Murano Wall Sconce in Textured Glass: Italian, c.1950s

The Murano glasshouses developed dozens of techniques for the surface of a piece. The glass itself, hand-blown and free of imperfection, could only do so much; the texture - the way the surface caught and refracted light - was where the real range of the medium lived. There was pulegoso, glass shot through with trapped bubbles, milky and clouded. There was battuto, the surface ground after blowing with a small wheel to produce a hammered finish like brushed bronze. There was a coste, ribbed vertically like a melon. Each technique gave the glass a different relationship to light. The post-war Murano workshops - Barovier & Toso, Seguso, Mazzega, Vistosi, and others - built whole vocabularies around these surfaces, and the lighting they produced in the 1940s and '50s carried the textures into rooms across Italy. A textured shade does something a clear one cannot. It softens the light source, holds it in its surface, makes the lamp itself a quiet object rather than a hidden one.

This wall sconce is from that tradition. A shallow domed shade in textured Murano glass, the surface raised in fine concentric rows of beaded relief that catch and diffuse the light; mounted on a bronze armature with faceted, almost architectural detailing - a vertical bracket descending from the bowl to a small turned form, fixed to the wall plate below.

Fully restored. Glass in good condition. Bronze cleaned and polished.