A hand shapes a glowing bubble of molten glass on the blowpipe with a wooden paddle, the furnace burning behind.

Handmade objects and craftsmanship

Artistic Glass

Glass is the paradoxical material: a solid that behaves like a liquid, a transparency that weighs, a fragile thing that lasts for millennia. Working it demands a rare combination — physical strength, precision of gesture, reading of temperature — because molten glass paste is alive, and changes state in a few seconds. The master glassmaker anticipates: he already knows what shape the material will have in thirty seconds, and moves accordingly.

Through a workshop's open door, lit glassware and a burning furnace; the alley drops away towards the hills.

Where

Where it is practised in Tuscany

In Tuscany art glass has a history that lacks the fame of Murano but exists and produces. In Empoli glass has been worked since the fifteenth century, and the town knew seasons of great fortune above all between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the green glass of Empoli — flasks, demijohns, bottles — furnished the cellars of half of Italy. Then there is Colle di Val d'Elsa (Siena), which developed a tradition of crystal — high-end lead glass — becoming the leading Italian centre for fine crystalware: glasses, stemware, chandeliers, decorative objects. Workshops of authorship also exist in Firenze and in other provinces, where glass artists work independently with small furnaces of their own.

The blowpipe, jacks, shears and wooden paddle laid out on the bench beside a sphere of pale blue glass.

How

The techniques of the craft

The techniques define different worlds. Mouth-blowing — the pipe that gathers the gob of molten glass, the master who blows and turns while the assistant works with tongs and paddles — is the central gesture of art glass. Grinding shapes and refines the piece after cooling. Engraving — with a diamond point, a wheel or acid — decorates the surface. Lampworking is done at the torch on rods and tubes, and produces miniatures of the highest precision. Crystal requires special equipment to handle the high temperatures and the toxic materials (lead) safely, and it has a more elaborate production chain. The stained-glass window — decorative panels made of pieces of coloured glass joined by lead cames — is a still more specialised craft, an inheritance of medieval sacred art.

A glassmaker at the glowing furnace mouth, a wall hung with tools, and in the foreground the bench with the blowpipe and a glass sphere.

Now

The craft today

Doing it today means working in a sector with very high energy costs (the furnaces have to be kept burning continuously), one that has suffered badly from the competition of industrial glass and cheap Asian products. The operations that hold up do so by going to the very top of the range: crystalware of authorship for international luxury, objects signed by designers, collaborations with gallerists and collectors. Tuscan art glass has a market abroad as well, where Italian quality remains a benchmark.