Long before Murano became a Venetian pleasure-ground, she had been famous for her painters, for her ships, for her furnaces. Like Torcello, she sent vessels to the triumph of the Doge Lorenzo Tiepolo, and she was conspicuous among the others, as da Canale says: “For you must know that those of Murano had on their vessels living cocks, so that they might be known and whence they came.” Molmenti thinks that Carpaccio himself belonged to a shipbuilding family of Murano, and this is the more interesting in view of the frequency and detail of shipping operations in his pictures. Murano was indeed the birthplace of Venetian art, and the riches of its furnaces glow in the garments of those early painters, Vivarini, Andrea and Quirico. From the end of the eleventh century the glass works had begun to flourish; by the thirteenth the industry was transferred wholly to Murano. The legend runs that a certain Cristoforo Briani, hearing from Marco Polo of the monopoly of agates, chalcedony and other precious stones on the coast of Guiana, set about imitating them. With Domenico Miotto to help him he succeeded, and the latter carried the art to still greater perfection, which resulted at last in the imitation of the pearl. In 1528 Andrea Vidoare received a special mariegola or charter for the fame of his wonderful pearls, polished and variegated by him to a degree unknown before. In the middle of the fifteenth century the first crystals came from the furnaces, and the following century was the golden period of the art--a period coinciding with the greatest patrician glory of the island. Murano still burns with its secular fire, winning from the old world its secrets, the old, wise world that worshipped fire, to fuse them once more in its crucible for the wonder of the new; secrets of crystal, pearl and ruby, and of the blue of the deepest ocean depths or the impenetrable night sky, imprisoning them in those transparent cenotaphs in forms of infinite harmony and grace. And it is not only in the revival of ancient memories and forgotten mysteries that the furnaces of Murano play their part; they contribute also to the present renewal of Venice: for it is here that the units of the mosaicist’s art are made. In Murano is laid the foundation-stone of its success--the quality of the colour, the depth and richness of the gold. The period of decadence in the Venetian arts is accurately reflected in its mosaics; with the decadence of conception we note also the decadence of colour. Those hard blatant tones that characterise the late mosaics of San Marco are records, too permanent, alas! of a time when the furnaces had lost their cunning, or rather when the master minds were blunted and the secret of the ancient colourists allowed to lie unquestioned under the dust of time.