Today we want to talk to you about a collection of coloured Murano glasses that is very important to us, the collection we have made to pay homage to a great artist we love so much: Gaudí.
The glass in this collection in fact, the Gaudí glass, was the first ever glass from the Vetreria artistica Murano Design.
It is a bizarre glass, there is no doubt about it, which is somewhat striking for its unconventional exuberance and, for this reason, does not go unnoticed (a bit like the works of Gaudí himself).
But let’s start at the beginning, because good stories must be told well.
(read the whole article if you want to discover the history of Gaudí’s collectible Murano glassware)
The Gaudì Glass
It was 2007, we had finished our apprenticeship in Murano and after years of hard work we finally felt ready to take over the reins of our artistic production, so we opened Vetreria Murano Design.
Now that we were fully-fledged master glassmakers, we could finally decide every single aspect of the work, from the technical realisation to the choice of craftsmanship on which we would specialise.
We couldn’t wait to try our hand at what would be the first product completely our own.
We had no doubt that it had to be a glass.
Why a glass
The first thing an apprentice glassmaker does is the glass. When you enter a glassworks and find yourself very close to the furnaces, you immediately realise that you will always be very hot in that place and will have to drink a lot of water.
So you combine the useful with the amusing (if you want to call the need to drink that…) and the master glassmaker immediately makes you try out the tools of the trade by letting you try your hand at making an object that will be indispensable for your survival: the gotto (‘glass’ in Venetian).
Obviously, as it is your first job, it always comes out a bit ‘lopsided’, very curved, almost dented.
Only with time do you learn to produce colourful and harmonious Murano glasses.
But why not inaugurate our new independence by starting again from our beginning and thus always making a glass, but this time making it curved in a non-accidental but deliberate way?
We decided to go further and make the curved line the motif of the whole glass.
But who was it who had made curves his strong point? Gaudì.
Who was Gaudì
Gaudí was a Spanish architect at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the greatest exponent of ‘Catalan modernism‘, i.e. the version that developed in Catalonia of the artistic current called Art Nouveau in France and Liberty in Italy.
Even if you are not an expert in art and architecture, you have certainly already seen Gaudi’s buildings, if only in photos.
His are in fact the strangest buildings you can see in Barcelona and the famous Sagrada Família, a cathedral famous in the collective imagination for its extravagant beauty and for the fact that it is said that it will never be finished (recent predictions say that we will see it completed in 2026, 144 years after the laying of the first stone and 100 years after Gaudí’s death).
Why we love Gaudi
Gaudí took up the teachings of another great architect, Viollet-le-Duc, who urged young artists not to turn dogmatically to the great examples of the past, but to improve on them with the help of their own sensitivity and new building and technological techniques.
And so it was that Gaudí decided that tradition should be the starting point, not the point of arrival.
When we opened the Murano Design glassworks, we felt like the young Gaudí: we loved the past and the historical techniques of Murano glassmaking, but we were also ready to put ourselves on the line, ready to break with the patterns we had been taught during our apprenticeship, but always keeping them as a point of reference.
Gaudì’s curved line
“The straight line is the line of men, the curved line the line of God” Gaudí was fond of saying, and his buildings that twist and contract without following the architectural logic used up to that point are proof that he meant these words from the heart.
And so it is that even our first glass as master glassmakers of Murano Design does not follow the lines of tradition but bends in on itself, like our first glasses as apprentices but, this time, not by mistake but to follow a precise logic, that of wanting to break the rules, have fun and amaze.
And after having given it that bizarre crooked but more ‘natural‘ shape, as Gaudì would perhaps say, we filled it even more with curves: thanks to melted coloured glass straws we added lines that were no longer schematic but ready to become more and more twisted.
Gaudì’s bright colours
What else distinguishes Gaudí’s works?
Obviously the colours.
Could we not pay homage to him by creating beautiful coloured Murano glasses?
Abandoning the silver leaf of the Murano tradition, we throw ourselves into composing a glass with the brightest colours we can create, as Gaudí did with the mosaics that adorned his works.
The colours of our glasses are vivid, with strong contrasts, ready to stand out wherever they are.
Of course we didn’t stop at glasses.
When you like something you want to do it again and again.
And so, in addition to glasses, we started making jugs, vases and goblets.
All driven by the same goal: to innovate while having fun.
And we want to leave you with a little lesson, on where to look for inspiration, that Gaudí left us.
“Nature has always been my teacher, the tree next to my studio is my teacher“.
Antoni Gaudí (1852-1926)
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