“Sì in Muran come fuora de Muran”: Transcultural Itineraries and Material Counternarratives in Venetian Glass, c. 1450–1650

Abstract

Few early modern materials are linked quite as closely to their site of primary production as Venetian glass. In the period from 1450 to 1650, beginning with the emergence of the highly limpid and colorless vetro cristallo, glass made both on Venice and à la façon de Venise gained international acclaim and cloaked Murano’s workshops and workers in artisanal myth. Although recent studies have interrogated the meaning of this material for Venice and Murano, there is a dearth of commentary on the means through which this material became “Venetian.” This article proposes a transcultural interpretive paradigm that identifies and de-naturalizes this process of “Venetianization” and instead centers the itineraries of the raw materials essential to its making. By tracing the complex itineraries of matter such as Syrian plant ash and silica-rich stones from the Ticino River, it asks how, at which moment, and by whom such materials gained a relationship with Venice, and whether their prior uses, histories, and associations were erased in the furnaces of Murano’s workshop.