Born into Glass: Murano, Tradition & Reinvention with Emilio Santini

A Contemporary Contexts Master Conversation with... Murano-born glass artist Emilio Santini
 
Emilio Santini traces a life shaped by five centuries of Murano glassmaking — from childhood in the factories to America, Studio Glass, art, craft and reinvention.
 
What happens when you are born into centuries of glassmaking tradition — and then choose to make your own way through it?
 
In this remarkable first-hand conversation, Emilio Santini explores Murano glass from the inside — not simply its celebrated history, but what it actually felt like to grow up within a community shaped almost entirely by glass.
 
Born in Burano off the Venetian mainland and raised in Murano from infancy, Emilio comes from a family with more than five centuries of glassmaking tradition. At eleven he began spending his summer holidays working at the Cenedese glass factory, learning under his uncle Giacinto Cadamuro and, over subsequent summers, other Murano masters. At seventeen, his father began teaching him lampworking.
 
Through Emilio's own family story, a much larger history unfolds. He takes us back through the development of Venetian glassmaking, the concentration of furnaces on Murano, the Golden Book and the privileges of its glassmaking families, and the secrecy and fierce competition surrounding technical knowledge. Particularly fascinating is his account of the relationship between furnace work and lampworking: rather than two entirely separate traditions, Emilio describes documentary evidence of lampworking being used alongside furnace work to complete elaborate Venetian pieces centuries ago.
 
But Born into Glass is as much about leaving a tradition as inheriting one.
 
After studying Italian Literature and Art History at the University of Venice, Emilio moved with his wife to Williamsburg, Virginia in 1988 and established a small lampworking studio. His encounter with America brought him into a very different glass culture and eventually into the international Studio Glass community. His career would span flame and furnace work, university teaching and some of the world's best-known glass schools, while his work entered museum and private collections internationally.
 
The conversation therefore becomes something larger than the story of one glassmaker. Emilio reflects on inherited skill and individual identity, the boundaries between art and craft, teaching and making, and what happens when a person raised inside an ancient and highly codified craft culture begins deciding for himself what an artistic life should look like.
 
And eventually that life circles back to something that existed before glass: writing. Emilio speaks about returning to his first love through poetry, short stories and a novel — another form through which glass continues to find its way into his work.
 
Warm, funny and deeply personal, this isn't a conventional history of Murano. It is the history of glass told from inside one family and one life — by someone who inherited that tradition, left it, carried it across a continent and made it his own.

Duration: 73 minutes
Access: Lifetime