Wright Auction

In 1926 Carlo Scarpa, a 20 year old architecture student, began working for Giacomo Cappellin at his newly founded firm MVM Cappellin & C. Known for his exquisite taste and openness to artistic experimentation, Cappellin proved to be the perfect mentor for the young Scarpa who flourished as a designer of glass under his tutelage. By 1928 Scarpa had taken over the position of artistic director and began designing opaque glass vessels with reduced modernist forms. These works were a departure from the norm, as Murano glass had always been valued for its lightness and transparency above all. Met with great enthusiasm by critics and the public alike, Scarpa’s groundbreaking experimental work with Cappellin changed the course of Murano glass and presaged his work at Venini in later years.

This Fenicio vase, designed by Scarpa in 1928, is an excellent example of his early experimental work for Cappellin. It consists of a light-colored incamiciato (encased) glass with darker surface details and pale gold iridization. The distinctive patterning is Scarpa’s interpretation of designs found on ancient Phoenician core-formed vessels. The ability to seamlessly combine ancient and modern exists at the heart of Scarpa’s genius as a designer, architect and artist and is well illustrated in this rare vase.

Period photo of similar examples. (Photograph courtesy of Marino Barovier)

Carlo Scarpa 1906-1978

Carlo Scarpa was born in Venice in 1906, and died an accidental death in Japan in 1978. Like many great artists, Scarpa’s work as architect and designer is highly influential and yet remains enigmatic, illusive and hard to categorize. What is obvious in all his work is an underlying transcendental quality, an uncanny ability to create powerful emotional states in all who experience it. It is perhaps this quality that makes him one of the most beloved and revered figures in the history of 20th century Italian art and design.

Scarpa’s various biographers often point to his sensitivity to materials and his ability to evoke the past, but nothing about Scarpa is easy to define. In 1919 he enrolled in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Venice and graduated in 1926 with the title of Professor of Architecture. He did not, however, sit the pro forma exam required by the Italian government, and hence was never fully licensed as an architect.

A master of blending ancient and modern materials, forms and sensibilities, Scarpa completed over sixty architectural projects for museums in his lifetime. His agile use of precious, humble and industrial materials in order to elegantly frame historical fragments and artifacts is perhaps his greatest architectural achievement. His devotion to restoration and preservation also seem to suggest a belief that the true vocation of any architect is to quietly re-frame history, to convey a sense of both past and present, uniting them in full knowledge that the future is unwritten.

Scarpa’s work as a glass designer is equally poetic and ambitious. Working for both MVM Cappellin and Venini he produced hundreds of models, all of which are now considered masterworks. Drawing inspiration from ancient Chinese and Japanese vessels, Scarpa was able to express the best aspects of Murano glass craftsmanship in reduced modernist forms. Even the titles of his series hint at the elemental power of his work: Bollicine, Transparente, Granulare, Iridato, Inciso, Batutto, Vellato, Fasce, Pennellate (Bubbly, Transparent, Grainy, Iridized, Incised, Beaten, Veiled, Banded, Brushstrokes).

Carlo Scarpa’s death itself was poetic. He died from injuries after falling down a flight of concrete steps that he himself had designed in Sendai, Japan. However his death was not immediate—he lived for ten days. While unable to speak, it is said that he could write, but only backwards, and that he spent his last days creating tiny illustrated books for his friends. In the end he was buried in the standing position, wrapped in white muslin, in a quiet corner of the Brion-Vega Cemetery in San Vito d’Altivole, widely considered to be his ultimate architectural masterpiece.