Orsoni Mosaic Lab

Yesterday morning we visited the oldest working glass tile factory in Venice. It's an international supplier for interior design clientele as well as conservation of some of the most historically renowned sites in the world. The Orsoni lab is also singlehandedly responsible for all conservation of all of the mosaic work in San Marco. 

It was a really interesting place, and it was amazing to see the process of color selection and the actual cutting of the tile. Our appointment was pretty early in the morning and I left too late to be able to grab a cappuccino from the corner caffe, and then our small class ended up being joined on the tour by a very large group of senior citizen tourists. It ended up being a pretty hectic visit - and pretty hazardous, having all of those people around such a dangerous work environment.....old people almost getting run over by red hot metal poles and what not. Venetians are pretty laid back, the workers kind of just yelled Attenzione! as they passed by inches close to burning someone with molten glass. Whatevs.

This is a picture of one of the furnaces. Inside is a large ceramic bowl with molten glass being churned by the man working with a long steel pole. It takes muscles to do this, you could see them struggling to mix it.

This is a work bench across the room from the furnace. They take samples out of each batch of glass to try to match the exact color they need. These are some of their color samples. In this case they were trying to match the exact shade of red needed to repair one of the mosaics the company had been hired to work on.

Underneath this steel press is a flat, circular blob of molten glass. You can see it's still burning red. They flatten it and scorch it in the cold water bucket to check for even color tones.

These are some of the left over ceramic tubs they use in the furnace for the glass. You can see how the glass actually stains the ceramic bowls. Over time the left over colored glass actually ends up cracking the ceramic bowl under the heat and they have to replace it.

This is a picture of one of my professors standing over a large bin of excess glass from the cutting rooms. They melt down the left over odd-shaped pieces to be reused for firing.

More left over shards of different colored glass.

This is only a small section of their color library. They have thousands of colors, and will sometimes make a color by specific request from a client. They have to be careful when doing conservation work, though. Most of these pigments weren't available until the 18th or 19th century, so they try to stay authentic to the time period.

The back wall is only flesh-toned glass. So many different, very specific shades. (You can also see some of the senior citizens in this picture.)

More of the library.

This woman is cutting glass with a machine into centimeter length pieces of tile. I wish I got a closer picture, the process is actually insane. I would go blind doing that day after day.

The door to the Orsoni Lab. 

Sorry about the few and far between updates. I've had such problems trying to contact different Italian phone companies to get an Internet card. More to come soon, I promise. I'm off to Ravenna this weekend to go see some beautiful mosaics so this is an appropriate last post before I do that :) 

A presto!