The secrets of Venetian glassmaking
Print Edition
A modern-day glassblower believes he has unraveled the mysteries of Renaissance-era Venetian glassmaking, a trade whose secrets were so closely guarded that anyone who divulged them faced the prospect of death.
Today’s glassblowers work with methane-fired furnaces, electric-powered kilns, good lighting and proper ventilation. The craftsmen of Murano, an island near Venice, didn’t have such technology, yet they still turned out museum-worthy pieces known for their artistry and beauty, using techniques that remained exclusive for centuries.
Through years of researching Venetian glass collections at American and European museums and comparing the artifacts with more contemporary glasswork from Venice, plus his own experimentation and many trips to Italy, William Gudenrath has created an online resource he believes explains Venetian glassmakers’ methods.
“The Techniques of Renaissance Venetian Glassworking,” which contains videos, photographs and text, details how Gudenrath surmises glassworkers produced works of art with little more than wood-fired furnaces and metal blow pipes and tongs. The information was posted this week on the website of the Corning Museum of Glass in upstate New York, where Gudenrath is a resident adviser and teacher of Venetian techniques. The gilding and enameling the Murano glassmakers added to their glass products had to be fired at higher temperatures than the glass itself to make the decorations permanent. The Venetians couldn’t simply turn a knob to regulate the temperature of their furnaces, Gudenrath said, yet they mastered the tricky art of glass decoration by continuously reheating and shaping the vessel after the decorations had been added, a process he demonstrates in several videos.
“It’s just amazing to me that they did what they did in those conditions,” he said.
Gudenrath’s knowledge of Venetian glassmaking and his research into the process are a “fantastic resource,” said Jutta-Annette Page, a curator at Ohio’s Toledo Museum of Art.
Gudenrath, 65, became fascinated with Venetian glass as a teenager in Houston, where he started blowing glass at age 11. But finding documents detailing how Murano glass was created proved difficult, a result of restrictions placed on the trade hundreds of years ago.
To prevent fires, the government ordered glass furnaces moved to Murano in the late 13th century. The move also was aimed at preventing trade secrets from being smuggled to competitors. Anyone attempting to do so could be executed under Venetian laws created to maintain the city’s monopoly on the luxury glass trade.
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