Fulvio Bianconi’s Fazzoletto vase is a variation of an earlier vase, the Cartoccio vase, designed by Piero Chiesa for FontanaArte in 1985. While the Cartoccio vase was made of industrial glass pressed in a mould and had a sloping top edge, Bianconi’s vase differed in its asymmetrical tips, created by spinning the molten glass in a circle and allowing the force of gravity to form the tips at random.
The molten glass, which, in the blowing ‘barrel’, had initially been intended to become a globe, became, during blowing, a shape freely fluttering in space, like a lace handkerchief held in the air by the wind.
From 1960 Venini began to produce it in solid colours and in 1987 the model obtained by superimposing two colours was called Fazzoletto Opalino.
This vase soon became one of Venini‘s most successful objects and was marketed internationally, its popularity increasing after it was included in the Italy at Work travelling exhibition that toured the United States between 1951 and 1953.
The Fazzoletto vase has been in production for decades and has become a representative object of Italian glassmaking in the 1950s.
SOFFIATO OPALINO
Opaline glass is blown and worked by hand and is obtained by superimposing lattimo with other glass. The technique is so defined because the craftsmen expand and shape the glass by blowing air into a long metal rod connected to it, according to the millenary tradition of glassmaking. This ancient action, combined with the experience and skill of master glassmakers, transforms simple glass into true artistic masterpieces, one of a kind.
FLYING HAND
This is the expression that indicates the agile and expert movement of the master glassmaker’s hand in the hot working of a fine glass.
