The Glassblower of Murano - Marina Fiorato [41]
Warily, she eyed the strangers, as they eyed her back in the planner of a couple examining a cut of meat before purchase. Chiara Londesa sported a cropped t-shirt featuring a near-pornographic manga design. Her swarthy colouring and calculating sloe eyes were offset by a shock of brutally short peroxide hair. Her colleague Semi, who seemed to boast no surname, was even odder. From top to toe he was dressed as the perfect English gentleman - Norfolk jacket, severely knotted tie, and polished Lobb shoes. As he leant forward Leonora could see - surely not? - the glint of a fob watch and chain peeping from his pocket. She fought the urge to laugh.
In the prolonged silence Semi rose and circled Leonora's chair, stroking his chin in an affected gesture straight from a James Mason movie. With the air of one selling his daughter to white slavers Adelino said, `see? Didn't I tell you?'
Semi, still circling, nodded. Expecting cut-glass Brideshead tones, Leonora found his perfect Italian an audible shock. `Si. Perfetto.'
Perfect for what?
Semi and Chiara, now ignoring Leonora, began to converse passionately in urbane Milanese. Through the frantic handgestures and rattled speech Leonora picked out a number of ominous words. Press ads. Interviews. Local, then national. Flyers to hotels for their hospitality packs. Photoshoot. Storyboard. At this last Chiara crossed to the flip chart and revealed an image which seemed to depict a blonde Botticelli Angel blowing a trumpet at heaven's gates. Leonora rose and looked closer. She had been mistaken. The angel was wearing jeans and a tight fitting vest. The trumpet was no trumpet but a blowpipe. The bell of the trumpet was an exquisite vase. The angel was blowing glass. The image was beautiful and terrible, and now at last Leonora did laugh. She turned back to three totally serious faces.
`Let me be clear about this.You're proposing to run some sort of ... advertising campaign ... on the back of, well, me?'
`Not just you, Signorina Manin, but your exalted ancestor' With a practised flourish, Chiara turned the page. 'May I introduce: The Manin range.'
Oh no.
Visuals and slogans shouted at Leonora. Photos, mock-ups for packaging.
More pages with copy lines writ large: `The Glass that built the Republic."See the real Venice through our Glass! 'Manin Glass, made by true Venetians for 400 years."Manin Glass, the original Venetian Glass' Over and again there were images of the blonde Botticelli (presumably herself) and a dark child in a frock coat and ruf.
'Unfortunately, there is no adult portrait of Corrado Manin. He fled his family home aged ten, so there is just this which we took from a family group.' Chiara's shrug expressed regret for this personal tragedy - not for the little boy's loss, but that she herself was inconvenienced by the lack of an adult image. Leonora studied the closed, serious face of the little boy who had grown into greatness. The designers had excised him from the painting, separated him from his family once again to stand alone. She had not known of this portrait, or even this part of his history, and felt ashamed.
How is it that these grotesques straight from the Commedia dell'Arte know more of Corradino than I do myse? Because they bothered to (find out. I must know more about him.
Chiara's pitch continued apace. `Our campaign depends on two major elements - Corrado Manin, the Mozart of glassmaking, gives this foundry's output the continuity of long history - the solid, antique image with an impeccable Venetian pedigree. And you Signorina, are his ancestor - and the only female glassblower on the islands. We can sell the