It is not necessary to imagine Murano’s glass as an industrial product but as a real art product, all the pieces are handmade and therefore they are unique even if similar to the others, designed and manufactured in the same series. The furnaces workshops, as you will see, are closer to an artist's atellier than to an industrialised workplace. The glass is mainly composed of pure siliceous sand which takes on the different colours with the addition of common metallic oxides at regular times.
This compound, with very small additions of other substances, is melted at very high temperatures and transformed into coloured glass: this type of glass is used by the Glassmakers of the "NasonMoretti"workshop of Murano. Each colour of glass is characterised by a different type of oxide which determines its intensity according to the quantity used. Artistic glass, whether blown or handmade, requires work groups made up of a master plus three or four other people specialized in the different stages of processing. The master blows the glass or shapes the piece, reaching the desired shape and size.
Master glassmaker was not born like that but you can become a very good glassmaker with much commitment and skill, accumulating experience, stealing with your eyes the skills of other masters. There are no schools that teach to become masters, only the people who work in the furnace are the Masters of Glass ArtThe piece, made by the master, when it is still hot, is put into the tempering kiln, a long belt-cooling oven. Here the workpiece flows and cools slowly over many hours and comes out ready for further processing. Tempered glass is about six times stronger than normal glass, because surface defects are kept "closed" by compressive mechanical stresses, while the inner part remains freer from defects that could cause cracks.
Objects blown into a furnace and tempered are taken to the milling department where they are cold finished by experts of grinding who proceed with sanding or other types of diamond wheel finishing. Grinding eliminates sharp edges or can be used to create special effects. With different technologies based on diamond grinding wheels, the glass worked like that becomes finished products, ready to be signed and packaged.
