Glass à la façon de Venise
As glass à la façon de Venise is Renaissance - glass referred in Venetian style, the Alps was made in the 16th and 17th centuries north. Often it cannot be distinguished externally from original Venetian glass .
Prehistory in Venice
The Venetian glass making is known since the Middle Ages. Trade and know-how presumably reached the republic via Byzantium . The glassblowers ( phiolari ), who had to relocate their production facilities to the offshore island of Murano by 1295 due to the risk of fire in the city , were legally obliged to keep the technology strictly secret.
Venice became known from the first half of the 16th century for its colorless, thin-walled and finely elaborated cristallo . Nothing has survived from before that, and only a little from the 16th and 17th centuries. Dutch and Flemish still lifes in particular provide information about the range of variations in Venetian glass art, its shapes and decors .
Most of these are cups, bowls, jugs and bottles that had shafts with flat feet made of blown hollow balusters . These shafts became more and more sophisticated in the following years, wings were attached in imaginative ornaments and figurative decorations, sometimes the shaft was also made in a figurative, for example animal form.
There were special finishing techniques for the wall . With so-called ice glass , made by quenching in ice-cold water or by rolling over small splinters, an effect is achieved on the surface like a window glass covered by ice flowers . In the case of thread or net glass (it. Latticinio / vetro a filigrano / reticella ) - milk glass threads were melted into the clear glass mass and woven by turning so that a thread or net-like pattern was created. This technique was already known to some extent in antiquity.
Spreading north of the Alps
In the forests north of the Alps there had been glassworks since the Middle Ages , but colorless glass of Venetian quality could not be produced in them. The coarse utility glass shapes were based on Franconian models; Discoloration techniques for forest glass , which is green due to its high iron oxide content , were not known.
From the middle of the 16th century, despite all attempts by the Republic to keep this secret to itself, the know-how of Venetian glass art reached Germany, the Netherlands and Flanders. Venetians who emigrated set up the first production facilities in Antwerp , Liège , Northern Germany and Holland, Kassel , Nuremberg , the Black Forest , Tyrol and elsewhere. Since glasses were not yet signed at this time, the owner's provenance (princely / count family property, noble house, etc.), as far as can be documented, suggests the provenance.
In the 18th century, with the advent of baroque cut glass, especially in Bohemia and Silesia, the first heyday of Venetian glass is over.
Glass collections à la façon de Venise can be found in various German museums, for example
- Decorative Arts Museum Berlin
- Frauenau Glass Museum
- Bavarian National Museum
- Veste Coburg
- museum kunst palast Düsseldorf, Hentrich collection
- Württemberg State Museum Stuttgart
It is also available in antique shops and auctions. It has to be distinguished from 19th century glass from historicism ; In addition to other stylistic features of the past, this trend in intellectual history also revitalized the thread and mesh glass technique à la façon de Venise , for example in the Rheinische Glashütten-Actien-Gesellschaft in Cologne-Ehrenfeld .
literature
- Franz Adrian Dreier: Venetian glasses and "Façon de Venise" (= catalogs of the Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin. Vol. 12). Kunstgewerbemuseum, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-496-01062-2 .
- Anna-Elisabeth Theuerkauff-Liederwald: Venetian glass from the art collections of the Veste Coburg. The collection of Duke Alfred of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (1844–1900). Venice, à la façon de Venise, Spain, Central Europe. Luca-Verlag, Lingen 1994, ISBN 3-923641-40-0 .
Web links
- Friedrich Kobler: wing glass . In: Reallexikon zur Deutschen Kunstgeschichte , Vol. IX (2003), Sp. 1447–1449.