Seguso Vetri d’Arte - a glassmaking family since 1397
Updated: 9 hours ago
Murano · 1933–1973
What is Seguso glass? Often the first answer is a vase in two colours, one held inside the other under a thick layer of clear glass. The technique is called sommerso, submerged. The Museo del Vetro on Murano names it as the glass Flavio Poli created for Seguso Vetri d’Arte: a glassworks founded on the island in 1933, and the subject of these notes. The firm lasted forty years. The family that gave it its name is far older: the museum calls the Seguso a glassworking “dynasty”, already named in a document of 1397.
Five partners and a furnace
At the start of the 1930s the Vetreria Artistica Barovier & C. was running down, and its master glassblowers worked at other furnaces. In 1932 five glassmakers began working together in a furnace on Via Beroviero, Murano: Antonio Seguso with his sons Archimede and Ernesto, Napoleone Barovier and Luigi Ferro. In 1933 they made it official, as Barovier Seguso & Ferro.
In 1934 Flavio Poli joined them, and the firm moved to Ponte Vivarini 138. In 1937 Ferro withdrew, Poli took his place as a partner, and the firm became Seguso Vetri d’Arte. The family itself is far older than the firm: the Museo del Vetro calls the Seguso a glassworking “dynasty”, already named in a document of 1397.
The master and the designer
Archimede Seguso was the master at the furnace who turned the designs into glass. Flavio Poli, born in Chioggia in 1900, had designed figures in solid glass for another Murano firm before he came. He stayed as artistic director until 1963.
An Italian art magazine, writing on the firm’s archive, describes the two roles: Archimede was the inventor, with new techniques and experiments, and Poli led the firm to “an extreme simplification of forms and new colour pairings”. Poli was nicknamed “the most Nordic of Murano designers”.
Archimede left during the war - in 1942 by one account; in 1944 he sold his whole share to his brother Ernesto, and in 1946 he founded his own furnace. His story has its own page: Archimede Seguso.
Bubbles, gold and acid: the 1930s
The glass of the 1930s was thick, and much happened inside it. Pulegoso: glass full of irregular air bubbles. Bullicante: bubbles set in a regular pattern. Gold leaf caught between layers. In 1936 the firm’s Laguna oro, Grigio oro, Pesco oro and Autunno oro won a diploma of honour at the Milan Triennale; at the Paris World Fair of 1937 its glass a bollicine metalliche, with metallic bubbles, won the Grand Prix. By 1942 Poli was also etching the surface with acid: corroso.
The firm also made lighting. Its chandeliers went into the Grand Hotel Savoy at Cortina d’Ampezzo and into cinemas in Milan and Venice.
Sommerso
In sommerso the colour is not painted or laid on. One colour is cased in another while the glass is hot, and the whole is cased again in clear glass, so the colours seem to hang inside it. The firm’s own catalogue describes overlapping layers of colour, with a thickness of glass between them.
In the 1950s Poli made sommerso the firm’s signature. The colours came in named pairs - verde giallo, green and yellow; blu rubino, blue and ruby; grigio violetto; fumè rubino - and every form had its model number. Beside them, in the early 1950s, came the Siderale vases, with large murrine or rings of colour in the glass, and the Valva, shaped like a shell.
The Compasso d’Oro, 1954
In 1954 the Milan department store La Rinascente founded a design prize, the Compasso d’Oro. In its first year one of the winners was a large vase by Poli for Seguso, model 9822, in blue and ruby. The jury praised its “colour, clarity and thickness”, and in the firm, “the honesty and mastery of a furnace”.
Museums were buying: the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 1952 and 1955, the Neue Sammlung in Munich in 1955, the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1958.
After Poli
Poli left in 1963. Mario Pinzoni, in the firm since 1953, took over the design; in 1971 Vittorio Rigattieri replaced him. In 1973 part of the company was taken over by Maurizio Albarelli, and the Seguso Vetri d’Arte partnership was wound up.
Its records survived. The archive of 1933–1973 - 13,311 period photographs and 22,479 drawings - is at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, and has been searchable online since 2023.
The name after 1973
The name lived on, but not in one line. It went through other hands - in 1992, by one account, to the Murano firm Cenedese. Later Archimede’s grandsons, the sons of Giampaolo Seguso, sold glass under it again, until their company went bankrupt in 2022. In 2023 the trademarks were sold at a court sale. Who has held the name since is not clear from the sources read.
For a collector this matters. A piece of the 1930s to the 1960s, a later execution of an old model and new glass can carry the same name.
How to recognise Seguso Vetri d’Arte
Model numbers. The firm numbered its models, and old paper labels often carry the number: “Seguso Murano 9830”, “Seguso Murano 12563”. Marc Heiremans’ monograph of 2014, Seguso Vetri d’Arte: Glass Objects from Murano (1932–1973), lists the models, and auction houses cite it for their attributions.
Labels. The labels changed with the firm: Barovier Seguso & Ferro in the 1930s, Seguso Vetri d’Arte in the late 1940s, red and silver foil “Seguso Murano Made in Italy” in the 1950s, a shield-shaped label in the 1960s, clear plastic from the 1980s - by a dealer’s list based on Heiremans.
Marks in the glass. In the 1930s, an acid stamp “Made in Italy”; on glass for Veronese, the firm’s partner in Paris, “Veronese” etched or engraved; later an engraved “Seguso Murano”. Many pieces carry only an old label, or nothing.
Look-alikes. Sommerso was made across Murano - by Cenedese, by Archimede Seguso’s own furnace and others - and sale catalogues sometimes mix them. The form, the colour pair and a model number, checked against the monograph, tell them apart.
What the price follows
Plain two-colour sommerso vases mostly sell for a few hundred euros or dollars. Named colour pairs and models made for exhibitions fetched from about €400 to €3,400 at a Munich sale in 2025. The pulegoso and gold glass of the late 1930s runs from several thousand to tens of thousands. The Siderale and Valva vases of the early 1950s stand at the top: a Valva Siderale vase sold at Christie’s in New York in 2015 for $75,000.
Two firms, one family
Seguso Vetri d’Arte and the Vetreria Archimede Seguso share a name, a family and a technique, and they are not the same firm. Seguso at MYT’ begins with a blue and green sommerso decanter, signed by Archimede Seguso’s own furnace; the notes on him tell its story.
A vase in two colours under clear glass looks simple. Behind it stand a model number, two names - Seguso and Poli - and forty years of a furnace on Murano.
Sources: Museo del Vetro, Murano, “Seguso: Art Glass 1932/1973” (2013) and “Glass of the 20th century”; ADI Design Museum, Compasso d’Oro 1954; Finestre sull’Arte (2023); Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Centro Studi del Vetro; Marc Heiremans, Seguso Vetri d’Arte (Arnoldsche, 2014), via auction catalogues; Carl I. Gable, Murano Magic; Il Gazzettino (2022); Il Sole 24 Ore, Astetribunali24 (2022); Seguso Collection catalogue; Pandolfini, biography of Archimede Seguso; Wikipedia, Flavio Poli; auction records of Christie’s, Wright, Quittenbaum, Cambi and others; 20th Century Glass, label guide.
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