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the glass processing
Why is glass the key component in Selène products?
In contrast to other manufacturing methods, glass-making has been around for over one thousand years; it is an art that reached the Venetian Republic along busy trade routes from the East at the end of the first millennium.
However an interesting historiography dates Venice’s glass-making tradition back to the first centuries AD when Aquileia Romana was an important glass-producing centre.
It recounts how the town’s inhabitants fled the barbarian hordes and headed towards the Venetian lagoon, taking their precious glass-making knowledge with them.
The “Domenico vetrario” donation, dating back to 982 AD, is the oldest official document on Venetian glass-making. In 1982, celebrations were held to commemorate one thousand years of this art, which has been based in Murano since 1000 AD.
This Aquileian, or more probably Oriental art has been handed down to today’s master craftsmen who carefully guard the secret formulas, refined over centuries, that give the glass its unprecedented charm.
However, the famous glass mixture of sand, soda and mineral powder is not a strict formula; as with paints, it is a special combination that can be mixed in different doses to produce an array of different weights, brightness, transparencies and colours.
The mystery of these thousand combinations is known only to master glassmakers, who hand it down from generation to generation. It is the key to the unique properties of Murano glass, the secret, for those skilled enough to use it, to the highest form of expression: light.
