Venice Show Rewrites the Story of Modern Glass: Costantini's Fucina

More than 100 works go on display at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice on 14 November in the first in-depth exhibition on the Fucina degli Angeli, the gallery that from the 1950s translated designs by Picasso, Cocteau and Fontana into Murano glass. The show, Fucina degli Angeli: Peggy Guggenheim and 20th-Century Artistic Glass, runs until 29 March 2027 and is curated by the art historian Cristina Beltrami.

The story begins with a brainwave. In 1952 the Venetian entrepreneur Egidio Costantini decided to take designs by contemporary artists and, working with Murano's master glassblowers, turn them into glass sculpture. This broke with the practice of traditional furnaces such as Venini, whose decorative glassware — increasingly shaped by international designers — was often produced in large, commercially dictated series.

Three years later Costantini founded the Fucina degli Angeli gallery to show the results. Until the 1970s, when rival glassmaking companies entered the field, he acted as interpreter for more than 100 international artists, channeling their ideas to the Murano maestri.

Who bankrolled the experiment?

The exhibition also examines the little-documented role of Peggy Guggenheim herself. Her purchases of many items helped sustain the gallery financially, and her connections allowed Costantini to exhibit the glass across Europe and even at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The collector is the subject of a second exhibition opening this month: Peggy Guggenheim in London: The Making of a Collector at the Royal Academy of Arts, 21 November–14 March 2027, on her Mayfair gallery of the late 1930s.

Born in Brindisi in 1912, Costantini settled permanently in Venice, where he had been raised and educated, at the start of the 1950s. He worked as a commercial agent for several Murano glassworks during Italy's post-war economic boom. He assembled a group of Venetian artists into the Study Centre for Painters in the Art of Glass, which exhibited at the furnace of Ferro & Lazzarini in 1953.

Then he aimed higher. Acting on his own initiative, Costantini had glass versions made of ceramic sculptures by Pablo Picasso and travelled to Picasso's house in Vallauris, near Cannes, to show him the results. Picasso gave him a copy of Faunes et Nymphes de Pablo Picasso (1952). The book survives in the archives, marked on images of ceramic figures later reinterpreted as glass sculptures at the Fucina. Who made the markings remains a mystery — one the exhibition apparently cannot resolve.

What did the artists make of it?

The name "Fucina degli Angeli" — smithy of the angels — came from Jean Cocteau, apparently in reference to Costantini's large family. Oskar Kokoschka contributed a sketch of two angels holding up an anvil, dedicating it to the founder, "who first succeeded in making me fascinated with the glass of Murano".

Cocteau designed extravagant mythological heads and visited the furnaces to discuss ideas with the maestri. He and Jean Arp, whose work also features in the show, were "seduced by the colour" of glass, Beltrami says.

Not everyone stayed. The Swiss artist Walter Bodmer allowed his sketch Asymmetric Cat (1955) to become what the Fucina rendered as an oversimplified glass vessel — and never participated again, for reasons unknown.

The Venice exhibition spreads 11 rooms organised by artist and theme, mixing glass, painting and sculpture with material from the Fucina's archives, never before studied in depth. Glass translations of works by Max Ernst, Lucio Fontana and Paul Jenkins sit alongside those by Kokoschka. What the show changes for the record is straightforward: it restores Costantini, and Guggenheim's quiet subsidy, to a chapter of Venetian glass history long under-appreciated.