Why the Horse? Murano's Glass Menagerie

A bird at a country auction, a fish from Venice, and a question left open

A woman went to a country auction with one lot in mind. She waited through the whole sale for a small blown-glass bird, bid against one other lady, and won it. Less than a year later she took it to Antiques Roadshow in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The appraiser, Arlie Sulka, identified it as the work of Vistosi, made to a design by the young architect Alessandro Pianon. "I had no idea," she said. Its eyes, she added, had been part of the appeal.

The bird carried no signature, and Sulka observed that such pieces rarely do. A paper label may once have been present, though labels often disappear. Birds of this kind are known as Pulcini, from the Italian for a chick: bodies of blown glass, eyes of mosaic cane, legs of thin wire.

Who made the bird?

Vistosi, the furnace behind the Pulcini, began in 1945, when Guglielmo Vistosi founded it on Murano to make glass components for lighting. Alessandro Pianon, born in Venice in 1931, joined in 1956 to design its logo and went on to design many of its collections. Records date the birds anywhere from 1960 to 1963, and the Toledo Museum of Art credits a second designer, Peter Pelzel, alongside Pianon.

A longer line of animals

Glass animals have a longer pedigree than the 1960s. The Museo del Vetro on Murano records a seventeenth-century taste for "more bizarre forms", among them "eccentric animal-shaped chandeliers, vases, cruets and glasses in the form of a flower". These were showpieces, made to display the glassmaker's skill. By the nineteenth century the glass animal had found a second, more serious purpose: models made for teaching. Marine creatures, which could not be preserved by taxidermy, were best reproduced in glass worked over a flame, the lampwork technique Murano also uses for some of its beads and other small pieces. In a parallel tradition outside Italy, the Bohemian glassworkers Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka made glass jellyfish for natural history collections.

The studio menagerie

The twentieth century made the animal a collector's subject. One famous collection began with a small glass fish, given to Pierre Rosenberg by the owners of a restaurant in Venice. The second was a red dachshund, bought as a gift for his mother-in-law but kept for himself. A former director of the Louvre, Rosenberg has since assembled a collection of more than a thousand.

In 2021 the Cini Foundation in Venice showed more than 750 of them, and together they told the story of twentieth-century Murano glass. Napoleone Martinuzzi worked in bubble-filled pulegoso glass; Tyra Lundgren and Toni Zuccheri made birds for Venini; Barovier & Toso dressed its Zebrati series in zebra stripes; and Alfredo Barbini made aquariums.

Why the horse?

The glass horse is not confined to the twentieth century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a glass horse of the eighteenth or nineteenth century, attributed to "Spanish or Italian, Venice (Murano)". The Corning Museum of Glass holds a speckled horse of 1987 by Toni Zuccheri for Barovier & Toso, an "S" curve of translucent white glass with orange-red enamels.

Venice has famous horses of its own. The four gilded horses of St Mark's are cast in a copper-rich alloy. They are thought to have come from the Hippodrome of Constantinople and to have been sent to Venice by Doge Enrico Dandolo after the Fourth Crusade. Since 1982 the originals have stood in the basilica's museum, with replicas outside. Whether a glassmaker ever looked up at them, we do not know.

One Sunday, when I was about twelve and we had travelled from Verona to Venice for church, I was taken to an artisanal shop and allowed to choose a glass animal. I chose a blue horse, prancing. I loved horses then and was desperate to learn to ride, though I think it was the colour that drew me, and the energy in the glass. For years it was my pride and joy, until, as childhood treasures do, it quietly disappeared.

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