VENICE'S GREAT AGE OF GLASS

THIS summer more than 225,000 travelers who wanted to catch their breath and feast their eyes have stopped in the small (pop. 19,000) upstate New York glass-manufacturing center of Corning. On view in the Corning Museum of Glass, which is part of the new laboratory and research center of the Corning Glass Works (makers of Steuben crystal) are 128 choice examples from the greatest age of Venetian glassmaking: the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries.

The glass goblets, vases and bowls on display, made for Renaissance princes and Islamic sultans, are now owned by private U.S. collectors and museums, who lent them to the Corning Museum. None dates before 1450, and by that time the industry was well established, centered in Venice's island of Murano, where glass blowers work to this day. The glassmakers imported alkali from Spain and the Near East, pebbles of quartz from the River Ticino near Milan, and manganese, the "glassmakers' soap," which turned their glass to near crystal transparency. They were accurately imitating jewels in glass and turning out beads, tumblers and chalices by the shipload.

An early, jealously guarded secret was the method for melting designs in enamel into rich, dark blue glass (see color). By the 16th century, turning from enamel, glass blowers were getting their effect from glass alone, embedding canes of opaque white glass to form latticelike patterns, or trapping pockets of air between the rods of glass to make Venice's famed vetro di trina (lace glass).

In what one contemporary called "a sweet contest of nature and of man," Murano's craftsmen reached their greatest peak as they learned to twist glass into all manner of sizes and shapes. At its best, as in the dragon stem goblet (opposite), the Venetian artists managed to capture the same excitement in movement and space that held Tinoretto entranced. This Venetian love of bravura effects reached a flamboyant finale just before the development of heavy potash glass in Germany and lead glass in England broke Venice's near monopoly. Glass blowers made wine goblets in the forms of whole ships, gondolas, pyramids, belfries, tubs, whales and lions. With such excesses, Venice's sun sank--but not before the glass blowers of Murano had explored the possibilities of their material to its limits.

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