Murano glass: seven centuries of fire on a Venetian island

For more than seven hundred years, a small island in the Venetian lagoon has been home to some of the world’s finest glassmakers. Here is how Murano became a byword for glass, and what to look for in a vintage piece.

An island of fire

In 1291 the Republic of Venice ordered its glassmakers to move their furnaces to Murano, an island about a mile and a half across the lagoon. The city was built largely of wood, and the furnaces were a constant fire risk. Moving them also made it easier to guard the industry’s secrets. Glassmakers were forbidden to leave the Republic, although some did, carrying their skills to other parts of Europe.

For centuries Murano led Europe in glass. Its craftsmen developed or perfected clear crystal glass, enamelled glass, lattimo (milk-white glass made to look like porcelain), aventurine with its glittering flecks, and the patterned canes known as millefiori, or “a thousand flowers”.

The modern masters

In the twentieth century, a new generation of designers and master blowers turned Murano’s old skills to modern forms.

• Venini and Carlo Scarpa. The architect Carlo Scarpa worked with the Venini glassworks from 1932 to 1947, inventing new surfaces and effects. One of them, a bollicine, fills the glass with tiny bubbles, created by adding a salt that releases gas in the heat of the furnace.
• Seguso. The Seguso family’s glassmaking can be traced back to the fourteenth century. From 1934 the artistic director Flavio Poli led Seguso Vetri d’Arte, and master blower Archimede Seguso (1909–1999) worked on Poli’s celebrated sommerso glass, in which layers of colour are “submerged” inside clear glass. Seguso and the Mandruzzato family made sommerso popular in the 1950s. Archimede was so skilled at animals that he was known on Murano as the “Master of Animals”.

Fish, birds and bubbles

Animals, and fish above all, became some of Murano’s best-loved pieces in the 1950s and 1960s. Look out for:

• Alabastro: soft, opaque white glass that glows like alabaster, often combined with clear or brightly coloured glass.
• Sommerso: thick, heavy glass with one colour cased inside another.
• Controlled bubbles: neat rows of air bubbles trapped deep inside heavy glass.
• Candy and swirls: twisted ribbons of colour, often in playful paperweights and sweets.

Murano or “Murano style”?

Murano’s fame has inspired a huge number of imitations, and experts estimate they make up a large share of glass sold as “Murano”. Since 1994, genuine glass from the island can carry the official “Vetro Artistico Murano” trademark, but most older pieces carry no mark at all. That is why, when we are confident a piece was made on the island, we say so, and when we are not, we describe it as “Murano style”. We never guess at a maker’s name we cannot support.

In the shop

A selection of our vintage Murano glass:

Sources: Wikipedia: Murano; Wikipedia: Venetian glass; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Quittenbaum: Archimede Seguso.