ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one of the most successful developments in luxury manufactures of Renaissance Italy, Venetian table glass. The lightness of Venetian glass is due to two factors: it is lower in lead content than northern glass, and the composition of the frit allowed it to be blown and manipulated into thinner membranes. The evolution of the wine glass fits in as an accessory to self-fashioning. By extending the stems, broadening the bowls into shallow saucer shapes, and rendering the glass ever thinner and lighter, the Murano masters produced glasses that directed attention to maintaining the vertical — any tilt would spill the wine. The trickery of photographs is to render differences of scale invisible by equalizing the graspable intimacy of glass and the vastness of Jacopo Tintoretto’s canvases, thereby luring us into false comparisons. In the Middle Ages the claritas of lustre, particularly gold, outshone the claritas of transparency.
