Five hundred years ago, beset by spies, glassmakers on Murano, a small island in the Venetian lagoon, claimed that they had solved an ancient riddle: They perfected the process of manufacturing the world's first absolutely pure, clear, and uncolored glass. This was a bold statement in 1503. The glassmakers also stated that they could produce this glass in large, thin sheets free of imperfections. The announcement convulsed their competitors and began a 200-year monopoly that may still be the greatest monopoly on a luxury product that Europe has ever experienced.
The essence of the formula, said the glassmakers, lay in two raw materials that they controlled--the salts concentrated in Venetian seawater and the beauty of their furnace flames, the product of select hardwoods gathered in Northern Italian forests. This claim was more romantic than truthful, and most importantly it was misleading, which was their intention. The Venetians had, in fact, found the secret that would produce a revolution in glassmaking. Stunned by the brilliant clarity of the glass, the Venetians' prime competitor--the Germans, Bohemians, and French--set out to try to steal the formula.
The setting for this intrigue was Renaissance Italy, where treachery and invention were common bedfellows. So it is no surprise that the Venetian doges immediately limited access to the island and implemented drastic countermeasures, declaring that anyone divulging the secret or defecting to a foreign glassworks would be hunted down and killed.
The tactic succeeded. For nearly 200 years, despite some minor breaches of security and some mysterious poisonings, five families of glassmakers on Murano held a virtual monopoly on the most lucrative luxury product the world had ever witnessed--the looking glass.
It had been a long wait. The Egyptians had produced lead-backed mirrors of common glass since about 1 A.D. Archaeologists have uncovered several examples of them. These crude, early mirrors are about the size of a tea saucer with frames of carved wood. 'They return their viewers' images in clouded, murky deep-gray or yellow tones. The Egyptians lacked the technical ability to make uncolored, non-distorting glass. Until the glass itself was made clear and pure, no improvements in the mirror were possible.
So when the glassmakers working on the island of Murano announced that they had perfected the technique of making mirrors of "crystalline" glass, which they claimed was previously unknown throughout the world, the statement was indeed thunderous. Their word, "crystalline," refers to what was then a well-known standard of clarity, the pure, unflawed quartz or rock crystal that was used in lighting devices to reflect light with diamond-like brilliance. The world of glassmaking was changed forever, and a rapid rise in the fortunes of several Muranese glassmaking families who shared the secret followed.
These families--the Del Gallos, Berovieris, Briatis, Bertolinis, and Mottas--began to sell mirrors to the Europeans wealthy enough to buy them in a variety of sizes, up to about a 40-inch maximum. The price for a small piece was equal to a year's salary for one of the glassmakers, and the largest pieces sold for our equivalent of about $50,000.
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