Toso is best known for creating highly detailed tableaus that depict scenes from everyday Jewish life: a chassan and kallah standing under the chuppah; Jews of every stripe holding the arba minim in a joyous Hoshanos procession; a multigenerational family sitting down for a lavish Pesach Seder with Kri’as Yam Suf in the background.

Toso’s a perfectionist. Pointing to shelves on the wall that bear a huge assortment of blown glass figures, Gianni explains that these are his “mistakes.” Rather than discard them, he considers the prototypes part of his learning curve.

“When a collector purchases a piece, he does not realize that what he has in his hands represents only about 70 percent of the process of creation,” explains Gianni. “I select only the best pieces to be a part of the finished work. What you see are the 30 percent of the pieces I rejected.”

Picking up a Kiddush cup tray with a recessed lip that he created to prevent spillage, he remarks, “Everything you put in the glass is a part of your brain. Nothing is an accident. Everything is calculated.”

Master of His Art

The color, glow, and fluidity of hot glass have fascinated Gianni since he was a child. He grew up in Murano, Italy, a small island in the Adriatic Sea near Venice that has been famous since the Middle Ages for its glass art.

Unfulfilled by his school studies and driven by his fascination with fire, one day the young Gianni entered the open doors of a glass factory. Mesmerized by the glowing furnaces and the glassblowers with their blowpipes moving like dancers in a ballet, Gianni begged the factory owner for a job. That’s how, at the age of 10 and unbeknownst to his parents, he embarked on what would become his destiny.

By the age of 12, Gianni was working 12-hour days for $1 a week, feeding wood into the huge furnaces six feet below the ground. Once his parents found out what he was doing, and sensing his passion, they allowed him to continue, only stipulating that he must attend school at night.

At 14, Gianni was accepted into the Abate Vincenzo Zanetti, a fine arts academy for master glassblowers. For seven years, he learned geometric design, art history, and painting, the academy’s prerequisites for training the next generation of glassblowers. By day, he worked in a succession of factories, producing everything from ashtrays to chandeliers. Eventually, he became the youngest apprentice to ever earn the title of “maestro” (master glassblower).

Disillusioned by the cutthroat competition he encountered in the factories, however, he decided to strike out on his own. That’s when lampworking caught his fancy.

Unlike the process of blowing glass, which requires equipment and a team of artisans, lampworking allows artists to work on their own with a torch. At the age of 24, Gianni moved to Venice and opened his own tiny studio selling small lampworked animals to tourists.

Across the Lagoon

The year was 1967 and Gianni had become the first person in the Toso family to leave the island of Murano in centuries. The move was fortuitous.

One day a Lebanese student came into his workshop — and somehow the conversation turned to Israel and the Six Day War. Gianni vehemently defended Israel and the Jewish People, almost coming to blows with the young Arab.

After the student left, an older man said to Gianni, “I didn’t realize that you were Jewish.”

When Gianni replied that he was not, the man could not understand why Gianni would fight so passionately on Israel’s behalf. “Because I care about justice, and about G-d.”

To which the man replied, “Come with me,” and led Gianni to an empty shop in the Jewish Ghetto, which became Gianni’s spiritual home for the next 20 years.

In Venice, the world of art opened up for him, influencing his artistic direction. Tourists and collectors from all over the world passed through his doors, and he mingled with celebrities while creating commissions for contessas and Mafia bosses alike.

In 1969, he made what would become his signature piece, a whimsical chess set depicting 15 rabbis and the Shabbos Queen facing off against 15 Catholic priests and a nun. (In 1981, the set was purchased for permanent display by the Corning Museum of Glass.)

A few years later, in 1976, a man walked through Gianni’s door who would change his life. Rabbi Yosef Sebag shlita was a shaliach of the Jewish Agency in Eretz Yisrael. One Shabbos on his way to shul, Rabbi Sebag saw Gianni working in his shop. He asked him what he was doing.

“Don’t worry,” Gianni remembers telling Rabbi Sebag, “I’m not really working. On the Sabbath, I don’t make work to sell. On the Sabbath, I create my most beautiful work as a gift for G-d.”

The rabbi, mistakenly believing that Gianni was Jewish, began yelling at him. “He told me that using fire is one of the 39 melachos! I turned off the flame and said, ‘Rabbi, please stop shouting and teach me instead.’ ”

Gianni explains: “Because I was working in the Jewish Ghetto, and because I had developed a close relationship with the former chief rabbi of Venice, Rav Alberto Piatelli, Rabbi Sebag mistook me for a Jew. When I told him that I was not born Jewish, he responded, ‘I know your neshamah, Gianni.’ He did. He taught me about Shabbos and other mitzvos, and in 1978, I decided to become a part of Klal Yisrael.”

In 1982, Karyn Cohen, an American tourist on her way back home from Eretz Yisrael, stopped in Gianni’s studio looking for the ghetto’s kosher restaurant. “It was already late in the day, and the old age home, the only place that served kosher food, was only open for lunch. I told her that if she wanted to eat kosher, she could have dinner with me. The rest is history.”

After their marriage, Gianni and Karyn divided their time between America and Venice, where for six months of the year they and the rabbi were the only observant Jews. Since kosher food was not readily available in Italy at that time, Karyn would pack suitcases full of powdered hummus and, in a classic example of coals to Newcastle, dozens of packages of kosher Parmesan cheese.

When their children were old enough to attend school, they eventually sold their apartment and studio (now the Chabad house and yeshivah) and moved to New Jersey, where Karyn’s parents lived. The Tosos later moved to Baltimore, where they have happily resided for the past 23 years.

“In America, I saw the future and continuity of my family’s tradition, and the future of the Glass Studio Movement,” shares Gianni. With remorse, he notes that none of his children have decided to carry on the generations-long family tradition.

Power of the Flame

Back in the studio, Gianni dons a special pair of didymium glasses to protect his eyes from the intensity of the flame. Before swirling a thin, bright-yellow glass rod, or cane, through the super-hot flame of his torch — in this case to demonstrate how he makes a hand for a figurine — he daringly waves his own hand through it, a few times.

“If you know glass, you know how to burn yourself,” notes Gianni, in response to my look of shock. “Now it’s a danger. Now it’s 2,000 degrees. Before I opened the oxygen valve, it was only 600 degrees.”

Although the torch resembles a Bunsen burner used in chemistry class, it reaches a higher temperature by mixing oxygen into the fuel. Gianni controls the amount of gas and oxygen delivered to the torch via hoses, which he adjusts with knobs on top of the torches as he works. This is how he varies the size and temperature of the flame to melt and shape the colored canes. Using this method, he can make anything from small beads to elaborate glass sculptures.

As Gianni works, I pull my eyes from the glowing glass rods and look around the workshop, taking note of the colors on his delicate figurines. They look as if they are painted, but I know they are made from colored glass that Gianni created by fusing clear glass with a variety of minerals.

“Blue comes from cobalt, yellow from cadmium, white from lead, and pink is a combination of lead and 24k gold,” Gianni notes, as he adds a thin red rod to the yellow one to fuse the color in the flame. “These minerals are ground into powder, which is then fused with clear glass in the furnace.”

Gianni snaps me out of my reverie and tells me to watch him as he uses his small blowtorch to melt, fuse, and then shape colored glass rods into a delicate, intricate hand. With the help of dental picks, steel clamps, butter knives, and other tools that he designed and fashioned himself, he intends to use the hand as part of a chassidic figurine. (Though exquisitely detailed in every way, there are no ears behind the figurine’s peyos, so as not to transgress the prohibition of making a human figure.)

Gianni shapes the hand by melting the flesh-colored rod into a molten, glowing globe. Turning the rod continuously to keep it from drooping, he quickly makes indentations in the tiny form with a small pair of scissors, then uses tweezers to delicately pull and shape the fingers.

After several minutes of perfecting this hand — which looks incredibly expressive — Gianni places it into a “garage,” a small oven atop his workbench, which will keep it at the proper temperature while he works on the next section of the figurine’s body.

After our tour of the studio, Gianni graciously leads us to his home, a short walk across the property, to view some of the magnificent creations housed in a gallery he created in a screened porch. We soon discover that the entire home is a gallery, a reflection of Gianni’s all-encompassing creativity.

As Karyn notes, Gianni’s artistry extends into everything he touches, including his marinated eggplant. “He’ll slice it really fine and sit in front of the oven for hours, turning each slice until it’s a perfect golden-brown; then he slices garlic paper-thin and lays it on top of the eggplant. Another layer of eggplant, another layer of garlic, all the time drizzling the exact amount of olive oil… It’s a work of art. He truly has golden hands.”

On a wall leading up to the second story hangs the Tosos’ kesubah, which Gianni painted with brightly colored tempera paint. He made his own paint from egg yolk using an old Renaissance recipe and covered the parchment with 24k gold leaf. The design is an arch depicting Venice on one side, New York on the other, and Yerushalayim on the top. His family crest appears on the bottom, along with the traditional crest depicting the hands of the Kohein in the position of Bircas Kohanim; Karyn is a bas Kohein.

He even made their dining room chandelier, a magnificent fixture that he fashioned in Italy with the assistance of a glass factory team. Colorful glass bowls and goblets grace the breakfront, and glass mezuzahs adorn every doorpost. A designated Pesach cabinet brims with a separate collection of particularly elaborate pitchers, bowls, and goblets.

After spending time with Toso, it’s obvious that he has a view into the spiritual underpinnings of the material world that most people lack. Like Betzalel, who created the keilim and Mishkan, Toso believes that his avodah as an artist is to channel that spirituality into his work and make it accessible for everyone. Judging by the enduring popularity of his art, he’s clearly succeeded.

Making Glass

Glass is made up of silica — a high-quality type of sand — to which metals and metal oxides, in addition to sodium dioxide and calcium oxide, are added to lower the melting point of the mixture. Glassblowers fuse these ingredients in a crucible, initially at over 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit to make “batch,” which they then melt in their workshop furnace.

The glassblower gathers the molten glass on one end of a stainless steel pipe, then creates a bubble in the molten glass by blowing into the other end of the pipe. Various tools are used to help shape the glass into the final product. Unlike almost any other art form, in glassblowing timing is crucial: if the glass cools down too much, it becomes rigid and must be put back into the fire to regain its elasticity for further shaping. Once finished, the piece must be slowly cooled in a kiln or annealer; rapid cooling can shatter glass.

For hundreds of years, the Venetian Republic’s glass was considered rare and precious. It graced the tables and palaces of royalty, and glassblowers were accorded the status of aristocracy. A decree enacted in 1295 forbade glassblowers from leaving the island of Murano on pain of death. Some historians believe that the government enacted the stricture to safeguard trade secrets and encourage glassblowers’ offspring to carry on the trade.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 655)