L’OTTOCENTO: dalla crisi alla rinascita

Permanent collection
From 12 December 2025
Murano, Glass Museum

Curated by
Chiara Squarcina
Mauro Stocco

The exhibition, planned to become a permanent collection as part of the museum’s renewed layout, will enhance the value of the rich and varied 19th-century collection of the Museo del Vetro in Murano, exhibiting it for the first time in its entirety. It will also draw public attention to the world’s most complete and important glass museum. 

Visitors will be able to retrace the troubled and fascinating vicissitudes of Murano glass production in the 19th century, from the crisis caused by the fall of the Republic of Venice (1797) to the rebirth of the art and its full development in the second half of the 19th century, thanks to craftworkers and entrepreneurs who used their skills to revive the island’s glorious past. 

All through the first half of the 19th century, the economy of Venice underwent a serious crisis in industry and commerce. The glass sector was one of the worst hit, and the production of art glass almost completely ceased, partly due to the market’s preference for glass styles from other European countries, such as Bohemia and England. The first signs of a renewed interest in Venetian glass and a resumption of the creation of artistic blown glass came in the middle of the 19th century. 

An important part was played by the recovery of rare qualities of glass materials and above all traditional glassmaking techniques, such as Renaissance filigree, successfully revived by Domenico Bussolin in 1838 and a few years later by Pietro Bigaglia. Many of these artefacts were donated by Bigaglia himself to the museum in 1861. Lorenzo Radi worked on recovering coloured gold leaf pastes for mosaics, and also gave a new lease of life to chalcedony glass, perfected in 1856. In 1854 Fratelli Toso was founded, eventually to become one of the most renowned glassworks on the Murano art scene of the 19th and 20th centuries. In 1859 the lawyer Antonio Salviati of Vicenza opened a factory in Venice for the production of mosaics, and in 1866 he established a furnace for blown glass. 

The exhibition shows how the splendid Renaissance and Baroque blown glass in the Museo del Vetro, founded in 1861, brought precious inspiration to the masters of 19th-century Murano. After the difficult period of crisis, they reproduced the most refined glass of past centuries, renewing them in the taste of the time with the addition of very fine polychrome ornamentation. 

The glass art of the Roman world was also studied with great interest for its forms as well as style. The most successful process was undoubtedly glass-mosaic or murrino, associated in particular with the name of Vincenzo Moretti. 

In these ways the exhibition exhaustively retraces one of the most interesting and compelling chapters in the long history of Murano glass through the masterpieces in the collection of the Museo del Vetro, many of them now displayed for the first time.