Fornasetti Tema E Variazioni No. 224 Lina Cavalieri Porcelain Plate

Details

Description

One plate, dozens of eyes, and a room that suddenly has something to say. This is number 224 in Fornasetti’s … Read more One plate, dozens of eyes, and a room that suddenly has something to say. This is number 224 in Fornasetti’s Tema e Variazioni, the series Piero Fornasetti built across a lifetime from a single borrowed face, and it is one of the cleverest designs in the whole run.

The face is Lina Cavalieri’s, the Italian soprano Fornasetti found in an old French magazine and never let go of. Here she is cut into overlapping crescents and repeated across the plate like scales or roof tiles, with only the eyes and brows of each impression left showing. From across the room it reads as a cool geometric pattern in black and gray on white. Come closer and it resolves into a crowd, all of them looking back at you. That double take is the whole point, and it is the sort of visual joke Fornasetti made better than anyone.

At ten inches it is generous enough to hold a wall on its own, and it hangs beautifully over a console, in a powder room, or at the center of a gallery wall of prints, where the black and white sits quietly against almost any color you have already committed to. Group it with other Tema e Variazioni plates if you have them, or let it be the single odd, arresting thing on a shelf of books. It also works flat on a coffee table as a catchall for keys and reading glasses.

Piero Fornasetti (1913–1988) turned some thirteen thousand objects out of his Milan studio, almost all of them made by marrying a printed image to a useful form. Lina Cavalieri (1874–1944) was a celebrated beauty of her day, but Fornasetti was drawn to the shape of the face rather than the fame attached to it: a face, as he put it, as classic as a Greek statue and as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa. He made more than three hundred and fifty variations on it, and the series has been continued since his death by his son Barnaba under the Atelier Fornasetti name.

Dimensions
Diameter: 10 inches (25.4 cm)
Height: 1 inch (2.5 cm)

Marks
Printed to the reverse with the Fornasetti eye device above a black printed oval inscribed TEMA E VARIAZIONI, the series number 224 beneath, and the hand-and-paintbrush device with FORNASETTI · MILANO / MADE IN ITALY. Partly obscured beneath the black series stamp is an earlier green printed oval reading Arzberg, with GERMANY legible on the line below. The green stamp is the mark of the German factory that supplied the porcelain blank; the black Fornasetti mark records the decoration, applied at the Milan studio. See less