The Lantern After the Flame

A flame in open air will not survive a Venetian evening. Something has to stand between the wind and the wick – and for as long as people have carried fire indoors, that something has been glass.

The word “lantern” says as much on its own. It entered English in the thirteenth century from the Old French lanterne, itself derived from Latin lanterna and, before that, the Greek lamptēr – a torch, a beacon fire. The essential idea has barely moved since: a lantern is a light with a protective covering, not simply a source of illumination but a structure built specifically to guard one.

Venice gave that idea a form of its own. Lamps made entirely of glass are thought to have emerged sometime between the late fifteenth century and the end of the sixteenth, though the precise date is difficult to establish. The hanging type, known as the cesendello – a cylindrical lamp, its name rooted in the Latin cicindela, “firefly” – is a genuine, well-documented category: examples survive in museum collections today, including one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One is also captured in art: Giovanni Bellini included a hanging glass lamp in his St Zaccaria altarpiece of 1505, independently noted as one of the painting’s own distinguishing details. Whether this particular lamp is properly classified as a cesendello specifically rests on Mariacher’s identification rather than a separate confirmation. It is not, in any case, a painting about lamps – it is a sacred scene, and the lamp appears in it as unremarkable background detail, the way a painter today might include a light fitting without a second thought.

That is a stronger kind of evidence than a written description: an object common enough to belong in a sacred scene without needing explanation suggests it was already part of the visual vocabulary of Venetian life. Whether the same is true of the type’s other supposed appearances – in two further paintings by Carpaccio and one by Basaiti, all cited by the art historian Giovanni Mariacher – has not been independently confirmed here, and is treated as a claim rather than an established fact. Murano’s glassmakers made something more literal too – glass covers fitted directly over torches, built for one purpose: to keep a flame burning in weather that would otherwise put it out.

A chandelier was not designed around this problem. Multiplying and scattering light was its priority – branches, crystal, cut glass, arranged to throw illumination outward, not to guard a single source of it. A lantern’s priority ran the other way: not more light, but light that survives, kept alight wherever wind or weather might otherwise put it out.

That distinction has outlasted the flame itself. Long after the flame disappeared, the instinct to protect it stayed.

Electricity should have ended this. Once a bulb replaced a flame, there was no longer anything to shield from wind, and the whole justification for enclosing the light in glass disappeared with it. The format persisted anyway. What had been a necessity became, from that point on, a choice.

Multi-candle-holder lanterns – three, four, six, nine, twelve individual holders, each one still encased separately in glass instead of gathered behind a single shade – stopped looking like one solution among several and became the lantern’s default visual language. They remain among the most familiar configurations today. Several go further still: bulbs shaped and finished to mimic a candle’s flame, seated inside the same glass surrounds a real flame once needed. Nothing about an electric filament requires that shape. There is no fire left to protect, and no wick to shelter from a draught – only a small bulb built to imitate the flicker of one. The lantern was designed to guard a flame. What it guards now is a picture of one.

The lantern survived; then the material housing it became something worth admiring in its own right. Murano’s glassmakers have been shaping that material since 1291, when Venice’s Great Council ordered its furnaces off the mainland and onto the island to protect the city’s densely built, wooden neighbourhoods from fire. The techniques that developed there give the glass its own way of handling light, colour and surface.

Balloton glass carries a deliberate texture, bubbled and irregular rather than smooth – a reminder that a housing can earn attention for its surface alone, not only for the light it lets through. Incamiciato glass goes further: a coloured casing fused over a clear or contrasting core, so the glass itself becomes a source of colour, instead of merely the frame around one. Each glass piece is blown by hand, and no two are quite identical.

Murano craftsmanship is part of why this became more than habit. A plain sheet of glass would have done the job of shielding a flame. Murano glass did more – it gave the enclosure an appeal of its own, distinct from the light held inside it.

Lanterns had always had makers. What changed, by the early twentieth century, was that the maker began to matter in a different way – a lantern could now carry a named designer’s signature, not simply a workshop’s hand. Napoleone Martinuzzi’s own life reads like the material he worked in – shaped early, then reshaped again. Born on Murano in 1892, he trained first as a sculptor, studying in Venice and Rome, before joining Paolo Venini and Francesco Zecchin in 1925 to found Venini itself, serving as the house’s art director. He left seven years later to found his own studio, later designed for Alberto Seguso, and remains regarded as one of Murano’s finest glass designers. He died in Venice in 1977.

Doge answers a harder question than most lanterns need to: why keep making an object named after an office that no longer exists, in a form whose original purpose disappeared a century before electricity? Offered today at 80cm and 120cm, in clear, blue, or golden straw-yellow, its gold-plated frame holds a single glass diffuser rather than the multiple candle holders of the traditional form – the enclosure reduced to one essential gesture instead of many.

Doge, from the Latin dux, was the title held by Venice’s own head of state. The name evokes Venice; that is enough. That Venini itself still produces Martinuzzi’s work decades after his death is not incidental – it is the imitation flame and the hand-blown glass housing again, applied to one named object: a form that outlived its original purpose, then outlived the man who last reshaped it, and is still worth making.

None of this requires a name attached to work. Strip away the candle holders, the gilded frames, the tiered arrangements, and what remains in the most stripped-back lanterns on offer today is a single geometric shade, faceted instead of fluted, holding one light source rather than several – a lantern in name only, since there is nothing left in it to protect. No designer’s biography comes with it, no doge lends it his title. The materials change, the proportions change, and the enclosure itself still does not disappear – an idea sturdy enough to last with or without a name attached.

A lantern was built to keep something alive against the wind. Electricity made that protection unnecessary, but the glass remained. The flame disappeared; the lantern did not. Over time, the glass became part of the lantern's identity: coloured, textured, shaped and refined, made as much to be seen as to contain the light. Protection was the reason it existed. Beauty is the reason it stayed.

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