Venice show traces the man who paired artists with Murano's glassmakers

Max Ernst, Oskar Kokoschka and Lucio Fontana all had their designs turned into glass, and a new exhibition in Venice tells the story of how that happened. The show at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice follows the Fucina degli Angeli, a glass project that ran from the 1950s to the 1980s.

The project belonged to Egidio Costantini, who was born in Brindisi, a port city in southern Italy, in 1912. In 1952 he came up with an idea: take designs by living artists and have them made into glass sculptures by master glassblowers on Murano, the island in the Venice lagoon known for its glass. Glassblowers are craftspeople who shape molten glass by blowing and working it with tools.

Three years later Costantini opened the Fucina degli Angeli gallery to show what the experiment had produced. The name, Italian for "Forge of the Angels", was proposed by Jean Cocteau, the French writer and artist. The Art Newspaper reports that Costantini acted as the go-between for more than 100 international artists and Murano's glassmakers until the 1970s.

Peggy Guggenheim, the American collector whose museum now hosts the show, helped keep the gallery afloat. Her purchases provided financial support, and her contacts helped Costantini exhibit his glass across Europe and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The exhibition brings together more than 100 works, including glass, paintings and sculptures, along with material from the Fucina's archives. It is curated by art historian Cristina Beltrami and arranged in 11 rooms, grouped by artist and theme. Visitors will see glass versions of works by Max Ernst, Oskar Kokoschka, Lucio Fontana and Paul Jenkins alongside the original artworks they were based on.

Families have a hands-on option too. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is holding a children's workshop inspired by the Fucina degli Angeli works on 14 November 2026 at 11:00 am. Children are invited to turn a simple cardboard vase into a character of their own, using drawing, collage and other materials to build a three-dimensional vase cover.

For anyone who has ever wondered who actually made an artist's glass piece, the show gives a clear answer: a small team of Murano craftspeople, working with an organiser who spent decades carrying designs from studio to furnace and back again.