Before describing the object under examination, we must make an important clarification; the artefact, one of many that we will publish over time, is part of the museum collection of a historic Florentine mill that unfortunately closed recently. It is the Marcello Galgani & Son company, whose completely manual and artisanal work has not withstood the disproportionate advance of mass mechanical processes! Marcello Galgani started his business as a grinder and restorer in 1960. Over the years, Marcello mastered and became familiar with special techniques and shapes, creating objects that manage to retain the freshness of grinding and engraving, the warmth and softness of light and the inimitable flavour of unique artefacts. After several years, their son Lorenzo, who grew up among crystals, also joined the business and immediately became passionate about this ancient craft with skill and ability. Stimulated by the aesthetic sense of the past, father and son set up a workshop where the shapes they themselves researched and created are mouth-blown by traditional Tuscan glassmakers in Empoli, then ground and engraved according to ancient 16th-century techniques, with motifs born from the Galgani family's inexhaustible imagination or culturally inspired by the am designs of objects seen and studied in Florentine museums (Up&Up, Galleria Palatina, Museo degli Argenti, etc.). Marcello and Lorenzo Galgani were also masters in the difficult art of restoration, bringing rare and precious objects back to life. As mentioned, the company recently closed and disposed of all its last production; only Marcello's old private museum collection remained, comprising unique and special objects created over time, a collection that the craftsman made available to us for a planned sale. All the objects were made entirely by hand with old grinding wheels, but there were mainly two tools that enabled the creation of masterpieces: the right hand and the left hand of the master craftsman. For all ground and engraved products, ancient glassmaking techniques were used: first the object was ground with an emery wheel continuously fed by a jet of abrasive sand and water, then re-polished with a very fine-grained sandstone wheel also fed with water. The engravings were done freehand using as many as 10-15 small stone wheels for each design (flowers, branches, animals, etc.); then the object was polished; at this point we must make an important clarification on these last two operations: towards the end of the 1960s acid crystal polishing was devised, the object was immersed in a crystal vat and then polished. The object was polished and polished; we must make, at this point, an important clarification on these last two operations: towards the end of the 1960s acid crystal polishing was devised, the object was immersed and rotated in a solution of sulphuric acid, fluoridic acid and water and in a short time all the defects left by the previous processes were eliminated; it was a fast and industrial operation that allowed costs to be considerably lowered, with discreet but not excellent results. But for Galgani's products, polishing is done with a cork bark wheel wet with water and pumice to make the surfaces more transparent. Finally, polishing is done with a felt wheel wet with a paste of water, iron oxide and cerium oxide. This series of processes takes an average of two days of work (sometimes much longer) for each object; each engraving or grinding is the result of the creative inventiveness of the two craftsmen, an inventiveness that transforms crystal into a material reality of the highest aesthetic value and inestimable worth. All the objects in the entire collection have never been used; they were part of the exhibition. Large oval crystal vase with base; the decorations, depicting graceful and delicate festoons, are in the Neoclassical style; the Maestro signed the vase, it was created in Marcello Galgani's workshop in 1983 and made using the techniques (grinding, engraving and polishing) explained in the description; for the shape the Maestro was inspired by a vase found in a painting, preserved in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, by the 16th-century painter Jacopo Ligozzi, the Medici's favourite artist. The vase is in excellent condition. Two examples of this piece exist. Measures diameter 17 cm, height 28 cm. For all our shipments we use special packaging materials (wooden crates, polystyrene, etc.) to ensure maximum protection and safety of the objects.
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SILVER Seller in Prato, Italy
