A gondolier artfully manoeuvres his vessel through the aquatic traffic, a single oar raised, spear-like at the stern. Daytrippers meander towards the merchants of Venice, feeling the magpie attraction to objects that glint in shop windows. Light refracts through chess sets, candlesticks and curiosities. It has always been like this in the Italian city where glass flows as freely as the waterway inlets.
That molten history is explored in Tracy Chevalier’s latest book, The Glassmaker, where the Girl with a Pearl Earring author turns her attention to the Venetian island of Murano. We meet Orsola Rosso in 1486 as she learns how to handle glass by practising with honey on a stick. The craft becomes increasingly sophisticated, featuring ‘white goblets embellished with swans, blue with fish, yellow with parrots, red with snakes’, and Rosso’s timeless ‘mouse dropping’ seed beads, which go on to adorn Italian socialite Luisa Casati’s extravagant gowns. Glass dolphins continue to be passed as love tokens into the 21st century; fortunes may ebb, but the Venetian glass-making tradition will never sink.
My first dalliance with Murano glass was in Suffolk. Pottering around my favourite antique shop in Bungay, I encountered a pale-pink dachshund figurine that was just the right side of kitsch. It was stretching in exactly the same downward-dog posture that my real dachshund adopts and, despite the hard, unrelenting medium, there was movement to the piece. ‘That’s Murano glass,’ the seller informed me with authority. It would be some years later, as I toyed with buying a mallard (eventually determined to be on the wrong side of kitsch) from a gallery in Venice — dizzy from coloured glass, you understand — that this pitch gained full meaning.
Italy’s speed skater Arianna Fontana carries a Murano glass lamp at the Closing Ceremony of the 2026 Winter Olympic Games.
(Image credit: Stefano Rellandini/AFP via Getty Images)
Murano — and Venice more broadly — is closely associated with skilled development of blown glass; a method based on the controlled expansion and manipulation of a molten bubble through a blowpipe. Decorative effects developed over time, including plunging a hot half-blown vessel into water to intentionally cause cracks to form on the surface. However, Venetian glass’s reputation is an early modern phenomenon: A History of Glassforming by Keith Cummings explains that, although until the 1960s it was thought that glass wasn’t commonplace until medieval times, blown glass is now known to date back to 50BC, when it was invented in the Syro-Palestinian area. The V&A Museum’s glass gallery in South Kensington includes a selection of Roman mould-blown head vases, a style still popular today.
Working under the brand La soufflerie, Paris-based couple Valentina and Sébastian Nobile’s pieces begin life as a clay sculpture that is then moulded in plaster. From this, another mould goes to a bronze founder in the Somme region of France. ‘It is this third cast into which we blow our glass,’ explains Valentina. ‘We work with a Venetian glass-blower who handmakes our tools for us.’ La soufflerie tableware is blown from the couple’s workshop in Tunisia. ‘There’s no machinery involved; everything is done with hand tools and a furnace,’ explains Valentina. ‘At the bottom of each item, you can feel the pontil mark left by the glass-blower’s cane.’
The author’s downward Murano dachshund.
(Image credit: Claire Jackson)
One particularly compelling aspect of glass is that it can be recycled an infinite number of times. At a recent craft fair, there was an inevitable butter-fingers moment with a glass decoration. The potter next door looked ashen, but the cheery glass seller simply collected the broken pieces and set them aside to use in a new creation. Valentina shows me bottles in varying shades of green, including Perrier. ‘Everything we make is from recycled glass,’ she says. It can be almost anything; ‘even car windows’.
Another intriguing side of glass-blowing is the performance around it. Although other art forms rely on multiple processes — paint can be layered at different stages, for example — blown glass must be crafted in one continuous session. This adds a sense of jeopardy, rather like cooking or the production of ceramics, where the maker is also at the mercy of a flame. Just as those crafts have inspired reality television shows (The Great Pottery Throw Down, The Great British Bake Off, both Channel 4), glass-blowing even has its own contest, Blown Away (Netflix), in which prizes include a residency at the Corning Museum of Glass, New York State, US.
For a closer experience, in Thuringia’s highland town Lauscha, Germany, visitors can watch artists inflate glowing spheres that become the Christmas baubles associated with the region. Glass has been blown in the area since the 16th century, with the first glass tree decorations — originally fruit and nuts — dating back to the 1800s. Demonstrations are also central to Glasi Hergiswil, the last place in Switzerland where glass is traditionally blown. The living museum, based near Lucerne, includes an archive of pieces created on the site over the past 200 years, and it is currently recruiting glass-blowers.
Erwin Eisch’s ‘Narcissus’ on display at the National Glass Centre in Sunderland.
(Image credit: Cliff Hide General News/Alamy)
Although glass-blowing in manufacturing might be confined to a handful of workshops, it is thriving as an art form in its own right. Among the Venetian platters and German tankards at the V&A is a huge silver-plated glass sculpture that appears to be melting into a mirror. The mould-blown Narcissus (1975) by Erwin Eisch stoked the furnace for studio glass. These artists soon realise it is not a quick skill to learn. ‘It’s 10 years before you’re a proficient glass-blower,’ says Alison Stott, who came to glass after working as a visual-effects artist and was a finalist at this year’s John Ruskin Prize exhibition at Trinity Buoy Wharf in London. ‘In its molten form, glass is like lava; it requires your undivided attention. Once you’ve got that hot glob on the end of your iron, you can’t think of anything else.’
(Image credit: Alamy)
Alison is particularly interested in caustics — the bright patterns we see at the bottom of a glass of water in the sunshine. In her piece Naturally Focused III, selected from nearly 4,000 entries, Alison’s hand-blown lens allows light to dapple and pool, combining the innate proper-ties of the material with scientific application. A similar piece, Naturally Focused I, is displayed in the school of physics at Bristol University, with the central blown section installed in a brass structure emulating a historic instrument.
It’s a long way from the Renaissance seed beads and, yet, to invoke Chevalier’s ‘time alla Veneziana’, the making methods span the continuum
