Piero Fornasetti Nobel Prize Porcelain Plate, 1974

Details

Description

A Fornasetti plate with a story on it. Made in Milan in 1974 to mark that year’s Nobel Prizes, it … Read more A Fornasetti plate with a story on it. Made in Milan in 1974 to mark that year’s Nobel Prizes, it carries Alfred Nobel himself in a large medallion at the center, in profile, bearded, looking every inch the nineteenth-century industrialist, and around him ten smaller medallions holding the faces of the ten men who won his prizes that year, each one named in the fine lettering Fornasetti used so well. All eleven portraits are printed in black in the manner of an old steel engraving and ringed in gilt laurel wreaths, on plain white porcelain.

The ten are: Seán MacBride and Eisaku Satō, who shared the Peace Prize; the Swedish writers Harry Martinson and Eyvind Johnson, who divided the Prize in Literature; Sir Martin Ryle and Antony Hewish, who shared the Physics prize for the discovery of pulsars — the first Nobel ever given for astronomy; Albert Claude, Christian de Duve and George E. Palade for Physiology or Medicine; and Paul J. Flory for Chemistry.

One charming detail: the plate says NOBEL PRICE 1974, and the mark on the reverse repeats it. The Milan atelier’s English slipped, and nobody caught it before the transfers were printed.

Piero Fornasetti (1913–1988) turned out something like thirteen thousand designs from his Milan workshop, and the engraved portrait in a gilt wreath was one of his favorite devices — he used it for composers, for writers, for opera characters. This one was made for an occasion rather than for the shelf, which is part of what makes it uncommon.

At ten inches it hangs beautifully alone, or in a group with other Fornasetti plates on a stair wall or above a console. It also earns its place in a study, a library, or the office of anyone who works in the sciences — a physicist, a chemist, a doctor — for whom the ten faces mean something. Not a plate for the dishwasher; a plate for the wall.

Dimensions
Diameter: 10 inches (25.4 cm)
Height: ¾ inch (1.9 cm)

Marks
Printed in black on the reverse: This plate is expressly created by Fornasetti for the Nobel Price-award of 1974, above the hand-and-brush device and FORNASETTI · MILANO / MADE IN ITALY.

Provenance
Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge See less