Curator Dr. Claudia Kanowski and a trio of Italian musicians guide visitors through the Venetian glass collection of the Kunstgewerbemuseum. This musical tour brings a remarkable treasure of the Renaissance into dialogue with the music of its time.

Transparent, fragile, at times sharp: The heart of the Renaissance frottola opens itself to the gaze like a window into the soul. In the love poetry of the early sixteenth century, the heart appears as a crystal crossed by light and desire; it shatters beneath the weight of unrequited passion, or else reveals itself as hard and impenetrable.

From this collection of images emerges Cor di Cristallo, a musical journey through the Italian frottolas printed in Venice by Ottaviano Petrucci and the symbolic world of Renaissance glass that surrounds their sound. Performed with voice, lute, and percussion, these pieces evoke a constant oscillation between dance and melancholy, lightness and wound. What shines always retains the possibility of breaking.

Alongside the songs of love stand other figures of Renaissance fragility: Fortune, mutable and unstable like glass; tears, resembling tiny crystals; and the flowing presence of water itself, recalling Venice, a city of reflections, transparencies, and shifting surfaces.

Within the galleries devoted to Renaissance glass, music and material mirror one another. The transparency of crystal meets that of the voice; the delicacy of the objects on display recalls the precariousness of the emotions sung in the music. The concert thus becomes a space of reflections and fractures, a window opened onto the poetic imagination of the Renaissance and the luminous fragility of the human heart.