WTI Magazine #20    2014 Mar, 7
Author : Enrico De Iulis      Translation by: Alessandra Bitetti

The art of glassmakers from Murano is famous all over the world, and everybody envy us for it. It is an art that goes back to many centuries and reached its excellence in XIX and XX centuries.

On this topic, the venetian "Fondazione Giorgio Cini" launched an interesting project called "Le Stanze del Vetro" (The glass rooms). The location is the wonderful Island of San Giorgio Maggiore (that will be the protagonist of one of our next articles): in a space properly prepared for the display of the glass objects collection, three years ago they started to retrace some of the most important productions in the history of Venetian glass.

Venini is the company narrated by the last two exhibitions organized by the Fondazione Giorgio Cini. The first one described the collaboration between the art glassmakers and Carlo Scarpa, one of the greatest and brilliant architects of the XX century in Italy. Born in Venice, he was an eclectic person, able to invent almost seven new molding technique solutions, still used today all over the world and considered the foundation of the modern glass-work. During the fifteen years when Scarpa was Venini's Art Director some series of magnificent glass items called "bollicine" (bubble glass), "sommerso" (submerged, combining layers of bubble and clear glass) and "corroso" (corroded, a rough surface achieved by packing glass in acid-soaked sawdust) have been designed. He created beautiful objects that can be considered contemporary for their modernity and stylized shape. These masterpieces are characterized by elegant forms, timeless colors and an uncontested power for interior design.

The second exhibition is dedicated to Napoleone Martinuzzi. He distanced from the classical Murano glasses, that we can simply recognize from the old chandeliers, in which the glass simulate phytomorphic shapes, drops, stylized and arabesque flowers, especially in reproducing the magnificent grandeur of candleholders and chandeliers. Martinuzzi restylizes the tradition. He had a strong bond with the poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, who commissioned to the artist from Murano the decoration of his house near the lake of Garda. Martinuzzi followed the ideas of the writer and created fruit, fat plant in glass, small animals that look like glassy toys. It was an innovative mimesis with a high artistic profile, strictly bonded to the decorative style of the late Art Nouveau and Art Deco with dark, uniform and saturated colors. But this was a production intended to join the upper middle class and aristocratic houses during the early years of the twentieth century.

The third exhibition will start on September and it will be devote to the short collaboration between Venini and Tommaso Buzzi (1932-1933). This collaboration was realized between the Scarpa years and the Martinuzzi years. Buzzi was an architect, too. He was more eclectic and histrionic, compared with the elegant simplicity of Scarpa. He directed Venini towards the bourgeois decoration and the color spectrum of the moment: all the pastel nuance, the chalky colors of the pale pink, beige and faded pale blue. It was a prelude to the chromatic shade of the objects made by Scarpa, that will keep the plain elegance of some of those color nuances, but will also stay locked in pure and rigorous geometric forms.

In the XX century, Italy excelled in the production of the so-called minor arts (glass, jewelry, textile, wrought iron, wooden marquetry, brass, pottery and porcelain): and it is only since a few decades that those high-profile artistic expressions, like those that the Fondazione Giorgio Cini is celebrating, have been given the proper interest and visibility. And it is a world yet to be discovered.