What about us? A story of anim­als and glass

Share this webpage

The adven­ture begins in the Italian city of Venice. One of its islands, Murano, is known all over the world because many glass artis­ans work there. They create objects and artworks made of glass. The person behind the exhib­i­tion is a man who spends a lot of time in Venice: Pierre Rosen­berg. He even owns a palace in the city. He is a special­ist in art history and was the director of a very famous museum: the Louvre in Paris. When he was a child, Pierre Rosen­berg already collec­ted bird feath­ers, stamps, and glass marbles. Do you also have a collec­tion?

Since becom­ing an adult, Mr. Rosen­berg has contin­ued collect­ing. He is partic­u­larly inter­ested in glass art (that is, art made of glass), and over 30 years he assembled a very special collec­tion: more than one thou­sand anim­als made of Murano glass. There are tigers, whales, elephants, and even grasshop­pers. Pierre Rosen­berg chose them because he found them beau­ti­ful or inter­est­ing, follow­ing his personal taste. He then housed these anim­als in his homes in Paris and Venice. The very first animal in his collec­tion was a small fish given to him by the owners of a restaur­ant in Venice. The second was a red dachshund bought as a gift for his mother-in-law, but which he even­tu­ally kept for himself. Because this collec­tion is so dear to him, he wants the public to be able to discover it as well.

More than 300 anim­als from this collec­tion are exhib­ited at mudac, in a wide vari­ety of styles. To repres­ent anim­als using glass, a mater­ial that is diffi­cult to work with, artists must look for elements that are recog­niz­able to every­one. The artist there­fore thinks about the anim­al’s most distinct­ive features. Some­times the animal is “styl­ized, ” mean­ing that only these most recog­niz­able traits are kept. As a result, the small glass animal will not always look exactly like its natural version, but we will still recog­nize it imme­di­ately. This is the magic of the artist’s eye. It also shows us what our vision of anim­als is, as humans.

Here above is one of the anim­als from the collec­tion. The artist used differ­ent tech­niques to give the glass the effect of a fox terri­er’s fur: he created a mold with a kind of grooves, into which molten glass (that is, glass heated to a very high temper­at­ure) was poured. Just like when baking cakes, the glass took the shape of the mold. The artist also used gold leaf to imit­ate the shine of the fur, and played with the trans­par­ency of the glass on the back of the legs. All of this creates an impres­sion of move­ment. The large, express­ive eyes also give it an almost life­like gaze, faith­ful to the play­ful char­ac­ter of this dog breed!

The artist who created the beetle you see above is named Bruno Amadi. He is one of the greatest masters of torch-work­ing in Venice. This tech­nique consists of sculpt­ing colored glass rods using the heat of a torch flame. In this way, the artist can work with great preci­sion. This glass beetle looks exactly like a real beetle in its shape, size, and colors. Bruno Amadi gave it the shiny, irides­cent appear­ance of an insect’s shell. This beetle invites us to take a closer look at the nature around us, its beauty as well as its fragil­ity.

Will you be able to find these two glass anim­als in the exhib­i­tion? Head to mudac to take up the chal­lenge and discover many other anim­als, both small and large.

This article was writ­ten in collab­or­a­tion with Carré Pointu, the little seri­ously funny news­pa­per.