Table-architecture

In Murano's Museo del Vetro (Glass museum) you can find a surprising example of what one might call "table-architecture": as you can read from the caption this enormous glass piece is a "table-triumph, or deser, in shape of an Italian garden with fountains, arches, flower-vases, flowerbeds. XVIII Century".

As Rebecca Solnit puts out in her Wanderlust: A History of Walking, the garden, also in its prototypical form of labyrinth or cloister has been used by noblemen to find in a secured place an occasion to wander. And the "tighter" the garden became as socioeconomic changes marked the decline of aristocracy and its own world, the more it was filled with statues, fountains, to enrich it and create a narrative of space without leaving it for the real world. But from the XVIII Century wandering in the outside landscape was considered a much better experience. The same destiny happened to the typology of the gallery, at the beginning an opportunity to take an easy walk inside a palace, it turned out as another spacial narrative when paintings and their exhibition replaced totally the original purpose. Murano's glass-triumph reverses the process, bringing the outside garden to the inside, a journey of the mind at table.