The master of masters
The consecration
The 1990s mark the final consecration of Egidio as “Master of Masters”1: the maker of the revolution that raised the Art of Glass to the level of the other visual arts.
The artistic community now recognises that Egidio has been able to teach other artists how to turn drawings, canvases, colours and wooden figures into sculptures of glass. A series of tributes follows: first Belgium, which in 1990 devotes an exhibition in Brussels to the works of the Fucina, with international resonance and great crowds.
In 1992 it is Venice that pays him homage: the works of Egidio and of the artists of the Fucina are shown again at Ca’ Pesaro, and win over critics and public. Then come, in 1996, the exhibition in Piacenza and, in 1997, the exhibition in Tel Aviv, held at the wish of the widow of the Israeli prime minister Rabin2 and extended for its success.
Egidio’s works
In those years the activity of the Fucina is not limited to exhibitions: Egidio creates works born, this time, of the reflections of the man and the artist alone, able to grasp the “beauty” there is in the world. So come Scotland, a homage to the nature and landscape of the Highlands, and Mexico I (1994) and Mexico II (1995), inspired by Olmec3 culture: two compositions of anthropomorphic figures, thirteen in the first and twelve in the second.
The family
There also take shape the collaborations with his granddaughter Emi and her husband, Wright, and with his daughter Egidia. With the first two he makes Venice (1990), a composition formed of a tower, the tip of a bell tower and a canal; from a drawing by his daughter comes Spring (1997), a flowering meadow.
In 1996, from an idea of Egidio’s and to a technical design by his son-in-law Mikuni Omura, a tower fifteen metres high and a fountain, both in steel and glass, rise in Irving, Texas.
The last years
2000 opens with an exhibition in Tolmezzo, followed three years later by one in Innsbruck; from 2002 some works of the Fucina are on show in the Kunstmuseum Walter in Augsburg4.
The last years mark Egidio’s gradual withdrawal from public life and from work. His mind never stops thinking of glass and of new projects, but his strength no longer allows him to return to the furnace.
Egidio Costantini dies in his home in Venice on 7 October 2007, aged 95.
- It is the title of two catalogues of his exhibitions: the first, of 1990, and the second, of 2000. ↩︎
- Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated in 1995. His widow is Leah Rabin. ↩︎
- The oldest civilisation of Mexico, which flourished on the Gulf coast between the second and the first millennium BC. ↩︎
- Augusta in Italian, in Bavaria. ↩︎