Just as the Italian Craft of Glassblowing Was About to Break Apart, a Skilled Artisan in Murano Appeared to Restore It
In 1859, Antonio Salviati established his glassworks to aid in the restoration of a local historic site to its prior magnificence. A vase at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum narrates its tale.
This vase, crafted by Salviati & Company circa 1960, exemplifies how Murano glass adapted elegantly to modern trends. The concentric colors were achieved by layering molten glass—initially purple, then blue, followed by clear. The layered color effect highlights and mirrors the gourd-like silhouette of the entire piece.
Fabian Öhrn
During the 16th and 17th centuries, monarchs in cities ranging from London to Istanbul reveled in the hand-blown glass emerging from the Venetian island of Murano. Craftsmen there had elevated the art of glassmaking to extraordinary heights, with each vase and stem thoughtfully designed and crafted. However, by the 19th century, this legacy was on the brink of extinction: The Venetian Republic fell in 1797, casting the renowned artistry of Venetian glass into jeopardy.
Antonio Salviati was resolute in his intent to rejuvenate this craft. He was born in 1816 in Vicenza, Italy, approximately 39 miles west of Venice, and he eventually became a driven lawyer and businessman. Frustrated by the deteriorating mosaics in St. Mark’s Basilica, a world-renowned site and one of the city’s prized possessions, he recognized an opportunity: In 1859, he launched his own glass factory on Murano to fabricate enameled tiles and, subsequently, blown glass. He made a strong impression on the officials at St. Mark’s, who awarded him a 15-year contract to provide, restore, and design new mosaics for the cherished church.
Astutely skilled at identifying talent, Salviati recruited the finest artisans he could afford and urged them to draw inspiration from Renaissance masters and historical wonders in the magnificent designs they crafted by hand. The reproductions were impressively faithful: As early as 1866, the Art Journal remarked that Salviati’s creations were “selling as genuine antiques.” The glass was stunningly envisioned: handcrafted vases of deep blues and shimmering reds, glass spouts marbled in silvery sea-foams, onyx jars adorned with golden bands. Salviati “possessed the spirit of an artist, and the wonders he beheld in Venice every day consumed his thoughts,” the Italian zoologist and translator Michele Lessona noted in a retrospective in 1884. “He witnessed the decline of the arts of glassmaking and mosaic and was filled with the noble ambition to revitalize them.”
As the reputation of his remarkable factory grew, Salviati secured investment from British backers and founded another enterprise in London in 1866, which quickly gained significant popularity. The architect and designer Charles Eastlake was astonished by the items displayed in Salviati’s London store, which he noted in 1868, “do not, in fact, possess the cold precision of form and immaculate shine of a standard dessert set, but are infinitely more picturesque in their appearance.”
Interesting Fact: The secrets of exquisite glass
In the mid-15th century, Angelo Barovier of Murano introduced cristallo, the first-ever colorless glass in Europe. To achieve the famed clarity of cristallo, Barovier incorporated manganese oxide to eliminate color impurities. This formula was among the island’s closely guarded secrets. Exporting any glass-related trade secrets could result in severe consequences.
Before long, Salviati’s influence was widespread. His factory produced mosaics for the South Kensington Museum, now known as the Victoria & Albert, and his glassware was sold at Tiffany & Company on New York’s Fifth Avenue. In Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the social climber Madame de Villeparisis inquires of her former lover, Monsieur de Norpois, whether he has visited Salviati’s. For Proust, as for many others, the glassmaker had become an undeniable symbol of style in a world eager for impression. Owning a Salviati piece marked an individual’s social ascent. The Art Journal declared in 1870 that any table lacking Venetian glass was “incomplete.”
Salviati’s ascent coincided with a transformative shift in perceptions of art. In mid-19th-century Britain, as the Industrial Revolution advanced, writer John Ruskin and others protested against mass-produced items. They fervently advocated for a return to the skill and elegance of handcrafted works. Ruskin praised traditional Venetian artists, who “created a new design for every glass.” Thus, Salviati, with his meticulously crafted masterpieces, was warmly embraced, particularly in Britain.
Throughout his life, Salviati instilled in his glassmakers a commitment to traditional craftsmanship, to the imaginative, to work that captivates. Salviati’s objective, states Reino Liefkes, curator of glass at the Victoria & Albert Museum, was to “embody the exquisite taste unique to Italy.” After Salviati’s passing in 1890, his factory persevered in that ethos—just as the many other factories on Murano continue to do. Some are family-run businesses that existed for centuries before Salviati’s time. However, it’s conceivable they might not have survived without him.
This Salviati & Company vase, dating from 1960, features “a simplified modernist aesthetic,” remarks Cindy Trope, associate curator at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Simultaneously, it embodies all the grandeur of Salviati’s earlier works, showcasing light and color interplay, with its own distinctive flourish.
In the 16th century, there was a legend that Venetian glassware was so delicate that it could not withstand contact with poison. It was said that a single drop could obliterate it irreparably. It is that gossamer-like fragility that continues to bestow Venetian glass its crystalline brilliance and ethereal charm. As the art critic James Jackson Jarves commented in Harper’s Monthly in 1881, the city’s glass catered to “the human yearning for beauty, perfection, the ultimate aesthetic ideal,” with a beauty “rooted in the infinite.”
