Submerged

Sommerso is Italian for "submerged" and describes exactly that: A colored glass core is dipped into another, usually clear or contrasting, layer of glass before the object takes its final shape. In the finished piece, the layers are visibly stacked, the core seems to float in the mass, and the color effect shifts depending on the incidence of light.

The technique became popular in the 1950s on Murano, primarily through the collaboration of Flavio Poli with Seguso Vetri d'Arte, which was awarded the Compasso d'Oro in 1954. From there it spread further, which is why this selection does not only include Italian pieces: Bohemian glassworks, especially Chřibská under Josef Hospodka, and Swedish companies like Åseda Glasbruk also worked with the same principle and developed their own color palettes from it, often in cranberry, amber, and smoke tones.

Because many of these objects left the factory unmarked, it is often not possible to clearly assign them to a single workshop. The object descriptions state how certain an attribution is and on what it is based.