The Venetian Masters of Glass

Among the most ancient and prestigious crafts of Venice was the art of the glass-worker. This industry flourished thanks to the abundance of fine sand and a rich marine flora capable of producing alkaline substances essential to glassmaking.

By the thirteenth century, the expansion of the craft had become so intense that the authorities deemed it prudent to relocate the furnaces—operating day and night—from Rialto to Murano. Thus, Murano became the heart of a jealously guarded monopoly.

In 1459, the Council of Ten assumed direct control over the art and imposed severe penalties on any craftsman who attempted to emigrate or divulge the secrets of the trade to foreigners. In some cases, the punishment was death. Glass-workers enjoyed extraordinary social status: they possessed their own Libro d’Oro and ranked alongside patricians.

Today, remarkable works by masters such as Zorzi il Ballarin and the Berovieri, figures immortalised with dramatic intensity by Marion Crawford, can be admired at the Murano Museum. An especially exquisite blue nuptial goblet is preserved in Room XII of the Correr Museum in Venice.

Legends abound about the almost supernatural skill of these craftsmen. Some goblets, it was said, were so finely made that they would shatter upon contact with poison, revealing treachery before the fatal sip could be taken.

Venice: Capital of the Printed Word

The Venetians were not only artisans and merchants; they were also passionate bibliophiles. Soon after the invention of printing, Venice emerged as its most important centre in Italy.

By the end of the fifteenth century, more books had been published in Venice than in Rome, Milan, Florence, and Naples combined. In 1469, the Venetian Senate granted John of Spires exclusive printing rights for five years. Shortly thereafter, Nicolo Jenson began issuing Latin classics, publishing an Italian translation of the entire Bible in 1471 and an edition of Pliny in the vernacular in 1476.

In 1490, the great humanist Teobaldo Pio Manuccio of Rome, better known as Aldus Manutius (Aldus Romanus), chose Venice as the ideal city for his ambitious project: the editing and printing of all the Greek classics. He surrounded himself with the greatest scholars of the age, employing Cretan Greeks as type designers and compositors.

Latin and Italian classics were printed in the typeface first used in the Virgil of 1501, later known as italic or aldino. Said to have been inspired by Petrarch’s handwriting and executed by Francia, this type would shape European printing for centuries.

Erasmus of Rotterdam worked for a time as editor and reader, and his translations of Euripides, along with his Adagia, were printed there. Though friends, Erasmus and Aldus might have been closer still had the meals been less austere.

Aldus’s unwavering enthusiasm carried him through his monumental task despite the turmoil of the wars of the League of Cambrai. At his home, he founded the celebrated Accademia di Aldo, where humanists gathered to study and refine Greek texts. The rules and discussions were conducted entirely in Greek.

Before his death in 1515, Aldus had published twenty-eight editiones principes of Greek masterpieces. He stands as the first modern publisher and the first to break the monopoly of books held by the wealthy.

His elegant octavo volumes, marked by the emblem of the anchor and the dolphin, were sold at remarkably affordable prices—about two shillings in modern terms. They were widely read. Of the 24,000 copies printed of Erasmus’ Praise of Folly, only one imperfect copy survives today.

Aldus died poor, but his relatives and descendants continued his work for nearly a century.

Venice and the Absence of a Great Literature

When we turn from printing to literature, we encounter a striking and paradoxical fact. Alone among the nations of Europe, Venice produced no great national literature.

Apart from her crumbling architecture, everything she conceived of beauty found expression in painting. This legacy immortalises a people of merchant princes—proud, sensuous, resourceful, firmly grounded in reality, and deeply religious in their own distinctive way, yet lacking the spiritual idealism of Tuscany.

Throughout the thousand-year history of Venice as a state, no great poet, thinker, or dramatist emerges. None, save for a graceful and fluent writer of decadent comedies—descended from a Modenese family—whose finest works were written in a foreign tongue for a foreign capital.