My private Italy: Murano, turning an incandescent mass into beauty

Italy is a treasure chest. Venice, in particular, is a hymn to beauty but also to the mastery of the artisan artists who have created this beauty, and who continue to pass on their knowledge of “doing” over the centuries. And nowhere in Venice is more representative of this knowledge of Murano.

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Every time I go to Murano, I go back in time, to a time when things were “created” by man, using what nature provided. Murano is not simply an island in the lagoon; It is a fluctuating microcosm where the secrets of a millenary art are handed down from generation to generation, sheltered from the prying eyes of the outside world. Walking along its quiet canals, the smell of salt mixes with the warmth of the historic furnaces.

But why Venice, why Murano, and why has this fame never died out? The answer lies in history, in techniques and in that combination of light, water and fire that only the Venetian lagoon has been able to produce.

Before 1291

Until the late Byzantine Empire, around the year 1000, the world’s most skilled glassblowers were mainly found in Egypt and Syria. Venice was already then what it would remain for centuries: a port, a crossroads, a place where goods and knowledge from different cultures met and mixed. Among the precious goods that arrived from the East, glass played a leading role. The techniques of the Levantine glass masters also began to spread in Venetian workshops.

In a Venetian document dated 982, the figure of a glassmaker appears for the first time in the lagoon city: it is the official birth certificate of the glass industry in Venice. Therefore, Venetian glassmaking is more than a thousand years old and is the world’s oldest artistic glassmaking tradition.

From oriental tradition, Venetian glassmakers took a fidelity to sodium glass, suitable for complex hot work, and progressively distinguished themselves as the most skilled artists, with a love of polychromy and a distinctive aesthetic approach. While in other countries glass factories have sprung up near sources of raw materials or fuel, Venice and Murano have always had to import vitrifying silica sands and melting soda and other raw materials from very distant locations. Even wood, used as fuel until fifty years ago, came from Istria and Dalmatia.

In the following centuries, the furnaces multiplied, the quality improved, and Venice slowly became the European acclaimed centre of glass working.

After 1291

But, together with success, concerns also rose due to the many fires and the damage furnaces could and would provoke. The Great Fire of 1105 had already destroyed 23 neighbourhoods and as many churches: fire was the city’s main enemy, a threat to a city built on wood, straw and stone, which could not afford to burn.

Thus, with a decree of the Doge of Venice at the time, Pietro Gradenigo, all the glassworks were transferred to the Island of Murano. Since then, Murano has been the island of glass and glassmaking has been the main, almost exclusive, activity for the people of Murano.

However, many experts argue that the decision to move the furnaces from Venice to the island of Murano was to jealously protect the knowledge and techniques of glass processing, away from the prying eyes of foreign travellers and merchants. The small island, for centuries, was “armored” both in entry and exit: there was even a law that forbade master glassmakers to leave the island of Murano without written permission from the authority. In this way, it was possible to preserve the tradition and value of this art for centuries, thereby making Venice the queen of trade. What was ostensibly a public safety measure turned out to be the greatest act of concentration of glass talent in history.

At the end of the 13^th century, the Glassmakers’ Guild was established, which gave Murano artisans an extraordinary social status for the time. The master glassmakers were considered on a par with the nobles and enjoyed many privileges, to the point that they were authorized to marry the daughters of the Patricians. They had the privilege of carrying the sword and of being exempted from certain judicial processes. However, a master glassmaker who had left Venice to move elsewhere with his knowledge risked very serious consequences: the Republic considered the secrets of glassmaking a state heritage to be defended. This system created something unique: a closed ecosystem in which innovations accumulated generation after generation, without being dispersed.

Already appreciated and exported in the Middle Ages, Murano glass became a highly sought-after product in the Renaissance among Europe’s highest social classes. The hot working and decoration quickly reached an exceptional level of refinement; the shapes adapted to the courtly elegance of the Italian Renaissance. In the Baroque period, extravagance dominated production but also determined the search for new effects in glass and new models. In the 18^th century, however, the novelties were truly striking, the chandeliers, the figurative table centrepieces, the enamel-decorated milks did not look out of place next to the beautiful furniture of the Venetian 18^th century, and this at a time when Venice was living in a deep crisis and was heading towards the fall of its Republic.

Decline and rebirth

The first devastating blow came with the plague of 1630, which decimated Venice’s population and left industry without masters or a market. The second, even heavier, was the fall of the Republic of Venice at the hands of Napoleon in 1797. The dissolution of the Glassmakers’ Guild deprived the Murano masters of the institutional protection that had guaranteed their survival for five centuries. Meanwhile, Bohemian glass, produced in the wider Habsburg Empire, flooded European markets with high-quality products and competitive prices. By 1820, only 16 furnaces remained on the island.

The rebirth came in the second half of the 19^th century, led by some extraordinary families. Then, in the 20^th century, came the most important turning point: Murano glass masters began to collaborate with artists and architects, elevating Murano glass from craftsmanship to an internationally recognized art form.

Today, Murano glassmaking is probably the most up-to-date Italian artisan tradition, more linked to the world of art and design and at the same time more respectful of the manual skills typical of craftsmanship. Established artists create their works, using the island’s furnaces, but without being bound by serial production ties.

Why is Murano glass famous worldwide?

Murano glass is created at 1200° C with a fusion of siliceous minerals, it is worked at 600° C with colors and the addition of other minerals such as chalcedony, aventurine, and fusion with precious metals such as pure gold and silver and much more. Glass is also partly worked in components, which are then used in larger compositions such as vases and sculptures.

The Murano glass works are handmade and mouth-blown, using simple tools such as pliers, scissors, and perforated metal rods that allow you to move the mass of very hot glass and blow it through the tube of the metal cane.

The master glassmakers of Murano literally “invented” glass. Two examples above all: “crystal” and “lattimo”. Around 1450, the master glassmaker Angelo Barovier managed to obtain an almost completely transparent glass, which was called “crystal”. The secret lay in the discolouration of the base mixture with manganese and other purifying agents, which eliminated the impurities naturally present in silica and metal oxides. Until then, no other laboratory in the world had been able to produce anything comparable: Venetian crystal became the most valuable glass in the world for over a century.

“Lattimo”, an opaque glass as white as milk, was invented around 1450 with a specific purpose: to imitate the Chinese porcelain that Venetian merchants brought from the East. Producing a glass object that appeared to be porcelain was considered an extraordinary technical challenge, and Murano won it.

Filigree is perhaps the most iconic technique of Murano glass: strands of colored or white glass are woven inside the transparent glass during blowing, creating geometric patterns of extraordinary precision.

Such examples show clearly what Murano is. Beyond raw materials, Murano is its men: the Master Glassmakers, who have developed an exceptional skill in modelling incandescent glass, according to techniques so complex that they require decades of apprenticeship to master, and the expert Technical Composers, who have perfected the quality of the glass and have always invented new, refined colours.

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