Collections du musée Ariana à Genève
Texts by Heinz Horat and Stanislas Anthonioz
Echoing the catalogue devoted to Swiss seventeenth–nineteenth-century pottery, this book persents a collection of enamelled glass pieces, so as to bring these fired handicrafts into dialogue.
From donations, bequests and purchases, over two hundred items of enamelled glass produced in Switzerland, between the first quarter of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century display a popular taste fairly common to central Switzerland. The iconography of the enamelled decorations, sometimes accompanied by inscriptions, presents recurrent scenes, and these vessels (bottles, flasks, gourds, goblets etc.) are decorated with plant, animal, symbolic and heraldic motifs as well as characters, illustrating religious, gallant or bacchic subjects.
The book retraces enamelled glass production from the birth of the workshops operating in the centre of Europe (from the northern Alps to southern Germany) from the eighteenth century, including the establishment of the Siegwart brothers—originally from the Black Forest—in the Entlebuch area (canton of Lucerne) in 1723, marking a watershed in the history of Swiss glass as the few of several similar enterprises launched in the region. These pieces are often brought together under the generic label “Flühli glass”, named after a locality in the Lucerne district.
Heinz Horat has a doctorate in art history. Author of the inventory of art monuments in the canton of Lucerne, cantonal curator and head of the Office of Historical and Archaeological Monuments in the canton of Zug, then director of the Lucerne History Museum (2001–2013), he has authored numerous specialist works, including Flühli-Glas, published in 1986.
Stanislas Anthonioz has a doctorate in art history from Geneva University and the EPHE, Paris, and is scientific officer at the Ariana Museum, Geneva, notably acting as exhibition curator in the field of contemporary glass.
