In the latter half of the nineteenth century the revolutionary design concepts style swept across Europe and the United States. Artists everywhere abandoned the Victorian revival movements in favor of the new style. Even in tradition-bound Venice a startling and dramatic new style of glass began to be produced. Fabulous monsters, especially winged dragons, materialized on the luxurious glassware that had captivated the world for centuries. Beautifully crafted, these beasties were destined to embellish Venice's art glass for the better part of three decades. Although never classified as such before, this body of work can now be regarded as the idiosyncratic Venetian contribution to the art nouveau style.

The many different national and/or regional manifestations of the art nouveau style [1] share two essential features, the first philosophical and the other tangible. Each variation self-consciously strove to create something new and each was influenced by one or more contemporary aesthetic fads, such as naturalism, symbolism, or Japanese art, Venice's claborate fin-de-siecle creations fall neatly into these

By the mid-nineteenth century one of the more obvious results of the political and economic turmoil following Napoleon's conquest of the Venetian Republic in 1797 was the imminent destruction of the glass industry on the island of Murano, its center since the thirteenth century, Control of the Venetrian territories passed back and forth between France and Austria, but in 1815, after Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo, Austria once again gained control of Venice and mounted a determined effort to destroy what was left of the Venetian glass industry in favor of its own. Austria enacted ruinous tariffs on the importation of the raw materials necessary for glassmaking, of which Venice had almost none, and on the export of the finished glassware. The first casualty of this double taxation was luxury glass, the city's traditional export. The glass industry was reduced to making beads for Austria's colonial trade and poor quality utilitarian glassware for local consumption that was occasionally enameled with anti-Austri an sentiments.

With its economy in shambles and unemployment rampant, Venice remained under Austrian control in the 1850s. At that time three dedicated Venetians banded together to revive the glass industry. They were Antonio Colleoni (1810-1885), the mayor of Murano; the abbot Vincenzo Zanetti (1824-1883), a visionary glass historian; and Antonio Salviati (1816-1890), a lawyer turned entrepreneur. Salviati opened his first glass factory and shop in Venice in 1859, and others soon followed his lead. In the early years Salviati concentrated on mosaics, glass tiles, and a very limited amount of blown chalcedony glass, a type of glass that imitated stone.

In 1866 Venice became part of the newly formed kingdom of Italy, and the local authorities, capitalizing on the unique attributes of the ancient city, decided to promote tourism. In the nineteenth century run-down Venice held great romantic allure, and the British in particular came in droves. Tourism soon became the lifeblood of the city. The legions of wealthy tourists pouring into Venice desired nothing more than to return home with a glass souvenir evocative of Venice's fabled glory days. Murano satisfied their need with faithful reproductions of early Venetian glass, which were sold with great success in large shops called stabilimenti. [2] The work was so fine that from the first it was widely believed to be indistinguishable from the antique. In 1866 the Art Journal cautioned:

It is necessary to wam collectors that many of the modem productions of Salviati are selling as veritable antiques. Those who are not experienced connoisseurs may be easily deceived, for the imitations - or rather the copies - cannot be at once distinguished from the old. They are as light and as soft to the touch, the semi-transparency has been preserved, the colours are often as brilliant, and the designs are, in nearly all instances, after veritable models. [3]

In 1867 Salviati exhibited his blown glass at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. His impressive presentation was anchored by two large pyramidal glass cases set up against walls covered with examples of the firm's mosaics. As Abbot Zanetti described the Salviati contribution, there were glasses, chalices, amphoras, cruets, vases, delicated tinted vessels harmonious with combinations of filigree [retorti] and reticello, bands of enamel graffito, dazzling with aventurine, ruby, aquamarine, and opal, with borders, flowers, butterflies, serpents, dolphins, swans, initials, masks. [4]

Zanetti later wrote: "of the blown-glass objects sent to Paris [by Salviati] not one returned to Venice; there was instead an indescribable rush to buy what was there and to order new works. " [5] The firm won a gold medal, three silver medals, and four honorable mentions.

One of the objects Salviati exhibited was a complex pink cup, unfortunately now lost and known only from contemporary descriptions. It stood twenty inches tall and was embellished with glass fruits, leaves, and swans. Created especially for the Paris exhibition by Antonio Seguso (1829-1903) and the fourteen-year-old Giuseppe Barovier (1853-1942), it was the forerunner of the intricate tours-de-force, laden with glass swans and dolphins, that distinguished Murano's later production. However, animal motifs, as evidenced in the Salviati objects illustrated in the Art Journal catalogue of the 1867 exposition, remained rare.

The stabilimenti considered the enormous commercial success of the modem copies of older Venetian glass too important to jeopardize, and discouraged innovation. The industrious young blowers, however, capitalized on a Murano tradition that had lasted for centuries: two free hours at the furnace at day's end. There they experimented with new forms, techniques, and color combinations. Their inventions--glass objects embellished with swans and dolphins--began to appear in contemporary catalogues alongside the traditional copies of early Venetian glass. An unqualified success, the production of glass with animal motifs increased exponentially. In the Salviati catalogue of 1878-1883 there is a plethora of swans and dolphins. However, more elaborate creatures were rare. We find only two examples of snakelike dragons, obviously inspired by tall, seventeenth-century Venetian and facon de Venise cristallo (clear glass) goblets with convoluted serpentine stems. [6]

At the Esposizione Italiana of 1881 in Milan, the Salviati firm exhibited an elaborate fountain designed by the Venetian artist Gasparini. With this fountain, two new but fully developed Venetian glass icons made their debut--elaborate winged dragons and fabulous hybrid beasts. A brilliantly colored mosaic basin was carried on the backs of turtles. From it, blown green glass dolphins supported a smaller basin from which sprang bizarre blown-glass hippogriffs. They, in turn, supported a vetro a reticello [7] basin in which blown-glass winged dragons clustered around a tall glass trumpet lily spouting water. Illuminated electrically from within, spurting and dripping water from all its elements, Salviati's fountain was an astounding sight. Soon these new animal motifs, which were commercially, if not always critically, very successful, superseded the pretty swans and dolphins on Murano's glassware. Their introduction was without doubt due to the impact of the nineteenth century's frequent international exhibit ions that provided an opportunity for the interchange of artistic traditions.

Of the countless inspiring objects the Venetian glass designers and makers saw at the exhibitions, it was the dragon that seemed to stimulate their imagination and challenge their glassmaking skills the most--not only the traditional European winged, three-clawed, dog-headed dragon of Saint George, but also the more exotic, often winged, horned, five-clawed imperial dragon of China.

The elaborate compote shown in Plate VI, in an unusual olive-colored glass, has a bowl mounted with two European dragons but supported by a writhing Chinese dragon replete with horns, five claws on each foot, facial protuberances, and milk glass teeth. The green glass cornucopia shown in Plate I is pulled from the body of a legless and clawless European dragon. A more threatening, three-clawed European dragon forms the shaft of the complex candlestick.

To create these elaborate objects, all of Murano's newly recovered historic and recently discovered modern glassmaking techniques and colors were called into service and combined in new, innovative ways. The trend toward soft colors, often with cloudy streaks and murky spots. The elaborate bowl is supported by an opalescent, pink-tongued, angel-winged Chines dragon with five claws. Both the bowl and the foot of the vase are blown in plate blue transparent glass infused with fragmented bits of silver leaf and random streaks of opalescent glass. The upper rim of the bowl drips with mosslike festoons obviously derived from the Japanese-inspired work of the French art nouveau glassmaker Emile Galle and his contemporaries.

The bowl and foot of the elegant vase shown in Plate IX are formed of blown aventurine glass, which is exceedingly difficult to work. [8] They are united by a pink glass European dragon. The intentional tilt of the bowl had never been seen in the traditional glass production of Venice.

The boat-shaped vessel known as a nef shown in Plate VII is wholly created of cristallo glass. Its entire surface is covered with small bumps of opaque turquoise glass, a technique perfected by the Barovier family of Murano and known as granzioli. The nef is embellished with two European dragons, and an amusing open-mouthed dragon's head forms the spout.

The nef shown in Plate XII, of cristallo and blue glass, is a reasonably accurate copy of a sixteenth-century original in Murano's Museo Vetrario. However, the cornucopia finial of the original has been replaced by a pink-tongued dragon. All the factories created their interpretations of the sixteenth-century nef in many sizes and color combinations. This one is identical to one illustrated in the catalogue issued about 1895 by the Testolini stabilimento. No specific factory attribution is possible since Testolini bought its glass from many Murano factories.

Eventually a lively competition developed between Murano's blowers, who conccoted ever more complex zoomorphic combinations, created in elaborate combinations of colors and techniques with mold-and free-blown elements executed oddly colored mottled or streaked glass, multi-colored vetro a retorli (twisted fillgress) [9] or retricello, or temperamental blown aventurine glass. Nothing seemed too difficult or too bizarre.

A recently discovered catalogue of about 1895 issued by Fratelli Toso, the oldest glasshouse in Venice at the time, contains an astounding variety of elaborate exotic animal pieces. The contemporary catalogue issued by th eTestolini stabilimento illustrates even more. At the 1895 Esposizione di scelti artistici ed oggetti attini in Murano, critics were of mixed opinion regarding the elaborate exotic creations. Some found them admirable, and, while Vittorio Zanetti, Abbot Vincenzo Zanetti's nephew, was awarded a gold medal cum laude "For the rare mastery with which he sculpted [blew] his animals," [10] others condemned the "heavy decoration with animals, dominated by the strange and the grotesque." [11] Not one critic, however, diminished the incredible manual dexterity needed to create them. As described in the Magazine of Art in 1890:

Each separate article is usually made by one man, with the aid of an assistant. The first shapes the lump of glass with the blow-pipe, and, as it gains form and consistency, the assistant hands various lumps of fiery glass on the end of an iron rod. From the luminous spot [the "glory hole"] the craftsman, with another iron tool, takes little bits and fixes eyes and tongues on his dragons and sea monsters, jewels, varying tints of color to his goblets, and handles andstems to his vases. Touches of gold foil, too, are deftly added, while some parts may be stamped with impressions of masks. Now he seizes his iron shears and cuts down one part, next he prinches another into shape, while between each operation the article still fixed to the blow-pipe is held for an instant in the blazing furnace. All this time is has to be twisted and turned a round, test the glass, being only partially cooled, should fall to one side and be spoiled. [12]

Among the unlikely glass creatures to survive is the griffin -- a bird-beaked, fish-tailed, winged creature with bird's legs that forms the base of the strange candlestick. The elaborate vase is supported by three more of these bizarre creatures. The scissor-cut bowl is a lexicon of elaborate glassmaking techniques. Sandwiched between the layers of rubino (ruby glass made with gold) are bits of fragmented silver leaf. The surface of the bowl is encrusted with masks, berries, and applied clear-glass trailing. The rare cornucopia is embellished with free-floating murrhine and entwined with a seventeenth-century-style crested serpent. The mold-blown scallop sheel vase is decorated with festoons reminiscent of Phoenician glass. The seemingly realistic seahorse perched on the edge of the vase is in fact an odd mutuant, for it has sprouted eagle's wings. The elaborate opalescent glass compete is obviously by the same hand. The bowl in the shape of a poppy flower is supported by an opalescent, pink-tongued Chinese dragon with five claws and angel's wings. Symbolic of the external struggle between gold and evil, the Chinese dragon, which was considered beneficent and identified with the Chinese emperor, is engaged in mortal combat with a turouoise blue serpent, a creature of the devil.

The price lists of the period indicate that each object could be ordered in a variety of colors and degrees of technical elaboration. A complex dragon vase executed in monochrome glass was the least expensive. Multi-colored and vetro a retorti versions of it cost more. The highest price was reserved for the object realized in vetro a reticello or blown aventurine glass, both difficult to work.

A careful study of surviving factory and retail shop catalogues can help assign a factory to a given example of late nineteenth-century Venetian glass, but attribution to an individual artist is much more difficult. True to the medieval guild tradition. Murano's glassmakers regarded themselves as artisans, not artists, and worked in almost total anonymity. Only occasionally was an individual glassmaker singled out for a special honor at an international fair or was mentioned in Abbot Zanettis newspaper La Voce di Murano. In this way we know that Gasparini designed the 1881 Salviati fountain. And since the brothers Giuseppe and Benvenuto Barovier (1855-1932) were Salviati's master blowers at the time, it is not unreasonable to assume that they created the fountain's blown-glass elements. In addition, the collections of Barovier family members contain several exotic-animal vases, which family tradition attribute to either Giuseppe or Benvenuto. By comparing these vases with other surviving examples, tentative attributions can be made. However, for the time being the master blowers at other glasshouses remain unknown.

In the early years of the twentieth century, reflecting the world's growing apathy to art nouveau, the taste for dragons and other elaborate creatures gradually diminished. Nonetheless, elaborate glass objects continued to be made at Murano's glasshouses until the eve of World War I. When the Austrians began bombing Venice in 1915 the glass factories closed and the glassmakers fled to either Livorno or Naples. On their return after the war they quickly realized that the simplicity of the art deco style was the new order of the day. In a typically Venetian response to change, Murano's designers and blowers once again delved into Murano's past for inspiration. They found it in the simple designs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Dragons and other exotic creatures became rare, and by the 1930s had disappeared completely.

1. The differences are most obvious when the rectilinear, abstract style of the Scottish architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928) is compared to the flowing, curvilinear lines of the French, Spanish, and Milanese manifestations of art nouvean.
2. Stabilimenti were retail shops sometimes occupying an entire palazzo and often included workshops for making small mosaics or furniture.
3. "Modern Venetian Glass," Art Journal (London), 1866, p. 290.
4. Salviati: Il suo vetro e i suoi uomini, 1858-1987, ed. Giovanni Sarpellon (Stamperia di Venezia, Venice 1989), p. 14.
5. B. Cecchetti, E. Sanfermo, and V. Zanetti, Monographia della vetraria veneziana e muranese (Venice, 1874), p. 75.
6. Several of the earliest winged-dragon pieces, elegant and restrained, are represented in the collection amassed in a matter of months by the American art critic and collector James Jackson Jarves (1818-1888). In 1881 he gave his collection of some 280 pieces of Venetian glass to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The majority of the objects date from the late nineteenth century, so the dragon pieces furnish datable examples of the first Venetian exotic-animal creations.
7. Vetro a reticello (latticework Filigree) was developed in Venice in the sixteenth century. In this complex technique a small bubble of glass with applied milk glass threading on its exterior is inserted into a slightly larger bubble with the threads applied internally, but twisting in the opposite direction. Carefully, the two are blown out together. The two bubbles fuse into a single object with a crisscross pattern of threads. Tiny bubbles of air are inadvertently trapped between the layers of glass in a regular pattern.
8. Avventurina (aventurine) is a type of glass in which many tiny bits of metallic copper form in the body of the glass as it cools, producing a sparkling, golden effect. The name derives from the Italian word venturina (fortuitous accident), for this glass was reputedly discovered serendipitously in the seventeenth century by Giovanni Darduin (1586-1654). Extremely attractive, it was produced on large lumps, which were cut into small pieces and used as a stone substitute in beads, inlaid jewelry, and small boxes. For more than a century aventurine glass was produced exclusively in Murano by the dalla Venezia family. It was sold to other Murano factories and exported throughout the world, even reaching China, where it was known as "the glass of the golden star." By the late eighteenth century the formula for aventurine had been forgotten. Pietro Bigaglia (1786-1876), the owner of a large bead factory, rediscovered the complex recipe about 1845. By incorporating thin aventurine rods into complex canes for us e in blown filigree glass, he succeeded in using adventurine glass in a new way. A more complex problem, however, remained unsolved for another quarter of a century. Over the years all attempts to blow aventurine into vessles had failed. The technicians at the Salviati furnaces overcome the difficulties and introduced blown aventurine glass in 1871.
9. The well-known term latticino, used until recently to describe vetro a retorti, has been exposed as a nineteenth-century invention. Vetro a retorti is produced by softening tightly packed parallel canes of clear glass incorporating twisted spirals of milk glass on a marver. Other glass colors and aventurine were often incorporated. Then a layer of softened glass, the pelle, is placed over the softened filigree canes and fused to them. The resulting mass is returned to the furnace and rolled several times on the marver to flatten the canes before being blown into the desired shape.
10. Esposizione di scelti artistici ed oggetti affini in Mumano. Relazione dei giurati (Venice, 1895), p. 19.
11. Rosa Barovier Mentasi, " Dai Soffiati "in stile antico" ai "tipi carichi di bestiacce,'" in Draghi, Serpenti e Mostri Marini nel Vetro di Murano dell'800 [Dragons, Serpents, and Sea Monsters in 19th-Century Murano Glass] (Junck and Gianolla, Venice, 1997), p. 11.
12. M. A. Wallace-Dunlop, " Modern Venetian Glass and Its Manufacture," Magazine of Art, April 1890.