Orsoni: A mosaic Mecca
It’s all very Venetian. You hang a left over a bridge, walk down a bit of a canal, turn through an arch and along a twisty alley. Then there you are. Next to a dull green door with an array of unassuming plaques. The door is closed. This is not a place that seeks attention.
But it doesn’t need to. Anyone who is anyone in the mosaic world knows full well that in its quiet no-fuss way, Orsoni Venezia is a mosaic Mecca.
Behind the door lies one of the great furnaces of smalti production. The only one left in Venice. Since 1888 this is where smalti for mosaics has been produced.
How they make it
Smalti, that rich reflexive glass that holds colour the way a cup holds water. Beloved of emperors and revered by supplicants, it has been used to decorate some of the world’s most important buildings. It’s not-quite-smooth surface catches the light, throwing it back it you. At the same time the colours run so deep that you can almost fall into them.
Here, molten glass is mixed with oxides in huge ceramic crucibles at impossibly high temperatures. It is stirred, tested, stirred some more and then poured. The gloopy liquid is like pancake mix on a hot plate. It spreads, reaches its limit, then forms into a roundish shape before hardening.
These shapes, the pizzas, are then cut by hand into tesserae. The same tesserae that you and I buy in stapled bags with carefully weighed out contents. Smalti is expensive and to see how it is made at the Orsoni Venezia factory you understand why.
Visiting Orsoni Venezia
I visited the Orsoni factory on a recent trip to Venice with Alison MacCormaic with support from the World Craft Council_ Europe. Tours which take place on the first and last Wednesdays of the month are often booked more than six months in advance. But they keep slots for ‘special visits’ by professionals so we were lucky enough to be allowed in thanks mostly to Alison’s persistence (and Italian).
Once through the door, Orsoni maintains the unassuming air which greets you on the outside. Except for the smalti-ness of it all, it still feels like the family home come factory that it was when the Orsoni family lived there.
But of course the smalti-ness of it all is the point. A reception hall contains the actual sample boards taken by Angelo Orsoni to the Paris Exhibition in 1889. There is a smalti wall mural of an oversized apple and a pear against a white background, perfectly demonstrating the subtle gradations and versatility of the material. Three crucibles as thick as tree trunks are stacked on one side artfully streaked with the residue of molten glass.
Touring Orsoni
And so it continues everywhere you look. Sunlight spilling like gossamer cloth over boxes of colour-matched pizzas in the garden. Wooden stalls full of discarded offcuts and hardened globules of glass. The huge furnace in the middle of a hangar-like warehouse.
It is fed and stirred by men with long wooden paddles while on one side a man stands watching. He is the ‘colour master’. Every now and again, the men bring the master a sample. He lets it cool and checks that it matches one of more than 3,000 colours in the Orsoni library.
That’s right. Three thousand colours. Think of it. Think of all those barely perceptible variations. He is a perfumier of colour.
Behind the scenes
In another room, a woman sits hunched on a stool, scoring and cutting pizzas of gold. Making gold smalti entails laying gold leaf between layers of glass. The top layer is so thin that the gold seems to sit on its surface. But the thinness is illusionary. The gold can dance behind its screen but the glass protects it from dust and corrosion.
Alison and I enter a room where employees cut the smalti down from pizzas into the brick-like shapes we buy. Women sit at high-rimmed tables, each with their own cutting machine. With one hand they turn a wheel that lowers a blade, with the other they feed the smalti through. Click, click, click. The air is full of it, like the sound of old fashioned type writers. Sacks of cut glass slump as casually as sacks of potatoes around the room.
We went into a bathroom lined with gold, wandered down corridors of beautifully coordinated pizzas, feasted our eyes and swooned with longing. We ended up back in the reception room with colour charts laid out before us. Now it was time to choose for ourselves. Limited budgets, infinite desire. Needless to say, it took a while.
