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MURRINA
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The murrina is a very ancient technique, unrelated to blowing, which it precedes, dating back to the 1st millennium B.C. In the Alexandrian and Roman era this technique was used to make fabulous glass objects, which are on display today in the most prestigious museums.During the second half of the XIXth century, when Venetian glass was going through its renaissance, Vincenzo Moretti, a glass technician from Murano, rediscovered this technique after more than two thousand years of oblivion, and for over a century this technique has become part of the technical heritage of Murano's glassmasters. |
It consists in the fusion, in the heat of the kiln, of monochrome tesserae or sections of polychrome glass rods laid down in a pattern, resulting in a brightly colored vitreous fabric. The resulting slab of vitreous fabric may be shaped into a dish or a bowl by using a mold in refractory clay. Otherwise it may be picked up with a blow-pipe and may even be given the shape of a vessel. This phase, required only to obtain closed shapes, was introduced by the masters on Murano, who thus increased the possible applications of the murrina technique. The murrina may also assume the dimensions of a miniature, which make it suitable for use in making jewelry and small objects.
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The composition of murrine allows infinite variations which correspond to the taste of the designer, and which through many stylistic periods have produced the widest range of effects: from the naive decor of the first XIXth century murrine, to the delicate nuances of the Art Nouveau period, to the strongly ethnic flavor of Carlo Scarpa's murrine in 1940. Today several glass makers have become specialized in murrine but it is also made by glasshouses whose production includes a vast range of glass techniques |
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