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 However, the cornucopia finial of the original has been replaced by a pink-tongued dragon.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.