Abstract

"In Search of Lost Craft: Artisanal Skills in the Ceramic District of Nove and Bassano Between Art and Industry, 1600-2000"

Giovanni Favero, Venice School of Management, Ca' Foscari University of Venice (gfavero@unive.it)

Present-day interest in craft practices is often described as a resurgence or revival of craft. Throughout history, craft-like elements recovered from the past have been used for both process and product innovation and marketing. The evolution of manufacturing practices and skills over time reveals multiple ways in which craft has been lost, recovered, and reinterpreted.

This paper examines the transformation of craft skills in the Venetian ceramic industry over the last four centuries, focusing on the manufactories and factories of the Nove and Bassano district. The early shift from guild control to privileged manufacturers in the late 1600s led to a loss of skills and a consequent need to attract artisans from abroad. During the technological turbulence of the 1700s, manufacturers sought to retain skilled workers and protect their know-how. After the fall of the Venetian Republic, production turned to cheaper, semi-serial products with faster handmade decoration. In the late 1800s, a renewal of production centered on an eclectic recovery of local rococo models, which gained recognition at international expositions during the belle époque.

By the late 1900s, the district’s growth brought mechanization of modeling and confined labor-intensive craft to luxury production or the domestic system, until the formal recognition of ceramic workers’ rights in the early 1970s. Around the same period, contemporary artistic ceramic production emerged, coupling traditional craft with industrial techniques. This artistic revival paralleled the decline of industrial ceramic production in the following decades.

The rhetoric of trade associations, often focused on “preserving tradition,” tends to conflate the structural crisis of mass production with the innovative resilience of artistic craft initiatives, obscuring the complex interplay between decline and creative renewal within the district.