The glassmakers of Murano
The island of Murano lies about a kilometre and a half north of Venice, and for more than seven hundred years its name has meant one thing: glass. The craft was not born there, however. Glass had been made in Venice itself long before, and a document of the year 982 already mentions a glassmaker living in the city.
In 1291 the Venetian government ordered every glass furnace to be moved to Murano. The reason it gave was the risk of fire, a serious matter in a city built largely of wood. There was a second advantage, though, which the authorities must have appreciated. With all the craftsmen gathered on a single small island, it became far easier to keep watch over them and over the methods they used.
Those methods were treated as secrets of state. In return for guarding them, the glassmakers of Murano enjoyed a social position that few other workers in Europe could match. Their daughters were permitted to marry into noble families, and the masters themselves had the right to carry swords. The price of these privileges was high. A glassmaker was forbidden to leave the Republic. If he went abroad to work, his relatives could be imprisoned, and it was widely believed that men who refused to return were hunted down and killed.
The island's greatest technical achievement came in the middle of the fifteenth century. By carefully purifying the plant ash used as a raw material, Angelo Barovier produced a glass that was completely colourless and transparent, so clear that it was named cristallo after rock crystal. It could be blown remarkably thin, and it made Venetian drinking glasses the most desirable in Europe. Other inventions followed. One was lattimo, an opaque white glass intended to imitate the porcelain that was arriving from China at enormous expense. Another, in the following century, was the glass mirror. A sheet of flat glass was backed with a mixture of tin and mercury to give a reflection far superior to that of the polished metal mirrors used until then, and such mirrors were among the costliest objects that a wealthy household could own.
So valuable a monopoly was bound to be attacked. In the 1660s Jean-Baptiste Colbert, chief minister to the French king, secretly recruited a group of Murano workers with offers of high wages and brought them to Paris to establish a royal mirror factory. The French learned quickly. When the Hall of Mirrors was completed at the palace of Versailles in 1684, the glass was French, and the choice was a deliberate display of independence. A few years later they went further than their teachers: instead of blowing the glass, they poured it onto a metal table, which allowed much larger sheets to be made.
Other rivals appeared at about the same time. In England, George Ravenscroft found that adding lead oxide produced a heavy, brilliant glass that was ideal for cutting into patterns, and in Bohemia craftsmen developed a hard glass that could be engraved. Fashion turned away from the light, delicate Venetian style, and Murano went into a long decline. After the Venetian Republic itself came to an end in 1797, the foreign rulers who followed taxed the island's raw materials heavily. By the early nineteenth century most of the remaining workshops were producing little except beads.
Recovery began in the 1860s. A local priest, Vincenzo Zanetti, gathered the finest surviving pieces into a museum, which opened in 1861, and attached to it a school in which young workers could study and copy the work of the past. At about the same time a lawyer named Antonio Salviati founded a company that revived the old techniques and found eager customers abroad. In the twentieth century several firms began to employ artists and architects as designers, and Murano acquired a modern reputation to set beside its historic one.
The island's workshops face new difficulties today. A large proportion of the 'Murano glass' offered to tourists in Venice is in fact cheap work made elsewhere, and in 1994 an official trademark was introduced so that buyers could be sure a piece was genuine. A glass furnace must be kept burning day and night, and when the price of gas rose steeply in 2021 and 2022, many workshops were forced to stop production for a time. Perhaps most worrying of all, few young people are prepared to spend the ten years or more that it takes to become a master. The craft has survived wars, plagues and the fall of a state. Whether it can survive indifference remains to be seen.