Venice and Murano through Time: Tracy Chevalier’s ‘The Glass Maker’

Tracy Chevalier’s new novel, “The Glass Maker,” is her most ambitious yet. Occurring over a grand sweep of 500 years — all experienced by her long-lived heroine, Orsola Rosso (the name Orsola, no doubt, a tribute to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, who also traipsed through the centuries, albeit changing gender en route) — the novel shines a spotlight on cosmopolitan Venice and nearby quiet Murano, famous for its glass.

Like most readers, I first met Chevalier via Griet, a sixteen-year-old girl living in the Netherlands in 1664; for me, the year was 2004, and the place was Hoboken, New Jersey. Griet was the fascinating title character in her novel “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” which brought to life and continues to bring to life to its millions of fans worldwide the subject of the painting by Johannes Vermeer of the same name. I wasn’t interested in historical fiction at the time, but the novel seemed to greet me in every bookshop I entered, Vermeer’s wide-eyed girl always looking over her shoulder at me. I bought it and was immediately hooked, both on the story of Griet, and on Chevalier’s fiction at large: her strong, quiet heroines; her taut prose; her gentle insights that stay with a reader long past each book’s close. 

Above all, Chevalier is the premier writer of craft, especially women’s craft. Read her work, and you will learn about the making of embroidered kneelers in Winchester Cathedral (“A Single Thread”), of quilts in the 19th century (“The Last Runaway”), of medieval tapestries (“The Lady and the Unicorn”). In “The Glass Maker,” Orsola comes from a family of glass makers, but Orsola’s specific contribution is glass beads, which women, who were unlikely to be out in the workshops pulling long iron rods out of burning furnaces and turning hot glass into candlesticks and goblets, mirrors or chandeliers, actually made. Worked over a tallow lamp with a bit of cane, the small beads could be formed in a nook of a house, barely noticed, and, compared to the grand male enterprise, worth little. With her modest pursuit, Orsola becomes an artist, fashioning beads that become emblems of hope as well as necklaces for the rich and powerful.

Orsola, and those around her, live on what Chevalier calls “time alla Veneziana,” or “Venetian time.” This is a bit of magic she injects into the story, asking readers to imagine skimming “a flat stone skillfully across the water,” watching it touch down, at intervals, on the water’s surface. She then asks that we imagine the stone is not touching water but rather time. Because the characters exist over such a long period, readers are treated to an incredibly rich history of both the glass industry and the location in which the novel is set. Beginning in 1486, during the Renaissance, we see Venice and Murano from plague to plague (and quarantine to quarantine). We enter into the workshops of different glassmakers, each family-run, with a maestro at its head, and garzonetti and garzoni blowing and pulling and molding the glass into wares that will travel the globe. We journey, with the skimming stone, from the Middle Ages to the time of Shakespeare, from the Enlightenment to Napoleon seizing “Venice, the prize jewel.” We see Venice thrive, suffer, recover. We land on the Great War, skim the “acqua granda” flooding of 2019, and soon after, COVID-19. 

Throughout, we get glimpses of Jewish life and influence in Venice. Although we don’t, as in Shakespeare’s famous play, ever make it inside the gates of the ghetto — the ghetto, the original, in Cannaregio, from whence the term originates—we pass its walls. Here, beside the Ghetto Nuovo, “where,” we read, “for hundreds of years Jewish Venetians had been required to live,” are glass factories housing women making seed beads used by American Indians. We hear of Giudecca, an island south of Venice and separated from it by the Giudecca Canal, providing produce for Venetians. Giudecca, of course, is like our English word “Judaica,” and refers to Jews; it is typically the name for the Jewish quarters in Southern Italy. Jews comprise some of the color and diversity that Orsola encounters when she, at first rarely and tentatively, visits Venice: “In the other trips to Venice she had made she had seen Turks in their turbans and Jews in their skull caps” and on the visit in question, she also meets “an African with his deep dark skin.”

There is a minor Jewish character in the novel. His Jewishness is not announced early on, and Orsola only discovers it belatedly. But this is by design, as the man, we learn, is a “Marrano,” a once-common term for The Inquisition’s conversos, now considered pejorative. This man hides his Jewishness so that he is not confined to the ghetto. Later, in World War I, he leaves for Germany and briefly lives as his authentic Jewish self. This choice results in dire consequences, a seeming irony, but we must remember that his fate wouldn’t have necessarily been different in Venice. In 1938, Italy, too, deprived Jews of their civil rights; in 1943, it was occupied by the Nazis, and over two hundred Jews were deported to concentration camps.

“The Glass Maker” is a gorgeous paean to Venice and Murano and to the artists and artisans whose glass has made our homes and lives more beautiful the world over.

If you, like me, and like millions of other tourists every year, visited Venice, and brought home a souvenir — I have a blown glass mezuzah from Murano — you may wonder at the stories of the people who created it. Wonder no more. “The Glass Maker” is a gorgeous paean to Venice and Murano and to the artists and artisans whose glass has made our homes and lives more beautiful the world over.

Karen Skinazi, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Literature and Culture and the director of Liberal Arts at the University of Bristol (UK) and the author of “Women of Valor: Orthodox Jewish Troll Fighters, Crime Writers, and Rock Stars in Contemporary Literature and Culture.”