Modernist Overlay Glass Vase with Polka Dot Pattern in White and Teal, Italian circa 1970

A modernist Italian overlay glass vase of bold graphic conception, the cylindrical body worked in the classic incamiciatura technique in which a coloured inner layer of glass is cased in a contrasting outer layer, which is then cut or ground away in a decorative pattern to reveal the colour within. Here, the inner glass is a vivid teal-blue, intense and luminous, while the outer casing is white opaline, soft and matte. The cutting takes the form of a regular grid of circular polka dots covering the full outer surface of the vase, each disc of white ground removed to create a circular window of pure teal, the effect simultaneously geometric and playful, rigorous in its structure and exuberant in its colour.

The overlay or cased glass technique has a distinguished history in European glass production, reaching its apogee in Bohemian and French glass of the nineteenth century, where it was used to produce complex multi-coloured objects of extraordinary technical ambition. In the mid-twentieth century, Italian glassmakers—above all those working on the island of Murano near Venice—absorbed and transformed this tradition, applying it to forms and colour combinations that were emphatically of their own time. The vivid palette of Italian design glass in the 1960s and 1970s—with its saturated teals, oranges, and yellows set against white or clear grounds—became one of the most recognisable visual signatures of the period, celebrated in the work of houses such as Venini, Barovier & Toso, and their contemporaries.

The polka dot pattern chosen for this vase is a gesture of confident graphic wit. The dot—a circle, the simplest and most universally legible of geometric forms—was a recurrent motif in Italian design of the 1960s and 1970s, appearing across furniture, textiles, ceramics, and glass as a shorthand for optimism, modernity, and the liberating pleasures of colour. In overlay glass, the dot becomes particularly effective: each circular window is not merely a mark on the surface but a depth, a view into the coloured interior of the vessel, creating a subtle three-dimensional quality that changes subtly as light moves across the vase.

In very good condition, the glass sound with no chips or cracks. A vase of considerable decorative presence and technical quality, equally suited to display on a shelf, sideboard, or table in any interior that values the exuberance of Italian mid-century design.