Retortoli wine glass

Venice, ca 1700
Vetro a retortoli, clear glass with multiple twists of milk-glass canes, conical cup, hollow baluster shaft pinched into three hollow nodes between two rings of clear glass, foot plate
Height 18 cm, diameter of foot 9,5 cm

Provenance: Germany, private collection

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This fragile wine glass of retortoli glass, which has been preserved in perfect condition, is revealed by the faint pink tinge of the colourless glass and the form of the vessel as a typical Venetian piece from about 1700. Technical features also date the glass to the turn of the eighteenth century: after being made, the individual canes with milk-glass threads were coated with colourless glass so that the white stripes, twisted into spirals and criss-crossing, appear to lie at the centre of each individual glass cane. Retortoli glass canes from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries look different, with the white threads encircling the cane of coloured glass on the outside. This technical innovation can first be observed in the filigrana glasses that have been displayed in the Glass Cabinet at Rosenborg Palace in Copenhagen since the eighteenth century, which were verifiably made before 1708. The glass works of art in the Rosenborg Glass Cabinet actually go back to a present made by the Venetian state to Frederick IV of Denmark when he was staying in La Serenissima in 1708. No wonder several glasses in the Glass Cabinet at Rosenborg Palace happen to match the glass discussed here in terms of colour, design and aesthetic qualities: they were all made at the same place at the same time.