TECHNIQUES
Glass
We carefully choose our glass among the products of the best glass factories in Europe.
Each small piece - be it smooth or rough, opaque or transparent, uniform or shaded, intense or soft coloured - is selected with precision for the role it is going to have in the whole.
Painting a gran fuoco
Different oxides, called grisailles, can be added to a glass, to change its chromatic qualities and its transparency. At a temperature between 600 and 700 degrees, grisailles melt, perfectly adhering to the surface and penetrating the glass.
We can thus obtain particular effects and represent images. This is the ancient technique of painting a gran fuoco, that assures an almost unlimited duration of colours and painting.
Lead
The single pieces of glass are kept together, according to the ancient lead sealing tradition, by H-beams which, in addition to form the bearing structure, are part of the composition, as they highlight some lines of the composition.
Glass fusion
In our workshop the glass, carefully chosen, is enriched with cobalt, copper, manganese and iron oxides and then cut, chipped, crushed to be put into fusion ovens and become a fluid that, slowly cooled down, transforms itself into sheets in relief or in all-round objects. Elements from this kind of sheets can find a location in a stained glass, enriching it with striking sculptural effects.
Tarsie
The Sicilian tradition of marmi mischi e frammischi and the charm of the trencadístechnique, used by Antoni Gaudì, have suggested the original and new glass intarsia technique: multi-coloured fragments of opalescent glass can be assembled with pieces of glass painted a gran fuoco, with figurative or decorative motifs. Intarsia can also be directly applied on walls or on stone sheets.
Dalles
Dalle de verre is a type of glass 2-3 cm thick, that we buy or realize by melting sheets and fragments differently coloured. It is cut, broken with anvils and hammers and then alloyed with cements or resins to form some panels that are kept together by a metallic trestle or directly inserted inside the structure, this forming bright walls.
Frameworks
Stained glasses can be directly set on the wall, in dedicated offsets, and blocked with a scaffold made of iron bars. This is an ancient technique that we have observed during more than one restoration work.
Nowadays, the common technique is to allocate glasses into wooden or iron frameworks, whose shape is designed within the initial project.