House & Garden 
TUT 
Scent bottles of modern Venetian glass make charm¬ 
ing additions to a dressing table. They can be 
obtained in a variety of colors, are opaque and have 
ornamental colored glass flower stoppers. Courtesy 
of Ovington Brothers 
This pierced and deco¬ 
rated Venetian glass 
compote is from a 
collection in the Met¬ 
ropolitan Museum 
VENETIAN GLASS 
j T IS known that the art of glass- 
making has been carried on in 
Venice for more than seven hundred 
years. And from the latter part of the 
13th Century, when the guild of glass- 
makers was established upon the island 
of Murano, the furnaces have never 
been transferred from that sequestered 
spot, and the industry has had a con¬ 
tinuous history that is unique, and full 
of interest both on the artistic and the 
human side. It rose with the wonder¬ 
ful artistic development and commer¬ 
cial expansion that took place in Venice 
after the Crusades. It flourished ex¬ 
ceedingly during the Renaissance, and 
later, all through the days of Venetian 
power and glory. Though in the days 
of humiliation and misfortune the glass 
furnaces were nearly all extinguished, 
still the craft survived, and in the 19th 
Century revival of the Murano fac¬ 
tories something of the old prestige re¬ 
turned,and early artistic traditions and 
distinctive qualities were preserved, to 
be passed on to the present time. 
Long before Venice existed the 
Romans were skilled in the making of 
glass, and it seems very probable that 
some traditions of this skill remained 
on Italian soil, and that it was work¬ 
men from Italian cities who first prac¬ 
tised the art among the lagoons. When 
Byzantine Greek workmen brought 
their Eastern knowledge of glass mak¬ 
ing to the shores of the Adriatic, it is 
believed that the impetus was given 
which was destined to lead to such 
great progress at Murano, where were 
laid the foundations of most of the 
modern developments in the manufac¬ 
ture of glass. There is no very marked 
Oriental influence, however, to be 
traced in the shapes and decoration of 
Venetian glass. More than any of the 
other arts that were brought to such 
high development in Venice it seems 
to be peculiarly the product of her en¬ 
vironment; its graceful forms, and 
especially its ethereal qualities of color 
and texture, seem to have something 
of the charm of the sea and the softly 
sparkling Venetian atmosphere. 
There was long and patient labor and 
experimenting by generations of de¬ 
voted, enthusiastic craftsmen in the oid 
laboratories and workshops of Murano. 
They were small and unpretentious 
enough at first, the furnaces simply 
constructed and fed with pieces of 
Istrian beechwood, and the tools used 
were few. But, little by little, the sub¬ 
tle secrets of chemical fusions, the deli¬ 
cate manipulations of the blowing- 
iron, and the various heating and cool¬ 
ing processes, must have been worked 
out with that creative joy and pride of 
execution that belonged to the artist- 
artisan of old. 
The guild of glass-makers became a 
caste by themselves as Murano grew 
into an important commercial center, 
and Venetian galleys carried the Murano 
productions to all parts of the civilized 
world. The famous Council of Ten 
made laws by which the secrets of the 
craft were most jealously guarded. 
There were very strict laws against im¬ 
migration. The glass-workers were for¬ 
bidden to leave Veniceto work elsewhere, 
on pain of imprisonment, not only for 
the fugitives themselves, if found, but 
for near relatives left behind. Fugi¬ 
tives if they could be tracked were 
threatened with assassination by some 
of the pleasant methods then in vogue. 
Eventually, of course, the laws were 
evaded, and Venetian processes could 
not be prevented from spreading 
through Europe. But for several cen¬ 
turies Venetian glass-workers man¬ 
aged to keep their supremacy. Their 
chief competitors appear to have been 
at home, the carvers and polishers of 
rock crystal, who were also an im¬ 
portant guild in Venice, and who looked 
upon the artificially made “cristallo di 
Venezia” as a rival fabric, and the 
workmen who made it as imitators and 
interlopers. And now, in museums, 
Venetian glass and rock crystal are ex¬ 
hibited in close association. 
In the 15th and 16th Centuries the 
island of Murano boasted a population 
of some thirty thousand people, and it 
is said to have presented from afar the 
appearance of a small city in itself, a 
mile in length. It was not entirely 
given over to manufacturing. Edward 
Hutton describes it as “full of vine- 
(Continued on page 106) 
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