At Venice Glass Week, A Near-Extinct Craft Is Celebrated

On Thursday night in Venice’s historic Palazzo Franchetti, the gallerist Giorgio Mastinu was presented with the top prize at Venice Glass Week, which ran from 13-21 September. It was in recognition of an exhibition of new work by the French artist Ronan Bouroullec, with whom Mastinu has worked for eight years, and there could have been no worthier winner.

Bouroullec’s extraordinary ability to work with color has infused all his work—from furniture and accessories made with his brother Erwan for top manufacturers like Vitra until their split two years ago, to his own vibrant abstract paintings. Now in eleven colors unique to Murano—including a rose pink, golden brown and the most cherished known as bluino—he brings this sensibility to composite “vases,” of four parts, created in cast and blown glass. Each perfect 3D jigsaw of two blocks, one tube and one dish looks like a small architectural marvel—a model dreamy building on the cusp of postmodernism where colors ripple and overlap to create crinkly lines and blurs of suffused tones.

Elsewhere in the city other remarkable works were on show for Glass Week, not least Domitilla Harding’s beakers, glasses and vases displayed in an all-white domestic interior near the Peggy Guggenheim Museum. Harding exploits the most ghostly aspects of the material, in collaboration with the masters at the Anfora furnace on Murano, in blown glass bearing the faintest traces of pink, tangerine and green, and thicker vases which she hand-finishes with powdery pigment.

Meanwhile work by glassmakers from around the world filled the book-lined rooms of Palazzo Loredan in the Campo San Stefano, including handcrafted flowers created using the lost art of French beading by the British Holly Parr and an exuberant sculpture by Brooklynites Nancy Wu and Jean Davis made from glass fragments excavated from landfill sites.

It’s enough to make you think that all is well in the craft world. But Michele Cantzi Blanc is not so sure and in 2022 she established a foundation called The Place of Wonders to protect and promote a number of disappearing skills. “People come to Italy because of our crafts and our culture,” says Cantzi Blanc. “Imagine if one day they came and no one was making anything anymore.”

Cantzi Blanc, who is 41, married into the Barbini family in 2008. Their company, The Hospitality Collection, has upscale hotels in Florence (The Place), Venice (Londra Palace) and Perugia (Borgo dei Conti); Cantzi Blanc decided to activate craft programs in the cities where they had a presence. “In Florence we offer jewelery scholarships,” she says, a self-confessed jewelery lover. “And we have supported a shoemaker, Matteo Capparini, who is now making made-to-measure sneakers with only locally sourced materials.” In Perugia, the foundation is helping to revive the unique embroidery skills used in making table and altar cloths, known as Tavoglie Perugine. On the island of Burano, near Venice, the focus is on the fast-disappearing craft of lacemaking.

“It’s desperate,” says Cantzi Blanc. “The lacemakers are now very old and need to pass on their skills.” The principal requirement for recipients of scholarships is that they are young, local people. “We want to keep the working knowledge alive in the place it comes from. And we want young people to be able to stay in the city where they are from.”

This year, a new scholarship has been created for eight students to learn the almost extinct skill of making glass-beads from the master of the craft, Alessia Fuga. “She’s not just an expert, she’s also an amazing teacher,” says Cantzi Blanc. Fuga’s work is also on sale in the family’s Venetian hotel, the Londra Palace. Profits from this, and the work of other artisans including the septugenarian hatmaker Guiliana Longo (she makes the gondoliers straw boaters), goes back into the foundation.

The Babini family acquired the Londra Palace in Venice in 1938; its one hundred windows look out over the Lagoon, and across to the Giudecca. Several generations of Venetian families have staffed its corridors ever since. The current general manager is Alain Bullo, whose father worked with Cantzi Blanc’s father in law at the hotel until not long ago. Now its recently redecorated ground floor is an homage to quieter Venetian tastes, with clear glass chandeliers from various decades of the twentieth century and walls pannelled with bespoke fabrics by Venetian company Rubelli in art deco peacock designs.

“We mustn’t take any of this for granted,” says Cantzi Blanc. “There are just about enough master craftsmen in this and other Italian cities. If we act now, Glass Week and all the other wonderful crafts could go on forever.”