André Verdet

1974

I met Egidio Costantini at Pablo Picasso’s, in Cannes, in the studios of La Californie, a long time ago. The painter had just entrusted Egidio, the renewer of the art of glass, with making a series of small Greek divinities whose images adorned the pages of a work by Pablo Picasso entitled “Fauns and Nymphs”. I had written the text of that collection, and it was Jean Cocteau who, a few months earlier, had warmly recommended Costantini to Picasso. I was also present when Costantini brought Picasso the first pieces made in Murano.

The patronage of Picasso, of Cocteau and then of Arp brought Costantini luck. Other famous artists, of every tendency, later worked with Egidio Costantini under the banner of the “Fucina degli Angeli”, and entrusted him, after studying together the projects and sketches put forward, with making pieces of sculpture in glass.

Young painters and sculptors, still almost unknown, also came to Venice to work with Egidio Costantini, whose seriousness and punctuality are matched only by his kindness, by his active friendship. So, thanks to the “Fucina degli Angeli”, these young artists, at exhibitions in Italy and abroad, saw their names beside those of their famous elders, and their work begin to win popularity with the wider public.

Costantini’s work is difficult, delicate, full of pitfalls, since it means making in glass the projects and sketches put forward by artists as a drawing, a sculpture, a relief; . . . or else a subjectivised object. His fine craft, his perfect technique often run into hard obstacles. First of all, he must preserve the spirit of the work to be transformed into forms of coloured glass. He must make himself neither overrule nor change that spirit, but adapt himself to it, bend to it, heightening it as far as the means of glass technique allow. He must avoid making the work being carried out a thing specifically his own, a creation too much marked by his own work as an artist. Hence the need for a close collaboration between Egidio Costantini and the artist whose work he interprets.

Of this collaboration, established over the years between Egidio Costantini and me, I have had only reason to rejoice. I have been able to see the great respect he has for the work the artist entrusts to him for transposition into Art Glass; his concern not to distort its deep spirit, its formal and moral substance. This concern is constant; it is always with him while the work is being made in the studios of Murano.

And I can also say that the Master, through his knowledge of the material and his fervour in the making, gives the work put forward by the artist a transparency, a light, an iridescence that will make the artist himself discover new possibilities of creation for his future work.

Catalogue of the Fucina degli Angeli.

1990

Egidio Costantini was the first to ennoble the historic island on the Adriatic with contemporary modernity in the art of crystal. He made the genius of others his own and, adding his own, transcended it.

From the documentary “Il Maestro dei Maestri”.