The island of Murano is closely linked to the idea of Venetian glass. Here, the Glass Museum, part of the Venice Civic Museums Foundation, has been locatd in a former patrician palace for a century. Despite being possibly less famous among the large audience than other counterparts, such as the Corning Museum of Glass in the United States or the glassware section of the V&A in London, the Museo del Vetro in Murano is surely worth a visit. It hosts not only a rich collection of early modern glassware and a bountiful section of contemporary glass-artworks but it is also suggestive for the context it is situated in: that very same isle where many of the items on display were created. The perma
Shell Gold – Production, Usage, and Handling of a Historical Artisanal Technique (including a hands-
We touched on the topic of shell gold during our fascinating workshop in Cambridge with Dr Spike Bucklow at the Hamilton Karr Institute last October (see the blog entry here). I was immediately intrigued by the technique and wondered about producing shell gold myself. For this blog post, I asked myself what exactly the historical technique of shell gold is, when and where it was used and – more importantly – how difficult it is to produce. Shell gold is a technique for which powdered gold leaf and a binder material are mixed together in a sea shell – hence the name. There are a number of different recipes for shell gold, which mention different binder materials, including gum arabic, egg-whi
