Ermanno Nason
Ermanno Nason was born in Murano on July 21st, 1928 in one of the islands oldest families of master glassmakers. He made his first acquaintance with his father Italo’s glass furnace at the tender age of ten. “I began working when I was still at elementary school and my passion for glass was so strong that every day, after school, I went to my father’s glass furnace. Notwithstanding the rigour of glass making I always found him satisfied and content with his work”.
After Ermanno left elementary school he divided his time between glass furnaces and the apprentice glassmakers school “Abate Zanetti”, then run by Professor Vittorio Zecchin. In this period he worked and learned his trade in various firms, including Pinzan & Cimarrosti where he was proclaimed master glassmaker at 18.
In his youth, Ermanno also worked at the glass furnace of Mazzega I.V.R. cooperating on Egidio Costantini’s great project that brought together extraordinary artists drawn from the various fine arts – painters, sculptors and master glassmaker – and to which Jacques Cocteau, in 1958, gave the name “Fucina degli Angeli”.
As he himself related during an interview, this experience launched him on his own personal research into glass working and afforded him further possibilities of working alongside world renowned painters and sculptors. And in fact Ermanno was to work with all the great artists of his time from Marc Chagall to Oscar Kokoschka, from Pablo Picasso to Renato Guttuso, from Jacques Cocteau to Braque, from Jan Arp to Max Ernst, from Autun Motika to Alexander Calder and many others…