Venetian Mirrors: The Craft Venice Guarded
In 1665 a French company was founded to break Venice's hold on the making of mirrors. The craft it set out to take had been guarded for centuries in Venice and on Murano, and workshops there still practise it by hand.
An island with a rule
In 1291 Venice moved its glass furnaces to the island of Murano, away from the risk of fire in the city. Within a few years the men who tended them were no longer free to go. The historian Catherine Kovesi writes that glassworkers were forbidden to leave the island without permission. Anyone who divulged the industrial secrets of the trade, she adds, faced the threat of the death penalty. Hugh Wakefield, a former Keeper at the Victoria and Albert Museum, notes in the Encyclopaedia Britannica that in the sixteenth century many Venetian workmen were nonetheless tempted to "abscond to other countries".
Tin, mercury and glass
Venice was making tin-mercury mirrors by 1507, and the Victoria and Albert Museum says that Venetian mirror production became dominant from that year. The conservators of the Williamstown Art Conservation Center credit the Del Gallo glassmakers of Murano with improving the method in the early sixteenth century.
A sheet of tin foil was laid on a smooth, lipped table, typically of marble, and covered with liquid mercury, in which the tin dissolved to form an amalgam. The glass plate was lowered onto it in one motion and weighted, and the table was tilted so that the excess mercury ran off. The mirror then spent eighteen to thirty days on a drying table, tilted a little further each day until it stood upright. The basic principles, the Williamstown conservators add, held for four hundred years.
The work, the historian Francesca Trivellato writes, was divided. The glassmakers' guild of Murano prepared the mirror plates, and the semi-finished plates then passed to guilds in the centre of Venice for the remaining work. The mirror makers' guild there, the specchieri, was established in 1570.
The trade could be counted, after a fashion. A report found among the Medici secretary's correspondence in Florence, in a file of letters dated 1592, is undated and unsigned; its editors, Rosa Barovier Mentasti and Cristina Tonini, give it the same year. Murano's total production, they note, brings in 142,000 ducats, of which only 25,000 comes from glass sold in Venice. Rough mirror glass, spechiami grezzi, has a line of its own: it goes all over the world, and is valued at 40,000 ducats. Glass and mirrors for Spain add 12,000.
The dressing table
In the late sixteenth century mirrors were luxury items across Europe, the V&A notes, and Venice was a major centre of their production. A Venetian inventory of 1578 lists a medium crystal mirror with a polished ebony case. The museum holds a casket from Venice, of the same decades, fitted with a mirror inside the lid. It is veneered, painted and gilded, and set with mother-of-pearl. Its interior would have been divided into compartments for hair dye, bleach, combs, brushes and sponge saucers, and caskets of this kind appear in pictures of Venus at her toilette.
In the V&A's account, the casket's style, with its scrolling gold patterns, seems to have been a Venetian speciality of the sixteenth century, and probably imitated Persian lacquer imported through the city. A toilet mirror of about 1590 in the same collection follows the fashion: a walnut frame, painted and gilded, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and tilting back on a dowel. Its ornament is Turkish-influenced, a style then widely used in Venice, a maritime power with extensive links to the Eastern Mediterranean. Neither mirror hangs on a wall: one is fitted into the lid of a casket, the other rests on a pedestal of its own.
Paris wants the secret
In 1665 Louis XIV granted an exclusive privilege to make mirror glass in France. The company that grew from it, Saint-Gobain, says in its own archive that it was founded at the instigation of Colbert, the king's minister, and that the aim was to batter down the supremacy of Venice. The state helped to entice Venetian glassmakers to leave Venice.
The Venetians, the archive says, refused to pass on their secrets, and in March 1667 they were dismissed. They were almost at once replaced by a gentleman glassmaker, Richard Lucas de Nehou. He contributed to the company the glassworks he owned at Tourlaville, in Normandy, together with his mastery of white glass blown into a cylinder, the technique needed for mirrors of quality "façon de Venise", in the Venetian manner. The glass was blown in Normandy and carried rough to Paris to be finished.
The answer at Versailles
The company's archive says that its mirrors adorned the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, finished in 1684. Seventeen windows look across the gallery to seventeen arches, and 357 mirrors fill the arches. The palace says the mirrors demonstrated that the new French manufacture could rival "the Venetian monopoly on mirror manufacturing".
Close behind Versailles came Copenhagen, where a mirror room at Rosenborg Castle, made for Christian V between 1684 and 1687, took its inspiration from the Hall of Mirrors, with mirrors on the walls and ceiling. A later king added an oval mirror set into the floor. The Royal Danish Collection notes that mirrors were then "outrageously expensive".
In 1688 the French works patented a new technique. Molten glass was poured onto a large surface and then polished, which made much larger and more regular plates possible and, in Trivellato's account, cut the production time in half. Venetian mirrors were blown and stretched by hand, and Murano did not adopt the French method until the middle of the nineteenth century, she explains, because the new process encroached on the work and standing of the master glassblowers, who had a voice in the guild's policy.
Venice goes on
Early in the eighteenth century Murano faced a rival. Competition from Bohemia, the Museo del Vetro says, had become a problem, and Giuseppe Briati met it by adapting Bohemian glass to Venetian fashion. He was granted permission to open a furnace in Venice itself, and there he made engraved frames and mirrors, and chandeliers with many crystal arms, one of which is displayed at Ca' Rezzonico.
The Corning Museum of Glass holds a pair of his girandoles, or candle sconces, made about 1750, in which mirror and lighting meet: each is a mirror plate and an arm set in a framework of hollow glass pieces arranged in tiers. The V&A, describing the type, notes that the mirror glass reflects the candlelight to increase the volume of light.
Venice kept a foothold in the mirror trade. Trivellato doubts that it could have competed with France in large plates even had it adopted the new method, and concludes that Venetian merchant-producers invested in small mirrors and succeeded in controlling that market. Workers from Friuli, who laboured mainly in the Murano mirror furnaces and rarely rose to become masters, were given exclusive rights to make small mirrors by the Venetian government in 1756.
The mirror joins the furniture
The mirror did not stay on the wall. La Treccani, the Italian encyclopaedia, notes that from the fifteenth century it appears in the furnishing of rooms both as a piece of furniture and as a fixed decorative element, set into dressing tables, the free-standing psiche and the mirrored wardrobe.
The Metropolitan Museum classes a carved and gilded Venetian mirror of the early eighteenth century as furniture. The V&A has one from later in the century whose frame is made of glass elements, some blown and some cast, mounted on wood.
The mirror's most architectural form came in the eighteenth century, with the trumeau. Treccani traces the word from the French name for the wall between two windows to the mirror hung there, and then to a chest of drawers with a tall upper section closed by two doors, often glazed or mirrored. In Venice, Ca' Rezzonico shows a bureau-trumeau of the mid-eighteenth century in walnut root veneer, which the museum calls unique for its size, workmanship and state of conservation.
How a mirror ages
Whatever its setting, a tin-mercury mirror grows old in its own way. The Williamstown conservators describe a darkened, speckled surface, with holes where the mirroring has been lost, and a bluish tone from tin oxides where a silvered mirror would tarnish to yellow-brown. They and the conservators of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, explain it by the movement of the liquid mercury: in a mirror displayed upright it can accumulate at the bottom, leaving tiny air pockets in some regions, and the tin can oxidise where they form. Because the mercury settles downwards, damage tends to gather along the lower half, which the Williamstown conservators count as a less definitive sign that a mirror is of this kind.
Such mirrors were the predominant kind until the end of the nineteenth century. The German chemist Justus von Liebig had devised a way of depositing silver on glass in the 1830s, giving a brighter image at greater cost, and the two kinds of mirror coexisted until silvering, the Williamstown conservators say, "won out" in the early twentieth century.
In Murano today
Murano workshops still make Venetian mirrors by hand. The Venice Design Biennial characterises the Venetian mirror as a system of hand-made decorative glass components and mirrors that interlock with a wooden supporting frame. Barbini, founded by Nicolò Barbini in 1927, describes itself as the oldest company still operating in Murano that specialises in glass engraving and Venetian mirrors. The work runs from cutting and grinding to engraving, silvering and assembly, and in 2022 Barbini showed a monumental mirror at Homo Faber in Venice.
The magazine Monocle visited another workshop, Fratelli Tosi, in 2026. The brothers have finished a restaurant project in Miami and hold an order for four six-metre-high mirrors for Riyadh. The family's own account lists mirrored furniture among the things it makes. Buyers, Monocle reports, still want "the classical Venetian look". In the workshop the glass is cut and silvered, engraved by hand, and small pieces of cut glass are taken from wooden drawers to assemble around the border of a mirror.
More than three and a half centuries after a French company was founded to break Venice's hold, mirrors are still made by hand on Murano.
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