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View all search resultsMurano: Art of Glass
The tenor seated in the gondola hits his highest note in the Venetian lagoon
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T
he tenor seated in the gondola hits his highest note in the Venetian lagoon. People with him close their eyes in submission to the music while enjoying the light breeze.
For most, Venice means romantic candlelight dinners with the fleeting gondolas as background.
On a visit you will notice that there exists an island of glass called Murano where the singers or gondolas do not venture because of the high seas around it.
Murano Island is the birthplace of the greatest masters of the art of glass.
One of the most famous pioneers in glass art in Murano was Loredano Rosin.
His techniques used the qualities of light and form to enhance the originality of his subject devoid of the distraction of shades and decor.
He used a technique that removed the constraints in the flexibility of the molten glass, concentrating on weight and fluidity to achieve his forms. Rosin's works focused on human emotions, bringing in tension and coupling them without a physical touch. He positioned two forms, for example a man and a woman, which complimented each other and yet created a negative space between them, to bring out the vital energy of life.
Rosin trained his younger brother Dino, who left school at the age of 15 to begin a career in glass sculpture.
While working under his older brother's tutelage Dino turned into an elite glass artist with his expertise in the intalgio (carving) and molatura (grinding) of enormous glass sculptures.
After Rosin passed away, Dino cultivated himself to be more creative using other techniques. He continued the idea that he and his brother had revived of using transparent glass and calcedonia glass.
The latter is a type of glass that sports multicolored stripes of zoned agate, which is a result of a chemical process. Each pot of calcedonia requires two kilos of silver nitrate to achieve the beauty typical of the glass. A different rainbow shade is achieved with every chemical process.
Another famous glass artist, Pino Signoretto, was trained by Alfredo Barbini. His colorful clowns are considered masterpieces.
He started his career by making chandeliers, moving on to glass blown pieces and then on to his art masterpieces. A nature lover, his art pieces are usually of creatures.
Another current master is Luca Vidal, who works in one of the most famous shops called Nuova Venier in Murano.
'I get my inspiration from what I see. My colorful pieces are inspired by the colorful houses in Burano, another island near Murano,' he says.
Vidal's pieces have more of a contemporary style.
Leaving school at the tender age of 13 to pursue his love for art, each of Vidal's work takes a week to finish and needs five assistants.
'You have to think like a painter when creating a piece. You need to look at the design, the colors and the movement of the picture you see,' he said.
Nuova Venier sells the best art pieces of Rosin, Dino, Signoretto and Vidal.
The owner Marino Laggia, who used to make chandeliers himself, said the shop specialized in chandeliers for many years until the art pieces took an upturn.
'Before people would hardly appreciate them but nowadays they understand the value of the pieces. The time and effort it takes to create a piece combined with an emotional vibration is what makes it priceless,' Laggia says.
Creating hand-formed glass sculptures is a tedious and expensive art. It requires a minimum of three people, a master and his two assistants.
A workshop requires two furnaces for glass fusion, an oven, and a workspace for the master. Another room is required for the moleria ' for the cleaning, polishing, grinding and assembling of the piece. The furnaces are fuelled 24 hours a day for 11 months (besides August).
The glass is melted only at 1450 degrees centigrade, enough to remove the bubbles and impurities and then cooled down to 1200 degrees for molding.
Each pot can hold 300 kilograms of molten glass, which is melted every night. Glass comes from either sand or silica, which makes up 70 percent of the weight and which needs a melting agent to create a piece.
The choice of melting agent differs according to the kind of result required. For the Murano art pieces, soda is used as a melting agent because it solidifies slowly giving time for the artist to create a design.
The molten glass for a Murano piece can be sculpted only at between 1000-1150 degrees centigrade.
Another advantage of soda as a melting agent is that it reaches a solid state at 700 degrees centigrade and shapes at 500 degrees. The actual sculpting takes place at the piazza ' a workspace between the furnaces and the oven surrounding the master's bench for proximity as the temperature has to be right.
The glass, melted on a rod, can sometimes weigh twenty kilos. After melting, it is turned constantly so it doesn't lose its shape.
When the master is done sculpting, the glass is cooled inside a muffola or oven. The muffola is sealed for two days or until the piece reaches room temperature. The cooled piece is then brought to the next workshop for cutting, polishing and assembling.
Masters of glass art attest that glass has the greatest potential in the freedom of design because of its immediacy and fluidity. It has elastic and chromatic qualities that make it easy to sculpt.
The art of molding glass started as early as 3500 B.C. in the form of glass beads and vessels during the Mesopotamian civilizations. The Romans continued this by molding medallions, heads and statuettes.
By the 15th century, people in Murano produced delicate figurines. The art continued as is, until Alfredo Barbini and Archimede Seguso developed the process of free-form sculptures from molten glass in the 1930s.
Although many artists have been following the technique of molding molten glass, only four or five have excelled in such works, one of whom was Loredano Rosin himself. In a book called L'arte Dei Rosin, Rosin revealed his deep relationship with the glass.
'It seems the glass itself wants me to shape it, to stroke it, to overpower it both with mental and physical strength creating the extensions of my mind,' he says.
'I do not abuse the nature of the glass, nor do I dominate it. That is why it responds to me when I mold it and make it alive.'
Photos By Aruna Harjani
