Glass Man visits the Treviso studio of Salvino Marsura, one of the great metal sculptors of the last century who until recently was little known outside the Italian town where he lived and worked
Every era has its blind spots. In 20th century metalworking, a handful of names arise almost automatically: Calder, Tinguely, the Giacometti brothers. Their output has come to define the canon of modern metal. But beneath the surface, were people producing equally radical work who never made the cut.
Salvino Marsura is one of them. Born in Treviso, Italy, in 1938, Marsura was a blacksmith who spent 60 years forging iron into furniture, lighting and sculpture as original as anything produced by established metal sculptors. Yet, until now, his work has been known to few outside northern Italy.
Photographer: Genevieve Lutkin courtesy of Béton Brut
Like art, design rarely arrives all at once. It moves in undercurrents with a group of dealers and collectors circling a name for years before the wider market catches up. Marsura has been riding one of those undercurrents for longer than most. Until recently, stumbling across a piece by Marsura meant travelling to Treviso or knowing someone who already had one. That changed when London-based gallery Béton Brut took on representation of his estate and introduced his archive to an international audience for the first time last year.
The reaction it produced was always the same. People were shocked by the sheer distinctiveness of it: the forge marks where the anvil met the metal, the way the iron had been contorted into forms that looked more grown than built, the patina that only decades of handling and oxidation can produce. Look closely, and you catch small flecks of red, yellow, blue and green paint that are almost invisible from a few feet away, only to be seen when standing right over the piece. It’s a texture no machine can fake. And every time, without fail, someone would ask, “Who is this guy?”
Photographer: Genevieve Lutkin courtesy of Béton Brut
Marsura’s workshop and forge occupy a farmhouse in the Veneto countryside – clustered, low outbuildings covered in ivy that climb walls of weathered stone, surrounded by land that had done the same quiet work for centuries before Marsura ever lit the furnace inside.
Step past the doorway, however, and the calm gives way to something closer to a labyrinth: room after room of corridors made up of decades of iron, ceilings dense with hanging candelabras and tendrils of metal tangled together. It isn’t exactly brutalist territory, but that’s the point. The tension between where Marsura worked and what he made runs through everything he produced: soft, rural surroundings pressed up against an industrial practice – a farmhouse turned into a metal maze.
That tension is the work itself. Marsura took the hardest material available and manipulated it into the softest forms imaginable: botanical shapes, floral motifs and stems. In other words, nature engineered through industrial force. He wasn’t the only 20th century metalworker doing this, but he might be the only one who did all of it at once.
Photographer: Gareth Hacker courtesy of Béton Brut
Seen against his peers, Marsura’s work reads less like a single style and more like a distillation. It’s as though, intentionally or not, he absorbed the 20th century’s most diverse metal philosophies and forced them into one hand.
You have the roughed-up, hand-worked surfaces of the Giacometti brothers, echoed in the way Marsura never lets iron look smooth or finished. You have Calder’s deceptive weightlessness, the trick that made his mobiles seem to defy gravity, in the way Marsura’s glass-topped tables seem to float over iron stems too slender to hold them. And you have Tinguely’s raw mechanical edge running straight through Marsura’s refusal to smooth away the presence of his hand. Three trademarks boiled down into the output of one forge.
Marsura trained under the Italian sculptor Toni Benetton. Affectionately nicknamed Treviso’s “Iron Poet”, Benetton taught him to bend iron at scale, taking techniques built for vast city-square monuments and scaling them down until they could live in an interior. But to get a real grip on Marsura, we must look to Paris, where “the Lalannes” were based.
Photographer: Gareth Hacker courtesy of Béton Brut
The Italian shares an obvious thematic link with François-Xavier Lalanne, both men preoccupied with rendering the natural world into metal. But it’s Lalanne’s wife, Claude, who stands as Marsura’s true visual counterpart. Both were obsessed with trapping nature inside metal. Just look at his Fior di Loto tables and her Ginkgo benches. But their methods couldn’t have been more opposed. Claude didn’t forge. She used galvanoplasty and lost-wax bronze casting to capture real garden leaves, suspending botanical matter inside metal.
For Yves Saint Laurent’s 1969 couture show, she took her technique further, gilding casts of the model Veruschka’s body and working them directly into evening gowns. Givenchy and Lagerfeld came calling, too. Where Lalanne’s work is a triumph of metallurgy, Marsura’s is a triumph of raw physical force where muscle memory and human strength were exerted over glowing iron until it gave up its shape.
Marsura’s work isn’t simply about craftsmanship. What he represents, ultimately, is a form of knowledge that is disappearing. This isn’t something that can be learnt from a book. Instead, it is held entirely in the hands and the eye; knowing the exact temperature of iron from the colour of its glow; knowing, by feeling alone, exactly how much force a piece of metal will take before it moves or breaks. This knowledge can’t simply be written down and passed on through instruction. It must be earned through years at the forge, and it dies with the person who holds it. This expertise isn’t being passed down at the rate it’s being lost.
Photographer: Genevieve Lutkin courtesy of Béton Brut
While Claude Lalanne went on to decorate the runways of Paris and the homes of the fashion set, and Calder and the Giacomettis were exhibited across continents, Marsura had it all – the eye, the hand, the instinct – and none of the exposure. He just kept working in Treviso while the rest of the century built its canon without him.
A Marsura piece isn’t just a piece of furniture. It’s a record of that knowledge in physical form, and it serves as proof that someone, somewhere, still knew how to do it. Mass production can copy the shape and mimic the texture, but it can never replicate the understanding behind it. For decades, the wider design world was slow to notice. Now, finally, we are catching up.
by Francesca Colborne-Malpas