Original, 1950s Venini Chandelier in Murano Glass

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Original, 1950s Venini Chandelier in Murano Glass

About the Item

Venini—the world famous Italian glass company—traces it roots to 1921, when Paolo Venini (1895-1959), a Milan lawyer with glassmaking ancestors, and Giacomo Cappellin (1887-1968), a Venetian antiques dealer, launched the Cappellin Venini & C. glass factory on the island of Murano. Under the art direction of Vittorio Zecchin, Cappellin and Venini’s business produced high quality, Renaissance-style goblets, pitchers, and vases. In 1925, following a dispute with Zecchin, Cappellin and Venini split their business in two. Venini’s business took the name Vetri Soffiati Muranesi Venini & C., along with a new, visionary art director, Napoleone Martinuzzi. Venini soon became synonymous with flamboyantly hued art glass and glass lighting at the cutting edge of contemporary aesthetics. From 1927 to 1932, Venini explored a series of new, techniques—like pasta vitrea (opaque glass), vetro incamiciato (layered glass), and vetro Pulegoso (bubble glass)—which engendered particularly experimental forms for the time. Venini’s reputation for innovation grew through exhibitions at national fairs, like the Venice Biennale, Monza, and eventually the Triennale di Milano. Around this time, Venini went into to partnership with Gio Ponti, Pietro Chiesa, Emilio Lancia, Michele Marelli, Tomaso Buzzi, and Carlo Visconti di Modrone to form Il Labirinto, an association for the promotion of modern design. In 1932, Martinuzzi decided to dedicate himself to sculpture, and Venini’s artistic directorship went to architects Tomaso Buzzi and Carlo Scarpa. The modernist vision they brought to Venini represented an exciting, modernist turn for the company. Scarpa was particularly interested in capturing and amplifying light’s interaction with glass and was instrumental in developing new techniques like battuto (beaten glass), tessuto (glass with lines), granulare (glass with small globules), and murina (patterned glass made from rods). Following World War II, Venini continued to produce glass in a modern idiom, frequently in collaboration with important midcentury designers and architects—not only Carlo Scarpa and Gio Ponti, but also BBPR,Fulvio Bianconi, Roberto Menghi, Tobia Scarpa, Massimo Vignelli, and Tapio Wirkkala. When Paolo Venini passed away in 1959, his company passed to his son-in-law, Ludovico Diaz De Santillan. In the 1970s, Ludovico’s daughter, Laura, managed the company, until the Gardini and Ferruzzi families acquired it in the mid-1980s. Through the end of the 20th century, Venini continued to work with outstanding design talents, including Gae Aulenti,Mario Bellini, Alessandro Mendini, Timo Sarpaneva, and Ettore Sottsass. In 2001, Venini was acquired by Italian Luxury Industries. In the 21st century, the company has commissioned designs from the likes of Tadao Ando, Atelier Biagetti, Atelier Oï, Barber Osgerby, the Bouroullec brothers, the Campana brothers, Gaetano Pesce, Matteo Thun, and Studio Job. In 2011, Venini celebrated its 90th anniversary with a travelling exhibition that visited the Glass Museum of Murano, Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana in Venice, the Shanghai Museum of Glass, and the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum in Milan. The first exhibition dedicated to the glass produced by Carlo Scarpa for Venini was a critical and popular success in 2013-14 when it showed at Le Stanze del Vetro in Venice and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Venini glass can be found in the permanent collections of the Louvre, V&A, MoMA, and more.

Creator:
Venini (Maker)
Dimensions:
Height: 63 in (160 cm)Diameter: 63 in (160 cm)
Style:
Mid-Century Modern (Of the Period)
Materials and Techniques:
Murano Glass
Place of Origin:
Italy
Period:
Mid-20th Century
Date of Manufacture:
1950s
Condition:
Seller Location:
Brussels, BE
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU226539299941

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Venini

Beginning in the 1930s — and throughout the postwar years especially — Venini & Co. played a leading role in the revival of Italy’s high-end glass industry, pairing innovative modernist designers with the skilled artisans in the centuries-old glass workshops on the Venetian island of Murano. While the company’s founder, Paolo Venini (1895–1959), was himself a highly talented glassware designer, his true genius was to invite forward-thinking Italian and international designers to Murano’s hallowed workshops to create Venini pieces — among them Giò Ponti, Massimo Vignelli, Finnish designer Tapio Wirkkala, Thomas Stearnsof the United States and Fulvio Bianconi.

Paolo Venini trained and practiced as a lawyer for a time, though his family had been involved with glassmaking for generations. After initially buying a share in a Venetian glass firm, he took over the company as his own in 1925, and under his direction it produced mainly classical Baroque designs. In 1932, he hired the young Carlo Scarpa— who would later distinguish himself as an architect — as his lead designer. Scarpa, working in concert with practiced glass artisans, completely modernized Venini, introducing simple, pared-down forms; bright primary colors; and bold patterns such as stripes, banding and abstract compositions that utilized cross sections of murrine (glass rods).

Paolo Venini’s best designs are thought to be his two-color Clessidre hourglasses, produced from 1957 onward, and the Fazzoletto (“handkerchief”) vase, designed with Bianconi in 1949. Bianconi’s masterworks are considered by many to be his Pezzato works — colorful vases with patterns that resemble those of a patchwork quilt. Other noteworthy and highly collectible vintage Venini works include Ponti’s dual-tone stoppered bottles (circa 1948); rare glass sculptures from the Doge series by Stearns, the first American to design for the firm; Vignelli’s striped lanterns of the 1960s; the Occhi vases with eyelet-shaped patterns by Tobia Scarpa (son of Carlo); and, with their almost zen purity, the Bolle (“bubbles”) bottles designed by Wirkkala in 1968.

With these works — and many others by some of the creative titans of the 20th and 21st century — Venini has produced one of the truly great bodies of work in modern design.