Galleria Abscondita presents the exhibition Vetro Mosaico, dedicated to the work of Vincenzo and

Ulderico Moretti, key figures in the 19th-century revival of mosaic glass or “murrino” Murano glass and its transmission into the 20th century.

Rome has a long memory. Beneath its cobblestones, in museum storerooms, in the display cases of collectors, fragments survive of an art that the city itself had forgotten it had produced: the mosaic glass of the early Imperial age – millefiori, ribbon, reticello, spiral, marbled – objects of a polychromy that remains unmatched in the centuries that followed.

When, in the 18th century, the excavations of Herculaneum and Pompeii brought to light of the customs and culture of Imperial Rome, the effect on European taste was immediate and lasting: Neoclassicism was not merely an artistic movement but also a demand for objects capable of speaking the language of antiquity – a demand addressed to all the crafts of beauty. Potters, goldsmiths, cabinetmakers responded. The glassmakers had to wait: Roman glass posed technical problems that antiquarian enthusiasm alone was not enough to solve. It took an extra century, and it took Murano.

It was the great season of 19th-century excavations, triggered by the proclamation of Rome as capital, that finally provided the necessary material for study. The major earthworks for the new districts brought to light enormous quantities of polychrome Roman glass fragments: collectors bought them, archaeologists studied them, they were donated to museums. 

Someone brought them to Murano, where Vincenzo Moretti, a technical arranger of genius, studied them until he understood their secret. Not only were the glass pastes imitated to perfection, but also the colors and shapes of the canes. Having abandoned the blowing of the first experiments, the ancient technique of casting in slab molds was adopted – the same technique that in Alexandria and Rome had produced the models.

That research did not end with Vincenzo. His grandson Ulderico carried it forward until the 1930s, reorganizing the family workshop and presenting his bowls at the Venice Biennale in 1932 – an institutional recognition for an art that many continued to consider craftsmanship, and which instead was, and already was then, something more.

The exhibition Vetro Mosaico, curated by Gabriele Frasca, brings together works by Vincenzo and Ulderico Moretti and returns them to the city that was, unwittingly, their muse. The catalog, published on the occasion of the opening, includes essays by Lucia Saguì (Sapienza University of Rome) on mosaic glass in the Roman age, and by Giovanni Sarpellon (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) on the history of murrina from its revival in the modern era up to the Venice Biennale.

Works by Vincenzo and Ulderico Moretti are held in the collections of: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY; Museo del Vetro di Murano, Venice.