The miracle of Peggy Guggenheim

Faced with the problem of creating from glass, a man, Egidio Costantini, is struggling to succeed the challenge of creating sculptures in glass.

In 1950, with a group of Venetian artists, he creates a cooperative bearing the name "Study Centre for Painters of Art Glass" whose ambition is to bring together the world of art and that of the crafts.
This idea is quickly gaining ground and interests of internationally renowned artists as Kokoshka, Le Corbusier, Calder and Mark Tobey.

In 1954, Picasso, himself fascinated by glass, adhered to the project and produced works of exceptional quality.
Jean Cocteau, passionate about this workshop, unique in the world, not only produced stunning works, but becomes an ambassador to all his artist friends, renaming himself the former cooperative: "Forge of Angels", in Italian "Fucina degli Angeli."

Thanks to him, many others joined this impossible dream of glass, making from Costantini an unavoidable interface between sculptors and this matter so much dreadful.

Even Chagall, who tried in vain with several artisans, entrusted him his creations.

Despite the success of hosting work, exorbitant rental costs of furnaces and their initiation for often unique creations, the lack of support or even hostility of Murano glass craftsmen, jealous of the initiative and opposed to any aid from the city of Venice, led the atelier to bankruptcy.

Only three years later, intervened Peggy Guggenheim, who became both mentor and patron of the "Fucina degli Angeli" and permits the revival of this workshop unique in the world.

As so well written by the professor at the University of Boston, Fred Licht, a renowned curator of the Guggenheim Foundation: "In the work of glass, sculpture goes beyond the normal relationship between sculptor on the one hand and foundry-man or stonecutter on the other. The only parallel that comes to mind occurs in the realm of music. Ferrucio Busoni’s arrangements of Bach, for instance, approach the kind of relationship that links Costantini to Arp, Ernst or Picasso."