THE ROMANCE OF VENICE

A romantic piece of stained glass artistry, designed on the theme of Venice, Italy. This piece of work had been designed and constructed for my City & Guilds Institue of London, Level 3 in Decorative Stained Glass and Design. The critira was a copper foil panel.

Venice, Italy came up for a theme and project. The idea was to fit as much as I could into the design as we had learnt on the previous course and this one. This ranged from, color, shapes, perspective, dimension, borders symmetrical items, mirror images, curved and straight lines.

So where is Venice? Venice is situated in the north eastern part of Italy and is the opening to the Orient. Venice became an independant Byzantine city in the 10th century. Many centuries later, Venice joined the Kingdom of Italy in 1866. Italy is the heart of of the Mediterranean, being protected from the rest of Europe by the Alps. Italy covers around 166,4000 square miles and has a population of around 58 million.

So what can we see? There are a few main icons that can be seen, however the view is not real, as all the icons cannot be seen together. This was the idea of the design. The icons incorporated into the desig are:

• The Grande Canal, with gondola and gondolier
• The Rialto Bridge, one of Venice's most famous sights and marks the heart of Venice
• The dome of the Baroque Church of Santa Maria della Sulute
• St. Mark's Campanile Tower, it was from this tower that Galileo demonstarted his telescope to Doge Leonardo Dona in 1609

The main view shows a beautiful sunset silhouetted icons and gondola with the sun's reflection glinting of the Grande Canal. The colors of the Italian flag have been worked into the design, red, green and white. The border is made up from the blue and white striped mooring posts at the sides of the Grande Canal.

Each side of the center panel there are identical mirror images of Venetian masks. These masks have been adorned with 24ct gold leaf. The whole panel has been framed in a hard wood ornate frame, and made into a light box with the bulb behind the sun. A brass plaque has been added to the front of the frame engraved with the title of this beautiful stained glass project. Grazie.

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