Istituto di Storia dell'Arte


Director
Luca Massimo Barbero


Centro Studi del Vetro
Tel.: +39 041 2710306
centrostudivetro@cini.it


Referents
Marzia Scalon (marzia.scalon@cini.it)
Sabina Tutone (sabina.tutone@cini.it)

The Seguso Vetri d'Arte archive is distinguished by the richness and breadth of its materials: in fact, the iconographic corpus, divided into Art Glass, Lighting, and Special Projects, gathers more than 22,000 documents, including preparatory sketches, plates, plans, and furnace drawings. The drawings are executed with multiple techniques, from watercolor to pastel to charcoal. 


Among them, the series relating to Artistic Glass, which consists of 13,525 small- and medium-format drawings collects models Z, Z1 to Z2500, and models 2600 to 14,800, dating from 1933 to 1971. 


Photographic sources representing the well-known Murano glassworks also include more than 10,000 color and black-and-white positives, as well as glass plates, by photographers Ferruzzi and Giacomelli, documenting the furnace's production since 1936. 


In addition, the archive holds some of the company's valuable production catalogs: those for Lighting, Barbier Orders and the so-called Showroom Catalogues. The latter collection is of considerable historical and artistic value and owes its name to the place where it was traditionally kept, namely the Seguso Vetri d'Arte showroom in Murano. The six volumes contain more than 8,000 'miniatures' made in pencil, pen, ink and watercolor, and represent the production of Seguso Vetri d'Arte from 1939 to 1971 (models 5953 - 14609).


Finally, the online catalog includes interesting design nuclei that have recently been catalogued and completely digitized. These consist of more than 8000 units, particularly representative of the prominent features of Seguso Vetri d'Arte's amazing creativity and thanks to which it has been possible to identify some specific production segments of the furnace. These series are proposed through grouping into Special Projects and Lighting.


The work of digital archiving and registry carried out by the Center, respects the criterion with which the historic company originally organized its archives when it was in business; the ordering of the documents as they were at the time they arrived at the Giorgio Cini Foundation has also been maintained. Fruitful intersections correlate the Seguso fund with other important documentary collections held by the Glass Study Center and the subject of future publications in the online catalog.

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