W. Patrick McCray - Glassmaking in Renaissance Venice

The Fragile Craft

W. Patrick McCray

First published 1999 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge
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Copyright W. Patrick McCray, 1999

The author has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

McCray, W. Patrick
Glassmaking in Renaissance Venice: The Fragile Craft.
1. Glass manufactureItalyVeniceHistory. 2. Glassware,
RenaissanceItalyVenice. 3. Venice (Italy)Social
conditionsto 1797. 4. Venice (Italy)Economic conditions
16th century.
I. Title.
666.109453109023

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McCray, W. Patrick
Glassmaking in Renaissance Venice: the fragile craft/W. Patrick
McCray.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Glass blowing and workingItalyVeniceHistory16th
century. 2. GlasswareItalyVeniceHistory16th century.
3. Glassware, RenaissanceItalyVenice. I. Title.
TP859.M33 1999
748.20282094553109031dc21

9931647
CIP

ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-0050-3 (hbk)

Many people over the past seven years have contributed their time, encouragement, and insight to me as I researched the history of glassmaking in Renaissance Venice. Of these, I first wish to thank Olivia Weaver Walling for her love, patience, good humour, and sound advice as my friend and partner.

The author wishes to thank the following person and institutions who helped make his research possible. At the University of Arizona Aniko Bezur, Pia Cuneo, Jennifer Croissant, David Killick, David Kingery, and Michael Schiffer; Lisa Pilosi at The Metropolitan Museum of Art; David Whitehouse, Robert Brill, and William Gudenrath as well as the library staff at The Corning Museum of Glass; Francesca Bewer at Harvard University's Strauss Center for Conservation; Ian Freestone and Dora Thornton at the British Museum; Reino Liefkes at the Victoria and Albert Museum; the staff at the Ashmolean Museum; Michael Tite at the Research Lab for Archaeology and the History of Art at Oxford; Marco Verit at the Stazione Sperimentale del Vetro; Rosa Barovier Mentasti and Ernesto Canal in Venice; and the staff of the Museo Vetrario in Murano. I also wish to acknowledge the advice given at various points in my work by Jan Baart, Maxine Berg, Richard Goldthwaite, Julian Henderson, Marcello Picollo, John Staudenmaier and the anonymous referees who have read and commented on versions of this manuscript.

The following museums deserve thanks and recognition for their cooperation in allowing me to examine the pieces entrusted to them: The Corning Museum of Glass, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Ashmolean Museum, the Museo Vetrario, and the Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche in Faenza.

I am very grateful for the assistance The Corning Museum of Glass provided me in 1994 through a Rakow Grant for Glass Research. This support made a summer in Venice possible and greatly expanded my knowledge of glass and glassmaking. I also owe a great debt to the University of Arizona's Program on Culture, Science, Technology and Society for providing financial support.

Finally, I wish to express my extreme gratitude to Dorothyanne Peltz for helping me prepare this manuscript and Erika Gaffney at Ashgate Publishing for her advice, help and encouragement in making this book possible.

WPM Tucson, Arizona and Minneapolis, Minnesota

It is difficult today to imagine the excitement and desire that glass and ceramics once stirred among people of all social classes in Europe. How can we appreciate this wonder when the shelves of every neighbourhood grocery store are filled with glassware of all types, and porcelain objects have long been relegated to curio shelves? Yet, there was a time when Chinese porcelain was a gift fit for princes and popes, when glassmakers from Venice were lured to other European cities, and when entrepreneurs such as Josiah Wedgwood deliberately manipulated fashion and taste for ceramics among the English aristocracy.

For centuries, the ability to make a clear, colourless, and defect-free glass was the "holy grail" of glassmakers. The Renaissance consumer or collector was interested in purchasing glass free from flaws and defects that displayed an artisan's virtuosity. It is ironic that in recent years more affluent American consumers are often less attracted to defect-free glass produced by machines and rendered defect-free by years of industrial development. Instead, kitchens and catalogues display handmade glass imported from Mexico, Thailand, and India and purchased from upscale vendors with multinational images. In lieu of "perfect" machine-made glass and ceramics, consumers frequently choose vessels bearing the marks and scars of the craftsman's hand and which originate in more "exotic" latitudes.

How will archaeologists and art historians five hundred years from now interpret such forms of material culture? Without understanding the desire of late twentieth-century consumers for goods that retain some element of artisan handicraft (even if it is crude, carried out at times under questionable labour practices, and sold by large corporate entities), explaining the existence of handmade glass and ceramics among the remains of middle- to upper-class American society will be challenging. Material culture, whether glass vases or hydroelectric dams, can have multiple roles and meanings over a variety of temporal contexts.