A Labor of Perfection

The Glassmaster
Emily Masters ~ Short Story

The three apprentices of Giuliada Tomasia Bastani knew how fortunate they were to study under an artisan of such renown.

Giuliada was an undisputed master of glass, and her three apprentices had been hand-selected from among thousands of eager would-be artisans. People spoke of her obsession with glass, but her apprentices knew that she was a true artisan. Like a true artisan, she knew no standards higher than her own. 

The first of Giuliada’s apprentices, Vittori, was a sharp-faced man with a face lined prematurely by concentration and fine detail work. He could work for hours in the sweltering cacophony of the glasshouse like it was the silence of a cathedral. His fifteen years serving as Giuliada’s apprentice had taught him more about the craft than most established glassmiths, and still he knew only a fraction of the secrets contained within molten glass that reflected in Giuliada’s narrowed eyes.  

Karletta was second in seniority. If Vittori had been chosen for steady hands and fine detail, Karletta was selected for the critical, finely-honed keenness of her gleaming beetle-eyes. Her sense for form and color made her an authority in Giuliada’s frequent absence, and her haughtily-angled chin made her an enemy of the other apprentices.  

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The final apprentice, Lorenz, was new, and Karletta and Vittori privately agreed that he would not last. Eagerness was no substitute for talent. Though Lorenz had both, the proportions skewed heavily toward the former. It was on account of his youth that they thought him flighty, unlikely to be willing to consign the rest of his life to the painstaking and dangerous detail-work on which they made their fortunes and their art.  

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The glassmaster was already deep into her craft when the apprentices arrived at the glasshouse each morning, and she showed no sign of ceasing when the workday came to a close. Delicate tools pulled at molten glass, spun symmetry out of glowing-hot materials, and shattered any piece that did not fit her standards of perfection. Increasingly, the sounds of breaking glass could be heard from her workroom.  

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All three apprentices, even Lorenz, understood the reason for Giuliada’s growing obsession. Giuliada Tomasia Bastani was going to die, and anyone could see that it would not be long.  

Vittori regretted this, to be sure, but he did not mourn the inevitable loss. Everyone died eventually, and few were lucky to have created so much beauty in the limited time granted to them. Few could boast such a legacy.  

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Few except Giuliada Bastani would covet more.  

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“One final piece. One great creation. One last triumph,” Giuliada said. She allowed the apprentices only the briefest glimpse of her sketched plans, but even that was enough to see that the line between genius and madness was where their master had built her glasshouse.   

None except Giuliada Bastani would covet this.  

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“A statue,” she said.  

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Karletta’s head tipped toward Vittori’s work table. An army of crafted glass chess pieces congregated around a forest of delicate glass flowers and a stampede of frozen-in-time stallions and finely-shaped mares.  

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“No,” Giuliada said. “A statue like they make from marble. Lifelike. Larger than life.”

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“A statue of what, Signorina Bastani?” asked Lorenz.  

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Giuliada closed her eyes, and the temperature in the glasshouse ticked up like hands on a clock moving inexorably toward noon. Time stopped for no one. It was like Giuliada Bastani in that way.  

The older apprentices did not look at Lorenz, as though his foolishness was not worthy of even the barest acknowledgement. It was understood that Giuliada would not share anything until she chose. And she never chose to share her inspiration until a piece had been completed.  

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“What materials do you require, Signorina?” asked Lorenz. The boy shifted forward, spoke quickly, all too eager to correct his slip.  

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Again, Giuliada considered. Again, the glasshouse grew warmer when not chilled by her attention.

“Red glass,” said Giuliada. “I wish to make my creation out of red glass.”  

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Her face did not change. The same deep lines, the same sharp-edged haggardness that put a brittle ache in Lorenz’s own chest each time Giuliada coughed. But as she said it, as she proclaimed that she would make something of red glass, the fragileness left her.  

It was Vittori who said what all of them were thinking.  

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“Red glass? I thought such a thing was not possible.” 

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That knowledge was hard-won.  

Karletta’s thin eyes surveyed the glasshouse. Poison-green carafes and small, delicate-legged deer the color of frozen honey. Chalices with pale-pink roses around the rims. Deep violet plates with wavering edges, placed between slender goblets of clear, icy blue.  

Nothing red. Not even Giuliada or her apprentices had been able to unlock the secret of what temperatures, what chemicals, what additives would create the purest of shades.  

Giuliada said nothing. She merely watched them with the same disapproval from their earliest days as her apprentices, the look that meant disappointment, failure. She returned to her workroom and gave them no further instruction for the remainder of the week.  

The apprentices understood, then. Their mistake had been thinking Giuliada would allow the secrets of red glass to elude her.  

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Clarity and transparency of glass was prized by most craftsmen. Not so in Giuliada’s workshop. She craved color, craved it in her lungs like most people craved air. It had begun with enamels, though only Vittori was old enough to remember Giuliada’s early days of spinning out a clear-glass goblet and pigmenting it with vivid enamel across the still-molten surface.  

The days of enamel were long past. Metal had changed everything. Nearly a decade ago, Giuliada was visited by an alchemist of renown, a bent-backed old man with wise, watery eyes behind thick glass spectacles. They spent eleven hours in Giuliada’s workroom, and when the craftsman left, Giuliada placed the first order for silver sulfide.  

Only Vittori had been here long enough to remember the first piece Giuliada made with the silver and the chemicals. It was a pitcher, sculpted like the petals of a rose and enhanced with a layer of metallic dust that drew the vitality of the glass to the surface. The rose pitcher was the brightest yellow ever worked into glass, and that day was the first that Vittori saw the revered artisan Giuliada Bastani weep.  

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From that day, there was a shift. Karletta accepted her apprenticeship to a glasshouse teeming with color that carried its own breath. Giuliada was not satisfied with that either, and her experimentation continued. The results were otherworldly in their vividness, taking the silent war of glass craftsmanship to a battlefield no other artisan could begin to contend with.  

What most would consider masterworks, Giuliada left to her apprentices. Glassmiths throughout Italia whispered behind covered mouths that the Bastani woman must have struck some manner of otherworldly bargain. Her soul traded in exchange for talent, for craft, for limitless energy and limitless inspiration.  

Vittori knew she had not traded her soul, for her soul bled from every piece produced in the walled-off back corner of the glasshouse.  

Now, once a work of glass was completed, Giuliada and her impossibly steady hands brushed it with the metallic compound. Lorenz clearly did not understand it, and though he would never admit it, neither did Vittori. What they did know was that it worked. Colors impossibly bright, shades mixing in ways impossible to imagine. Brilliance was the hallmark of Giuliada Bastani and her glasshouse, and the world would know it.  

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The change started when Giuliada’s health began to fail.  

The furnace in the center of the workshop was perpetually stoked to a temperature that could melt glass. At all hours, the furnace’s roar was a heartbeat beneath the arguing apprentices, a music accompanied by the fine scratching of delicate tools etching delicate patterns.  

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It had once been allowed to go dormant overnight, but no longer. For nearly a year, ever since Giuliada’s coughing fits began, she would not abide the idea of the furnace going out. It ran day and night, heat that simmered off the baked-clay tiles of the glasshouse floor. It pressed into the lungs of anyone nearby, and it dragged an immediate flush to the face of the apprentices the moment they arrived each morning. If not for the large, open windows and the breeze of Venice’s canals, the workshop would have been unbearable.  

Only Lorenz was unaffected by the heat, one of the many ways he made himself obnoxious with his tirelessness. No one but Giuliada could surpass his energy, and as Giuliada’s coughs increasingly spattered crimson across discarded handkerchiefs, it seemed certain that he would surpass her one day as well. The glassmaster, though, did not allow her declining health to impact her tireless work. She had decreed that she would create red glass, and Giuliada Bastani did not suffer failure.  

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The next few months were… severe.  

Piles of broken glass on the glasshouse floor were nothing new. Giuliada prized perfection and raged against flaws, flinging away pieces that failed to meet her exacting standards with reckless passion that bordered on hatred. Lorenz, Vittori, and Karletta were accustomed to being greeted each morning by the shattered remnants of Giuliada’s work the previous night.  

The difference was the color of the shards. They began a vibrant pink, bright enough to spear into the eyes like a physical ache. They did not remain so. Each successive morning, the shards were redder.  

But never red enough, for as Giuliada grew weaker, she demanded more of herself and of her apprentices.  

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Vittori stayed late, stoking the forge with all his might as sweat stung his eyes and salted his beard.  

Karletta was called into Giuliada’s workroom daily and reported being asked to pour over sketches and examine chemical formulas until her eyes ached from reading parchment under candlelight.  

With the great masterwork consuming the other apprentices’ time as well as Giuliada’s, Lorenz found himself left to oversee the majority of the glasshouse’s commissions from their patrons and benefactors. As the older, more seasoned apprentices were increasingly called away to assist with the mysterious masterwork in the back room, Lorenz completed goblets of luscious amber, iridescent decanters with handles like twining serpents, and thin, flat goblets greener than the sea that he brushed with a feathery texture. They were among his finest works, and praise from patrons echoed off the empty front room of the glasshouse while Giuliada toiled for perfection behind closed doors and thick curtains.  

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It was after four months of witnessing the progression from pink to orange to burgundy all in pursuit of red that the apprentices were met by a shattered pile of glass on the glasshouse floor. The glass was the color of a rose petal, pure and bright and, to the eyes of the apprentices, red.  

Giuliada stood before the pile of broken glass. She did not turn around when her apprentices approached. She merely stared into the pile of fragments.  

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“Remarkable,” Lorenz exclaimed, bouncing on his heels in poorly-concealed exuberance. “Remarkable!” 

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“You’ve done it, Signorina Bastani. Red glass,” Karletta whispered.  

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“Cranberry glass,” Giuliada said, her voice as hollow as air through a crack in a window. As the daily piles of broken glass grew more red, Giuliada appeared to drain of color. Either disease or pure fixation siphoned away her energy. “Not red. Not truly red.” 

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Her tongue darted from her mouth, traced her bloodless lips.  

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“How much more can you ask, Signorina?” Vittori asked. “We have done the impossible already. A hundred times over, we have done the impossible.” 

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He held out the shard that, to Karletta’s eyes, was the closest to red that human hands could manufacture.  

Giuliada took the shard from him. Her hands were skeletal, callused from decades of detail-work and bleached from lack of sunlight. She looked like a creature made of ash. But when she slashed the shard of glass across her forearm, the blood that rose to the surface of her skin was the most violent shade of crimson.  

The contrast against the glass proved Giuliada correct; the color of the glass appeared pale, cheap, wrong compared to the pure crimson of blood.  

For a moment, Karletta could not speak; it was as though Giuliada’s vision, her single-minded obsession had permeated the air within the glasshouse. For a moment, any cost was worth paying for glass of such a color.  

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“I have not made red glass,” said Giuliada. “I have merely come close.”  

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She allowed Vittori to bandage the slash in her arm only when the apprentices warned her that leaving the injury untended might hinder her work.  

Giuliada once more vanished into the depths of her private workshop, and she did not emerge until nightfall.  

The apprentices did not speak, but all three pairs of eyes found themselves drifting again and again to the pile of red glass as if pulled by a powerful current. Against the crimson spatters of Giuliada’s blood, the shards of glass hardly looked red at all. Vittori had studied under Giuliada Bastani’s tutelage for over a decade, but never before had an aspiration of hers felt so noble. Red glass. What wouldn’t an artisan give for red glass?  

When the time had come for the apprentices to depart until the following morning, Giuliada made a rare appearance.  

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“Lorenz,” she said. “You will stay. You will assist me in my work.” 

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The older apprentices were not happy, but they did not question Giuliada. The glassmaster gave orders, not requests.  

… 

The following morning, the workshop floor was clean. No shards of glass caught the light, and without the near-scarlet of the shards, the glasshouse was colorless, the blues and greens and yellows and violets all reduced to the gray of corpse-flesh.  

“It is finished,” was all Giuliada said.  

She ushered them into her workroom. It was a place of reverence, to be entered like the confessional in a chapel, with bated breath and hesitant footsteps. The air stank of burning, the telltale sign of impurities in the fuel.  

Rather than stained with color like a church, the windows of Giuliada Tomasia Bastani’s workroom were stained with soot from the glass furnace. The scant daylight from the edges of the window proved more than sufficient to illuminate the great artisan’s masterpiece.  

Vittori and Karletta saw now that the discarded glass months-over had been pale imitation, counterfeit color and nothing more.  

This was red in truth. Lifesblood red. Fiery, visceral, and arterial red.  

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True to her word, Giuliada had crafted a masterwork, a sculpture larger than life and made of glass in a color that the world had called impossible. The statue towered above Giuliada’s frail, haggard body, dwarfing the apprentices. So vivid was Giuliada’s creation that the living creatures in the room with it appeared diminished, weakened, sickly.  

The glass woman’s hair was frozen as if caught in an unseen wind. She was depicted in the middle of a graceful stride forward, unimpeded by clothing. A body designed and crafted with such care, such appreciation, such intimate knowledge of the female form that a painter would weep in admiration and despair.  

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“Eve,” said Giuliada, a hoarse whisper. “The mother of mankind, the mortal who doomed us all to die. Fitting, no? That the final work of the only female artisan among her contemporaries should depict the first woman to walk the earth.” 

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The two apprentices could not speak. It would have been disrespectful, perhaps, to utter a word in the presence of pure mastery. They simply stared, taking in the perfection, the pinnacle of an already-unmatched virtuoso of glass.  

Eve’s glass hands reached upward, eternally grasping toward something just out of reach. Delicate fingers, individually sculpted and perfectly proportioned.  

Glass. All the reddest of red glass.  

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“Where is Lorenz?” Vittori asked. “He should witness this. He should see that our work was not in vain.”  

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Giuliada did not answer. Her eyes saw nothing but Eve, red reflecting off unshed tears. “My greatest creation. My foulest torment. I have achieved perfection.”  

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Karletta could not speak, could scarcely breathe. The sense of wonder was so intense that it was indistinguishable from revulsion. Never in her life had she seen such a color, too red to be a living thing but too intense to be anything but alive. She gazed upon the face of the statue, struck by the care in the detail.  

Glass eyes, crafted in such a way that created variation of color in her irises, depth in her pupils, the detail fine enough to show each one of her long, delicate eyelashes. Eyes that looked up and ahead, anticipation written in glass. Glass lips slightly parted as if in thought, as if the statue might draw breath at any moment she chose.  

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“I created Eve,” Giuliada’s voice was a rasping whisper, dried-out. “Am I Adam, or am I God? Either way, what power.” 

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“How?” Vittori asked, reverent and breathless. “How did you create such color?”  

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“Metal is required to make glass vivid,” Giuliada said. It was as though she lacked the strength to speak louder. “Metal surrounds us. It is in the stones beneath our feet. It fills our veins.”  

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Giuliada held up her paper-white hand toward the statue, a mirror of the glass Eve’s grasping pose. The violent red slash along her arm looked brighter, deeper.  

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“Eve,” said Giuliada. “My Eve. If I am God, why should I not take what I require to create art?” 

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She coughed, and this time, her handkerchief came away more red than white. 

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“What did you require?” Karletta asked. Greed and glass reflected in her eyes in equal measure, but Vittori could not say if the emotion was cold or molten.  

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“The price of great art is what it has ever been – blood.” 

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“Signorina, you- you put your blood in the glass?” Vittori asked. It should have been horrifying, but the apprentices were not certain that was what they felt.  

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“I tried. It was not enough,” Giuliada said. “I needed more than what I alone could offer. I needed vitality. Youth.” 

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The glass was the color of blood. For the first time, Vittori questioned whose.  

A brush of realization susurrated through him, as delicate as the tools that added detail to molten glassworks.  

A whispered question. “Where is Lorenz?” 

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Giuliada extended a single, tremulous finger toward the statue.  

Thanks to the glass furnace, no glasshouse was ever anything but stifling. It was, however – for an instant – not enough to keep the room from feeling frigid.  

Giuliada swayed where she stood, and the look on her face as she gazed at the crimson glass above her was pleading and proud in equal measure.

“Heat turns glass into art. It sears away the imperfections from the human form until nothing remains but metal. Metal is color, and color is perfection. There is no difference between them. What is the purpose of an apprentice if not to buy perfection with blood?”  

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“I do not understand,” Vittori said. He wished he was lying.  

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“What have you done?” Karletta whispered.  

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Giuliada lowered her ash-white arm to gesture carelessly at the furnace.  

Years of working amidst the perpetual sound of fuel consumed by flame led to a sort of deafness. Vittori could not remember the last time he had consciously considered the dull roar of the furnace. All he could think now was that he no longer heard it.  

The furnace had burned out. For the first time since she chose this mad obsession, Giuliada had let the flames go dormant. The beating heart of the glasshouse no longer burned.  

Vittori did not think he could persuade his body to move, but Karletta opened the metal latch that held the furnace closed.  

Karletta screamed, but the sound was swallowed by sickly silence and the faint drifting of loose cinders. Among the dead embers, some of the blackened and ash-crusted shapes were too curved to be the sticks of the forge’s usual fuel. Karletta stirred the remains of the dead fire, and her keen eyes could not ignore what might have once been the nimble fingers of a glassworker, or the now-blackened teeth of an eager, youthful smile.  

Lorenz had always been eager to please.  

Vittori could only stare. Horror, disgust, and the most grotesque feeling of all: admiration of the master craft before him and the ruthlessness that had created it.  

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“I have completed my life’s great work,” Giuliada said, heedless to the stunned silence she had sown. “Red glass. I created red glass.” 

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Giuliada doubled over, coughing into her handkerchief once more. The cost of red glass was not merely one life; it was two. One worked into the glass, the other worked to death to create it. The price had been gladly paid.  

Karletta and Vittori were not often in agreement, but they were united in their decision.  

The horror of the apprentices did not reach the artisan’s ears. If she cared when they cast the furnace’s coal and oil over the furniture and wooden floor, she did not show it. If she wished for the apprentices not to shatter a lit lantern into the amassed fuel, she said nothing. The apprentices of Giuliada Bastani set the workshop to burn and did not look back as they fled.  

Giuliada did not stop them. Perhaps she no longer had the strength. Perhaps she no longer cared, now that the impossible had been proven anything but.  

If she feared the flames, she gave them no heed. She merely sat at the base of her creation long after her remaining apprentices were gone.  

Heated to such a temperature, the most vibrant red glass in the world was merely molten-white. Giuliada Bastani’s masterwork was indistinguishable from any other work of glass.  

Giuliada Tomasia Bastani, the great glassmaster of Venice, watched through the smoke as Eve succumbed to fire. It was transformed to something liquid and living and dead at once. Form consumed by flames. Life consumed by vision of more.  

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The last piece of the statue that melted was the hand of Eve, eternally outstretched as she reached for temptation, for knowledge, for eternity.  

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The ends of Eve’s fingers dripped blood.  

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It was beautiful.