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Desk SetZoom Select the image to zoom

Desk Set

ca. 1755-70
La Granja de San Ildefonso
Transparent cobalt blue glass with opaque white threads
Diam. (tray) 23.5 cm

This desk set comes from the royal glass works at La Granja de San Ildefonso (near the royal palace of the same name, province of Segovia), established in 1728 by the Catalan craftsman, Ventura Sit. Eight years later, the factory was brought under direct royal control by Philip V to meet the increasing demand of the Spanish court. These glassworks became a source of pride for the Bourbon rulers of Spain, and, in the mid-eighteenth century, they produced the largest and finest mirrors on earth. From the beginning, the glassworks attracted masters from across Europe, so that the distinctive techniques and styles of France, Bohemia, and Italy all flourished.

This desk set, a masterpiece of the glassblower's art, is one of only two like it known to exist (the other is now in the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia). In particular, it reveals a remarkable command of the Venetian technique called latticino in which rods of opaque white glass are introduced into the main material of the vessel to create a striated effect. By the late eighteenth century, fashion had largely turned away from Venetian styles like latticino. This desk set, however, recasts this time-tested technique in a classicist light, providing a lively, but ordered, surface for elegant, restrained shapes. The knobs of the inkwells display another method in which opaque glass is deposited on the surface to imitate the appearance of precious stones.