“Fili applicati” vase in clear glass in slightly crimped section with polychrome applications

The fili applicati is perhaps the final series of wares designed by Carlo Scarpa for Venini. Displayed at the 1942 Venice Biennale in the artist’s moment of purest abstraction of colour and form, the vase’s asymmetry posed a challenge to the Murano glassmaking tradition in which symmetry was a defining feature.

Giandomenico Romanelli aptly locates the significance of Scarpa’s work in the Murano universe as follows: “Working with glass seems to offer Carlo Scarpa a metaphor for his own development as inventor and creator: a journey home, a rediscovery of the sensations and secrets of material governed by the hand; a return to the distillation of forms, and perhaps to an alchemical and histrionic challenge to the senses.”

Previously unpublished