Sparks, Ripples, and Molten Glass

He was a glassmaker from Murano, but also a ceramist, a creator of tapestries and carpets, and an unparalleled craftsman; that is how Gabriele D’Annunzio thought of him. In Leda without Swan the poet described visiting Vittorio Zecchin’s workshop. In later years, design magazines such as Domus and Casabella contributed to his reputation as a master of the applied arts. That description helped to obscure Vittorio Zecchin’s work as a painter. Zecchin never left Venice, and the glow of flames in the glass furnaces, reflections cast by water on colorful walls, the creations of the Viennese Secession (Klimt and others) glimpsed in the Giardini della Biennale, and impressions of the Orient, ever present in the lagoon, all nourished his artistic vision. The twelve surviving panels of The Thousand and One Nights from the dining room of the Hotel Terminus, the highest achievement of Zecchin’s pictorial work, summon up a fanciful world of slave girls and princesses, “gems, crystals, ebony, coral, and fine petals of gold.”