Research:
Of wood, mirror glass, gilded wire, green velvet, gilt-brass and colored lampworked glass. In the form of a two-storied Baroque church altar. The glass-balustraded upper section with three mirrored arches between Corinthian columns, the central aperture containing a gilt figure of the Virgin Mary below a halo of glass and pearls. The cornice of alternating pearls and arches in three sections supporting a gilt-brass figure on the left and right, and an acanthine applique at center. The lower section decorated with conforming Corinthian columns with projecting bays centered by steps leading up to an altar supporting two lampworked candlesticks. The whole of the structure decorated with flowers and foliate C-scrolls in lampworked glass, and flanked to the front by lemon and pomegranate trees. The whole resting on a molded wood base, which is old but may be later, originally ebonized, raised on gilt-brass winged paw feet.
This model of a Baroque altar, clad entirely in lampworked, reverse painted and mirror glass, is almost certainly the product of a seventeenth century Venetian, Muranese, glassmaking workshop. The position of Venice as an active port linking the Eastern and Western worlds, established the city as a glassmaking center, through which technical information and natural resources passed.
To produce different types of glass, Venetian glassmakers used recipe books, the earliest dating to the fifteenth century. An anonymous sixteenth century manuscript reports 105 glass recipes of Muranese origin. In order to achieve the high quality of the glass, raw materials had to be imported from abroad. For example, Venetians used soda from Spain and the Orient, and tried to prevent those materials from being exported to competitive glassmaking centers in other countries like Bohemia. The republic of Venice drew great commercial profits from the fabrication of blown glass, including from the production of beads and rods of glass, which were exported throughout Europe. The color of the glass was manipulated by adding different chemical elements.
The special technique of lampworking (also called flameworking) was used to produce the majority of applied glass decoration on the present piece. It involves heating glass rods and tubes in front of a flame to the point that they become soft and easily manipulated, shaped and fused together. The process was typically carried out at a wooden bench to which a bellows worked by a treadle was mounted. The air flowed through a tube in front of an oil lamp to create a very hot, and sometimes horizontal, flame in front of which the glass pieces were heated and manipulated. The combustibles used included wax, rapeseed or some other oil (like poppy or olive) and animal fats and oils (bone oil and fish oil). The use of rapeseed oil appears to have been widespread and preferred. The hand tools used in lampworking glass were often “simple and hand made” and included pliers, tweezers, scissors, and wire clamps (much unchanged today).
As noted, the present model assumes the form of a Baroque altar. A highly exuberant and ornamental period in architecture, Baroque design broke the rules of Renaissance symmetry and proportion. Characteristics of the style include complicated, exaggerated and distorted shapes, particularly elliptical forms; interest in light, shadow and depth; and the addition of decorative sculpture. It was encouraged by the Catholic Church as part of the Counter-Reformation, a reaction to the Protestant Reformation. The large structural backdrops of an altar, called reredos and retables, mirrored full-scale architectural design.
Small-scale “house altars” were the subjects of personal prayer in the chapel of a private residence and those of the Baroque era, much like the retables of churches, were designed in imitation of life-size architecture. “Many devotional exercises were undertaken in private and were facilitated by images and other works of art, which could include everything from simple wooden crosses to costly bejeweled treasures.”
Full research report available on request.