Piero Fornasetti Pesci Fish Plates, Numbers 2 and 3, a Pair

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Piero Fornasetti Pesci Fish Plates, Numbers 2 and 3, a Pair

This pair of plates comes from Piero Fornasetti’s Pesci … Read more Piero Fornasetti Pesci Fish Plates, Numbers 2 and 3, a Pair

This pair of plates comes from Piero Fornasetti’s Pesci series — passata di pesce, a passage of fish — designed in his Milan atelier in 1955. A school of fish crosses the white ground of each plate with no border and no ground line: number 2 in cool blue-greens with red fins tipped in yellow, number 3 in yellow and olive flushed with orange-red. The fish are taken from nineteenth-century natural-history engravings, lithographically printed and colored by hand — the kind of old engraved illustration Fornasetti collected and reused throughout his career.

The two plates complement each other, one cool and one warm, and read best hung or displayed together. Fornasetti (1913–1988) produced the numbered plate series as his most characteristic form — a single motif turned through a run of variations — and Pesci examples of this early type are sought by collectors of his work.

Diameter: 9¼ inches each; height 1¼ inches. Good condition, no restoration, a small amount of typical rubbing. Each plate marked on the reverse with the Fornasetti Pesci fish device and its series number, and the pattern date 1955. See less