In spite of its name, which recalls a lighthearted little boy from the lagoon city (Tipetto in Italian means little boy ), the Venetian Tipetto is a peculiar glass goblet, with showy decorations on the stem and belonging to the Venetian tradition of blown glass art.

In this article we want to tell you a little about it, how to recognize it and why to fall in love with it.

“But why not just call it a chalice?” customers visiting our Showroom ask us .
Actually, calling the Tipetto a “chalice” is not wrong, but it would be like calling a goblet a “glass.” In fact, the Tipetto is a particular type of glass, more specifically a particular Murano glass goblet.

Let’s start with the technique: an ordinary goblet glass can be made with a wide variety of processes, while a Venetian Tipetto will only ever be made with the technique of blown glass.
If you would like to see how we master glassmakers of Murano Design work, on this page there are photos of us at work while shaping or blowing air into glowing glass (me writing this is the handsome one), and the process is explained step by step.
But in a nutshell we can say that the process of making Murano glass consists of taking a glowing mass of glass and blowing into it with a very long straw!
And then putting the cluster (which is a little less “cluster” at that point) back into the furnace, and withdrawing it out, and blowing, and putting it back in, and withdrawing it out, until it has the shape we want.
You can see how tiring the work is, but it also gives great satisfaction, because in the end each Tipetto is a unique piece, in which you can touch the passion and hard work of the master glassmaker who made it!

At one time, Venetian Tipettos were actual glass goblets, used for dinners of nobles and royalty all over Europe!
Caterina De Medici, great-granddaughter of the famous Lorenzo De Medici (patron of the most famous artists of the Renaissance, including Michelangelo), had inherited artistic taste from her great-grandfather, and when she left Italy to marry the King of France, she took her precious Venetian Tipetti with her, causing the fashion to explode throughout Europe (there were no influencers, but being queen of France and granddaughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent still gave you a certain visibility and power of emulation).

With these introductory paragraphs we hope that we have made you at least a little curious about these beautiful objects steeped in history and that you have realized how dear they are to us and how proud we are of them.
By showing you our Tipetti now we hope you can realize the love that went into forging them.
Remember that they are all unique pieces and are like children to us master glassmakers!
Let’s start with introductions.

These are the more classically styled Tipetti, the ones we make inspired by the Tipetti you could find on the table of a 16th-century Venetian Doge and which you might see at the Glass Museum in Murano.
They are also the least lavish, perhaps the least daring (we Venetians liked luxury, but there must have been some more morose Doges, right?).
If you want to see them in more detail go here.

They are like Tipetti Venezia, but with the upgrade of incalmo stripes.
“Incalmo” in Venetian means “grafting.” To make this Tipetto, while the glass is still warm and we are working it, we add colored glass strips and a crystal band on top of the mouth of the goblet (thus making a “graft,” precisely).
If you open the page perhaps you will see better what we are talking about.

The Burmense are still in what we would call a “traditional” style, but unlike the striped Incalmo Tipettos, these are decorated with gold leaf (that is, gold cut into very thin, 22-carat sheets), which is meticulously placed on the glass before it cools, so that it sticks well to it.
These are the types of Tipetto that most flaunt their Venetian nobility, the ones from which we imagine Catherine de Medici sipped wine as she enchanted French nobles with her Italian elegance.

We step out of the comfort zone of classic and traditional to launch into our reinterpretation of Venetian Tipetti.
The past should be treated as a great teacher, a sage who should teach you how to grow and renew what he has already done, so that his work is always kept current.
Tipetti are not just decorative glasses from the past, we believe they are timeless objects, capable of adapting to modern needs and taste. It is the ability to renew itself that distinguishes a piece of simple craftsmanship from one of art, and we think the Venetian Tipetto is art!

The workmanship is initially similar to the Burnese Tipetti. Only here a thin gold leaf is not applied, but silver leaf.
What makes the break with tradition is the innovative choice of decorating them with glass castings inside, according to the ‘inspiration of the master glassmaker. Each decorative casting will be unrepeatable and will make the Tipetto a unique piece, a moment shared only between you and its craftsman!

Let’s take a further step away from the Classic Tipetto to see tipettos made with the murrine technique.
We talked about this technique in this article here. If you don’t feel like going to reread it, we can tell you, in brief, that murrine is a very old technique (from well before anyone had any idea of building pilings in a lagoon in Northern Italy ). However, the technique was lost and was rediscovered and reused in Venice only in the 19th century (if we think about the whole history of the Serenissima, this fact, you will agree with us, is very recent!).
We have here taken the form of the Tipetto, an artifact of the 1500s and made it married to a technique of the 1800s!

Here, I think you can guess, is where we had the most fun!

We like Gaudi so much (we have paid homage to him already here and here).

After all, who better to inspire us in creating ultra-modern Tipetti than the greatest exponent of modernism?
With this series we have made Venetian Tradition embrace Modernisme. Because ‘art must also be this: a meeting point not only between past and present but also between peoples and cultures.
Do you think Gaudi would have appreciated our homage?

As mentioned earlier, no Venetian uses tipetti for drinking anymore, and the precious and special goblets are displayed along with other Murano glass vessels as decorative elements.
So we thought, why not make candelabra out of them?
The stem is the typical tipetto one (if not, it wouldn’t be a Tipetto, remember?), but we modified the goblet mouth to add a candle holder, so that Tipetti are still usable objects!