Melodies for the Eye

"I go directly and ring the bell. If they answer, fine! If they don't, I ring the bell again a year later." For Italy's Egidio Costantini, a balding man in his 50s, this persistent bell ringing has opened the doors of some of the world's most renowned artists--Oskar Kokoschka, Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Luis Fontana, Yves Klein, Jean Cocteau, Picasso. No avid autograph seeker nor voracious collector, Costantini is a contemporary Venetian visionary out to restore the grandeur that was glass four centuries ago (see color).

Forge of the Angels. Felled by a heart attack in 1948 and forced to eke out a living, Costantini set up a shop, like many of those lining the Piazza San Marco, selling the gaudy souvenirs that today pass for Venetian glass. "I suffered," he says. No one needed to remind him that Murano, an island in the Venetian Lagoon still crowded with furnaces, had once been the capital of the glassmaking world. The problem was to restore art to the craft, and Costantini decided to persuade contemporary artists to supply designs for the glassmakers left on Murano.

The idea was not original. Such Renaissance painters as Veronese and Tintoretto are believed to have had a hand in the designs of fragile cristallo. But it was a stimulating new notion to today's artists. Austrian Expressionist Kokoschka responded first. Three years later Costantini produced his gay Bacchantes. Then Jean Cocteau got interested, traveled to Venice, christened the project "Forge of the Angels," and supplied drawings. Finally, even Picasso capitulated. To Costantini's enormous relief, language proved no barrier. "Speak Italian," ordered Pablo when the Venetian at last got his foot in the door. "Your French is impossible."

The Acid Bath. Once Costantini has a drawing or plaster model in hand, he seeks out the glass blower he feels particularly suited to the work. "We drink a glass of wine and talk," he says, "then another glass of wine and talk some more." Costantini selects the colors, and the tortuous work of blowing and shaping begins. For Ernst's tall, reddish-brown Poet, topped by a sharp-beaked head with a hole for an eye, the glassworker at some stages had the equivalent of a 100-lb. weight at the end of his long metal blowpipe. Le Corbusier's amber Bucrane went through 26 failures, costing about 3,000,000 lire ($5,000) in workers' wages and shattered glass. As for Andre Verdet's Red Character, Costantini spent three years simply studying the project.

Arp, says he, comes easier: "I know him so well I don't need his drawings any more." Switching furnaces to keep other glassmakers from copying his methods, Costantini limits each sculpture to an edition of three--one for the artist (who must approve it), one for himself (to sell when the price is right), one for Collector Peggy Guggenheim, an early benefactress of the project. Then he adds his finishing touches. To give a wizened patina to Picasso's sprightly nymphs and fauns, he dipped the little people in acid baths. Now their skins look aged and lived in.

Pan's Flute. Today Costantini's glassworks number more than 700, many being carefully packed and crated for exhibition later this fall at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. With Arp's curvaceous Forms in lavender and bright blue, Cocteau's red-eyed cyclops, Ernst's Poet as well as his playful, milky-white Pekinese, Klein's nudes splayed against the wall, and Picasso's nymphs, fauns and fish, as protean as underwater creatures in the shifting depths of their blues, it promises to look like a fragile fairyland.

Their creator, meanwhile, is busily laying plans to open his own museum in Venice. Occasionally, he hints of giving up the quest for new artists. "After all," he says, "I don't want people to begin saying, 'Hey, Costantini, you're just doing the same old thing!' " That seems unlikely. As Cocteau put it before his death two years ago: "Costantini blows into the glass of Venice with Pan's flute. If he happens to blow a false note, he's pardoned because it's all to play a lovely, solid melody for the eye."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.