was one of the great mercantile cities of Europe, its commerce dominated by Italians who settled there. Italian was the lingua franca of the business community, and Antwerp became a market for the best Italian products and began to attract Italian craftsmen.

Immigrant potters produced Italian style majolica (tin-glazed earthenware) in Antwerp shortly after 1500, and in 1537 Lucas van Helmont was making verre cristallin l'instar de Venise (cristallo glass imitating that of Venice). The list of Italian glassmakers in Antwerp begins with a mirror maker named Cornachini, who in 1541 imported workers from Murano. (9)

The use of glass increased in England during the sixteenth century due to imports from Venice and, later, from the Low Countries, and the creation of a successful local industry. Jean Carre (d. 1572), a Frenchman who had worked in Antwerp, received a patent to make Venetian style glass in London in 1567. (10) His first workers were from the Low Countries, but in 1570 he hired two Venetians. One of the latter, Jacopo Verzelini, took over the glassworks in 1572 and secured a twenty-one-year monopoly to make Venetian style glass.

Many scholars attribute twelve remarkable glasses to Verzelini (see Pl. XIV). Eleven have engraved decoration that is ascribed to Anthony de Lysle (w. 1577-1590), a Frenchman who was described as a "graver in puter [pewter] and glasse" in London in 1583. (11) However, neither attribution can be proved.