# Coppa Barovier > Venetian manufacture, Murano workshop (traditionally called the Barovier workshop) - c. 1460-1470 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/barovier-workshop-murano/coppa-barovier-museo-del-vetro-murano/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-09-06 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Venetian manufacture, Murano workshop (traditionally called the Barovier workshop) - **Date:** c. 1460-1470 - **Medium:** Free-blown blue glass, painted with polychrome fusible enamels and gold - **Dimensions:** Height 18 cm, maximum diameter 20 cm - **Object type:** Glass - **Period:** Venetian, fifteenth century - **Current location:** Museo del Vetro, Murano (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia) - **Attribution:** disputed ## Summary A small blown-glass standing cup in deep blue glass, painted around its bowl with polychrome enamels and gold: a cavalcade of courtly riders moving toward an octagonal fountain, and, opposite, bathers within that same fountain, framed on either side by two profile portrait medallions of an unnamed man and woman. It is dated on costume evidence to about 1460-1470 and is among the earliest and finest surviving examples of Venetian smalto painting on glass, a technique that made Murano famous at every court in Europe within a generation of this cup being made.It is not, on the museum's own current account, a work by Angelo Barovier. That attribution is a nineteenth-century tradition built on Barovier family fame rather than on any signature, contract or contemporary record, and it survives today mainly in the cup's name. What is documented is narrower and more interesting: a Murano workshop, almost certainly the Barovier fabbrica or one very like it, made a wedding gift for a couple whose identity was never recorded, using a technique whose secrets the Venetian state spent three centuries trying to keep on this one island.The cup has been part of Venice's civic collections since the Correr bequest of about 1830 and is now the single most reproduced and most cited object in the Museo del Vetro's holdings - to the point that its name has been borrowed, since the nineteenth century, for glass it did not make. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **c. 1460-1470** Original commissioning couple (unidentified), via a Murano glassworking workshop traditionally called Barovier `[documented]` (origin) Made as a wedding gift; costume evidence in the painted portrait medallions dates the object to this decade. Neither the maker nor the couple is named in any source consulted. - **-1830** Unknown intervening custody `[unknown]` (gap) No source consulted documents where or with whom the cup was held between its making in the 1460s-1470s and its appearance in the Correr collection by the time of Teodoro Correr's 1830 bequest. - **1830-1932 (or earlier)** Museo Civico Correr, Venice, then Museo del Vetro, Murano `[documented]` (bequest and transfer) Entered Venice's civic collections via Teodoro Correr's bequest of about 1830. The Museo del Vetro itself was founded only in 1861; the documented reorganisation that brought the finest Renaissance glass from the Correr, Cicogna and Molin collections into the Museo del Vetro's display took place in 1932, under Giulio Lorenzetti and Nino Barbantini following the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia's 1923 assumption of the museum. Whether the cup itself was already on display at Murano before 1932 is not established in the sources located. - **1932 (or earlier)-present** Museo del Vetro, Murano (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia) `[documented]` (current holding) Currently displayed in Room 2 of the Museo del Vetro under inventory Classe VI, n. 0001, described by the museum as among its most important works. ## Open questions - Who were the bride and groom depicted in the two portrait medallions? No source consulted, including the Museo del Vetro's own catalogue entry, names them, and no documented Barovier-Contarini marriage claim was found to corroborate the version of the story that circulates in some popular accounts. - Which hand or workshop actually painted the enamel decoration? Neither the traditional attribution to Angelo Barovier nor the alternative scholarly proposal naming Marietta Barovier is, on the standard biographical reference's own account, certainly documented. - Exactly when did the cup pass from the Correr bequest of about 1830 into the Museo del Vetro's own display? The museum's founding (1861) predates the documented 1932 reorganisation that added Correr, Cicogna and Molin glass to the collection, leaving roughly a century of custody unaccounted for in the sources located. - Has the cup undergone any conservation treatment, condition assessment, or scientific/technical imaging campaign, and has it ever left Venice on loan? No published conservation or exhibition-loan record was located for this record. - Is the object's dating better fixed at 1460-1470 (the museum's own current figure) or 1470-1480 (given in some secondary listings)? The two ranges are not reconciled in the sources consulted, and the distinction matters directly to whether any personal-attribution debate involving Angelo Barovier (d. 1461) is even chronologically possible. ## Sources - [1] Museo del Vetro / Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, catalogue entry 'Coppa Barovier' (visitmuve.it), giving inventory number, dimensions, materials, dating, the Chinese-porcelain form source, and the Correr provenance. - [2] Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia (MUVE), gallery entry 'Coppa Barovier'. - [3] Wikipedia, 'Angelo Barovier', for the cristallo development, the 1455 Milan/Filarete episode, and the statement that no work is documented as personally by Barovier's hand. Flagged for replacement with a peer-reviewed monograph on the Barovier family. - [4] Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Treccani), entry 'Barovier', for Angelo's 1461 death, the succession to Marino and Maria (Marietta), the 1496 workshop inventory in the Archivio di Stato di Venezia, and the explicit statement that the attribution of the nuptial cup is not certainly documented. - [5] Web Gallery of Art, 'Marriage Cup' by Barovier, Angelo - for Barovier's dates (c.1400-1460) as given in secondary literature and the c.1470 dating of the cup, illustrating the chronological tension with a personal attribution to Angelo. - [6] Wikipedia, 'Marietta Barovier', for her documented status as one of fourteen named specialist glass decorators active in Venice 1443-1516, and her 1487 kiln privilege. - [7] Wikipedia, 'Murano Glass Museum', for the museum's founding by Vincenzo Zanetti in 1861 and description of the Barovier Cup in its collection. - [8] Victoria and Albert Museum collections online, 'Guggenheim Cup', goblet and cover, Salviati & C. / Giuseppe Barovier, 1875-1910 - the documented nineteenth-century revival piece distinguished in this record from the fifteenth-century original. - [9] Museo del Vetro, 'Lavorazioni e composti del vetro' - the museum's own technical description of the pittura a smalto (fusible enamel painting) process, firing temperature, and the 1317 documentary reference to opus smaldorum. - [10] Wikipedia (Italian), 'Vetro di Murano' - for the guild secrecy laws of 1271 and the 1291 relocation of furnaces to Murano, the death-penalty framing for glassworkers disclosing techniques abroad, and the development of enamel decoration after Angelo Barovier's cristallo. Flagged for replacement with a scholarly history of the Murano guild statutes. - [11] Wikipedia (Italian), 'Museo del vetro' - for the 1932 reorganisation under Giulio Lorenzetti and Nino Barbantini that added Correr, Cicogna and Molin glass to the collection, and the 1923 transfer of administration to the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia. - [12] Wikimedia Commons, image metadata (extmetadata/LicenseShortName) for the eight 'Coppa Barovier' photographs by Sailko used as plates in this record, confirming CC BY 3.0 licensing and the object description. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.