The Glassmaker

by Tracy Chevalier

People who make things also have an ambiguous relationship with time. Painters, writers, wood-carvers, knitters, weavers and, yes, glassmakers: creators often enter an absorbed state that psychologists call flow, in which hours pass without their noticing. Readers, too.

garzonetti—young boys who helped out around furnaces with an expectation of becoming a garzone—an apprentice training to work in glass.

This was Maria Barovier, daughter of Angelo, sister of Maestro Giovanni.

The Doge of Venice even granted Maria Barovier permission to set up her own small furnace and produce the special bead she had created. A woman tending her own furnace: this was something new. It was unlikely to happen again unless the world changed substantially.

Two hundred years before, the Doge had sent glassmakers to work solely on Murano, to isolate the fiery furnaces from the dense city and to keep track of the artisans so they wouldn’t run away to the mainland with Muranese glass secrets.

It was like that for some: coming out of quarantine was almost harder than being in it. When locked in, there were few decisions to make: all you could do was to wait and keep yourself alive in the meantime. Once out, suddenly there was freedom, and with it, choices.

you never recover from losing someone; you just learn to accommodate the hole it makes in you.

Venetians complained about their city becoming a theme park, but Orsola knew that as long as Venice’s canals stank of sewage, its rooms were dark and damp, its people melancholy and sardonic, it would maintain its true nature, which was so seductive. A pearl needs grit to be beautiful; beauty comes from the scar on the lip, the gap in the teeth, the crooked eyebrow.