It started in Venice in 1884. Leland and Jane Stanford, vacationing with Leland junior, wandered into a glassmaking shop, Salviati and Company, on the Grand Canal. Nearly 20 years later, gifts from this atelier began arriving at the Farm. By 1913, hundreds of whimsical and elaborate Venetian glass pieces, including five chandeliers, graced the Stanford Museum’s collection. In their first showing in nearly a century, 120 of these treasures will go on display at the Cantor Center September 18.
The gifts weren’t exactly out of the blue. When their son died of typhoid fever in Florence in 1884, the Stanfords relied on the translating abilities of Maurizio Camerino, a young Salviati employee they had met months earlier, to help them make arrangements. After the elder Leland died in 1893, Jane had Memorial Church built in his honor and wanted to decorate it with mosaics. She called on Camerino in 1899.
By then, Camerino was a partner at Salviati. The following year, he took Jane on an extended tour of churches and museums in Italy and France, gathering design ideas, then came to campus to oversee the mosaic installation. His ensuing gifts were to thank her for Stanford’s hospitality.At one point, Stanford’s Salviati-Camerino collection boasted more than 450 pieces, but the 1906 earthquake shattered many of them. Others were sold to pay for the museum’s restoration after the disaster. Today, the museum owns 245 works.
Dragons, seahorses, dolphins and other elaborate mythological creatures adorn the goblets, bottles and bowls that will be on view through December 29. The collection is “rich in superstars,” says Sheldon Barr, author of Venetian Glass: Confections in Glass, 1855-1914. He calls it a “freeze-frame” of Venetian glass production of the period.
Though glassblowing dates back more than two millennia to the Roman Empire, and the craft thrived in Venice from the Middle Ages until the early 1800s, Antonio Salviati reinvigorated the Venetian industry in the late 19th century. A lawyer and entrepreneur, he started creating small glass tiles, or tesserae, for mosaics, gaining international recognition for restoring Venice’s Basilica of San Marco. Later, the firm won awards at world’s fairs and began selling to Tiffany and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Salviati required his craftsmen to study ancient and Renaissance glassblowing on the nearby island of Murano, the center of the Venetian glass industry, which reached its apex in the 16th and 17th centuries. Using traditional tools such as blowpipe and pincers, marver, shears and pontil, the Murano artisans were “free and fanciful,” according to Carol Osborne, PhD ’79, former associate director and chief curator of the Stanford Museum and guest curator for this exhibition. They experimented with techniques, styles and colors, molding the glass—created in furnaces by melting silica, soda and manganese dioxide—into complex gossamer creations.
Salviati’s artisans excelled at centuries-old glassmaking techniques, Barr says, but they were innovators, too—mixing their own colors and using sodium-based glass for its lightness and ease of manipulation. No matter how many distinct parts went into a piece, they fused them into one integral object, he says. In contrast, many artisans today use premixed colors and heavy lead-based glass, and they glue their creations together. “A real cop-out,” Barr sniffs.
But the Venetian tradition still exerts an influence on contemporary artists such as Dale Chihuly, a native of Tacoma, Wash., who studied glass in Murano. Chihuly “made the art world accept glass as a viable medium for making art,” says Patrick Maveety, ’51, MA ’75, Stanford’s emeritus curator of Asian Art.
Maveety is guest curator for a Cantor Center exhibit accompanying the Salviati-Camerino show. “Contemporary Reflections of Venetian Glass” will include pieces by Chihuly and Stephen Rolfe Powell, among others.
Unlike the more diminutive Salviati goblets and vases, a couple of these works are more than 2 feet high and 3 feet long. What does a Venetian aficionado think of the contemporary glassblowers? “Bigger isn’t always better,” Barr replies.
