Glassmaking in Renaissance Venice: The Fragile Craft (review)

Glassmaking in Renaissance Venice: The Fragile Craft By W. Patrick McCray. Aldershot and Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1999. Pp. xii+240. $78.95.

This book examines early modern glassmaking as a technical process, as a means of social organization, as an economic phenomenon, and as a cultural production. W. Patrick McCray elaborates the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century "transformation" of Venetian glassmaking, a development he claims put glass at the center of the market in moderately priced luxury goods and poised the industry on the cusp between traditional artisanal and factory methods. His interpretive aim is to put consumer demand squarely at the center of accounts of technological change.

The turning point in McCray's story is the mid-fifteenth-century invention of cristallo, a nearly transparent, nearly perfect glass material, and the basis for further innovations in glassmaking techniques. While Levantine glass had become widely unavailable by 1400, McCray denies that this had a major impact on Venetian glassmakers. Rather, he claims, the revitalization of the industry came through a "self-catalyzed" process of technical innovation in the 1450s, spurred primarily by consumer demand but also supported by governmental policies, Venice's position in the world market, and the availability of skilled labor. Initial chapters introduce structures of the craft before 1450; the central chapters establish the demand for Renaissance glass and detail the technical and organizational operations that fulfilled that demand. A final chapter looks at the dissemination of glassmaking knowledge through the distribution of glass goods, the migration of glass masters, and the publication of secrets.

McCray has made use of the literature in Renaissance economic history, the writings of connoisseurs, and modern chemical analyses of artifacts. He shows a mastery of the volumes of documents related to the Venetian glassmaking industry collected by Luigi Zecchin, as well as the passages on glassmaking from printed technological treatises. In this book, so full of impressive details, we discover where the materials requisite for glass production were located and the chemical composition of various types of glass. We find the prices of individual pieces (usually between one and three lire in the first half of the sixteenth century) as well as the total value of Venice's glass exports (182,000 ducats) and their destinations in 1590. We learn how the government both regulated and protected the industry, concentrated on the island of Murano in the Lagoon of Venice. We find out what sort of instructions Isabella d'Este, Marchessa of Mantua, sent with her many orders for glassware. And we are introduced to the types of workers and working conditions required for the batch preparation, melting, refining, and working of glass.

To an extent, Glassmaking in Renaissance Venice does what its author wants it to do: clearly establish a cultural context for the development of glassmaking, outline a narrative of that development, and propose a new causal explanation. The multiple strands and rich details, however, never quite become plaited to form a vivid picture of Venetian glass workshops in situ or provide a convincing metanarrative of technological change. The almost nervous jumping from one line of investigation to another also makes it difficult for McCray to achieve some of his ambitions.

The central thesis takes inspiration from current economic theory on high-tech industries: demand and technical innovation form a kind of feedback loop. Yet McCray does not really work out a more illuminating dialectic between demand and innovation. He does suggest reasons for the appeal of glass: its ability to take many shapes, its imitative qualities, and the virtuosity of the craftsmen who make it. These established, however, he neither investigates the underlying Renaissance fascination with the relationship between art and nature nor uses these marketable qualities as a basis for looking at further innovation. Moreover, while McCray stresses the market position of glass as a moderately priced luxury good, he never approaches the questions opened up by this designation. While some comparisons are made to majolica production, one...