Murano, the glass which excites

Murano, the glass which excites

We want to tell you what does mean “Murano Glass” for us.

Since the first collaborations with the architect Simona Marta Favrin, we have embraced her passion for the artistic Murano glass. We developed a passion for the antique processing techniques that, survived from furnace to furnace up to these days, make this material a cultural and artistic heritage of Italy.

Our activity has deep roots in the territory from which we come: Glass is for us much more than a simple material, it has become our way of strengthening the origins of the company and its connection with Venice, cradle of more than a thousand years of the history of the glass, the godmother who represents it in everything and for everything. Equal in being artworks of immense beauty, equal in their fragile delicacy and in their untiring survival, equal to being a way of salvation.

The glassmaking activity in the lagoon dates back to the late Roman era, 900 b.C., when the barbarians arrived and forced the habitants of the nearby roman cities, to seek shelter on the islands. Glass art has been existing for centuries and, at the time of this escape to salvation, those who were future Venetians, did not even renounce to move their furnaces, despite all the adversities.

The processing of artistic glass was able to arrive to this age, thanks to these men, who have handed down and enshrined this ancient knowledge, from fathers to sons, from generation to generation, enriching this art with creativity and uninterrupted pursuit of perfection.

 

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Thanks to the intuition and intelligence of Angelo Barovier, glass maker by an ancient Murano family, since 1450 an evolution of the working techniques started and in the following century there was a development in order to obtain thin glasses with extremely high purity.

The Serenissima Republic of Venice even established some awards for the glass masters who were able to introduce innovation to the glass processing technique. It dates back to 1605 the introduction of The Golden Book, a collection with all the names of the Murano glass nobility (name attributed to the circle of the most important glassmasters), with the aim of limiting their expatriation as much as possible.

Over the centuries, Murano glass has lost several times its demand because of the discovery of new materials, but there has been an ever-growing and attentive return to this material. And also in recent time, this ancient art is demanded by collectors, glass and art lovers, but especially by artists and designers who use the glass like an expressive medium, melting ideas and contemporary projects together with the antique glasswork.

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For us the use of Murano glass at this time it has become a kind of challenge, both technical and mental, that encourages us to be creative in respect of our roots and that strengthens the link to our territory and the permeating art.

Among the many glass workings, the techniques we use for our fountains are basically two.

For our glass panes we use the fused glass: glass tesserae with different colors are juxtaposed on refractory clay base, or on a plate in ceramic fiber, and fused in a furnace. In this way we obtain a multicolor vitreous tissue (mosaic glass or murrina). The flat pane, supported on compatible media, can assume infinite forms, at high temperatures. The glass tiles, suitably shaped and combined with glass oxides, glazes or other substances, create “paintings” with multi-colored effects and unexpected depth.

This technique, which we approached when we made the vitreous shell for “The Lagoon Monster”, was used later for the panes of the “glass line” of the new indoor fountains collection “Le Sirene”.

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In combination with the fused glass, we often use also the blowing glass.

The processing in furnace means that the glass, mainly composed of silica sand and pure, common or rare, metal oxides that determine its color, is molten at very high temperatures.

Blown in the mouth or hand-made, this process requires working groups composed by a master and three or four other people, the “piazza” (square), specialized in the various stages of work. “Hand opened”, “submerged”, “phoenician”, “reticello”, “pulegoso”, are just some of the endless processing techniques with which the incandescent glass is handled with incomparable mastery by the heirs of a millenial tradition.

Once completed, still very hot, the workpiece is introduced into a long tape cooling oven, the “tempera” where it flows and cools slowly after many hours of permanence, coming out ready for subsequent processing, such as grinding, beating, engraving or decoration.

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These processings embellish our fountains, transforming each work into a piece of art, unique and unrepeatable.

Susanna Dei Rossi

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