Fornasetti Tema E Variazioni No. 89 Lina Cavalieri Porcelain Plate

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Fornasetti Tema e Variazioni No. 89 Lina Cavalieri Porcelain Plate

A face sinking into a lake, and four eyes looking … Read more Fornasetti Tema e Variazioni No. 89 Lina Cavalieri Porcelain Plate

A face sinking into a lake, and four eyes looking back at you. This is number 89 in Fornasetti’s Tema e Variazioni, the series Piero Fornasetti spent a lifetime spinning out of a single borrowed face, and it is one of the quietest and strangest designs in the run.

The face belongs to Lina Cavalieri, the Italian opera singer Fornasetti found in an old French magazine and never let go of. On this plate she is half under water. Only the brow and the eyes clear the surface; everything below the waterline is gone, and the eyes come back a second time as a soft reflection in the ripples, so you are looking at two pairs at once. A few rushes lean in across the bottom edge. The whole thing turns on one perfectly straight horizontal line, which is all it takes to change a portrait into a landscape.

It is printed in black on white, no color anywhere, which is exactly why it goes with everything. At ten inches it is substantial enough to hang alone and be the one odd, arresting thing on a wall, and it looks especially well in a hallway, a stair, or a powder room, where people come close to it. Over a bed or a console it reads as a graphic circle from across the room and only resolves when you approach. If you have others from the series, hang them together and let this one sit slightly off center, since the horizon line gives it a stillness the busier designs do not have. It works flat on a stack of books too.

Piero Fornasetti (1913–1988) turned out some thirteen thousand objects from his Milan studio, nearly all of them made by marrying a printed image to a useful shape. Lina Cavalieri (1874–1944) was a famous beauty in her day, but it was the shape of the face that held him rather than the fame: 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 his son Barnaba has continued the series under the Atelier Fornasetti name since his death.

Dimensions
Diameter: 10 inches (25.4 cm)

Marks
Printed to the reverse with the Fornasetti eye device above TEMA E VARIAZIONI, the series number 89 beneath, and the hand-and-paintbrush device with FORNASETTI · MILANO / MADE IN ITALY. Beneath and partly obscured by the black stamp is the green printed oval mark of Arzberg, the German porcelain manufactory that supplied the blank. See less