The history of the Venetian glass industry
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The history of the Venetian glass industry mirrors the economic and political history of the Serene Republic. As the city established its supremacy over trade between western Europe and the eastern Mediterranean glassmaking, along with other manufactures, was a significant supplementary industry--drawing in raw materials from the east and exporting glassware to the west. But the importance of the industry increased enormously when, in the fifteenth century, Venice was besieged by its neighbors and its trade was threatened by the advancing Ottoman Turks. The city began to develop its industries in a conscious plan designed to compensate for the loss of trade. Technical innovations, accompanied by great political and financial investment, put the glass trade in the vanguard of the city's successful substitution of industry for trade. Glassmaking had been important to Venice from at least the tenth century. But in the fifteenth century the industry progressed from the profitable production of utilitarian glassware to become the world center for technical innovations and the production of glassware with great aesthetic value. A brief review of Venetian history is followed by a discussion of the origins of the industry in the Middle Ages and the art of the glassmakers of the Renaissance. Venice was unique among European states in remaining independent of any other political entity throughout the Middle Ages and in the absolute complementarity of its governance and its co
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ed by city officials--remained the norm.
In 1292 the Republic took the last important step in institutionalizing glass production when the Senate issued an order for "the removal of all workshops from within the city boundaries to the nearby island of Murano" (Mariacher 23). In one stroke the Republic removed the strong danger of fires posed by the presence of the furnaces in the crowded city and consolidated the glassmakers within a defined geographic area where their output could be more easily controlled and their secrets better guarded. Murano consists of several small islands built as a low plateau that is intersected, like Venice itself, by canals. It had been part of the Venetian state since 1171, but in 1275 it was given the status of "an independent administrative unit with its own Podesta (magistrate)" and its own Libro d'Oro, the 'golden book in which "the names of the privileged citizens [including many glassmakers] were inscribed" (Polak 55-56). The Venetian industry flourished and documentary evidence shows that its wares, "made to satisfy the tastes of its different customers," were being exported to Germany by 1282, to Flanders by 1394, and to England by 1399 (Vose 51).
Despite the broad range of the trade,
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Approximate Word count = 4322
Approximate Pages = 17 (250 words per page)
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