1960s Piero Fornasetti Ceramic Appetizer Bowls, Complete Set of Six, Antipasto Subjects

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Piero Fornasetti Ceramic Appetizer Bowls, Complete Set of Six, Antipasto Subjects, Circa 1960

This complete set of six small ceramic … Read more Piero Fornasetti Ceramic Appetizer Bowls, Complete Set of Six, Antipasto Subjects, Circa 1960

This complete set of six small ceramic bowls was made by Piero Fornasetti for the drinks table, each one given over to a different thing to eat with a drink. The subjects are cheese, artichokes, onions, cocktail sausages, fava beans, and a flowering almond branch, each printed in fine black line by lithographic transfer, in the engraved manner Fornasetti took from old printed sources, and carried around the outside of the bowl at a scale that fills it completely.

The printing is crisp and closely worked: wedges of Emmental cut open to show the eyes, globe artichokes among their deeply cut leaves, onions with their tops, a knot of linked cocktail sausages, fava beans in the pod, the fave eaten raw with pecorino as an antipasto, and a five-petalled almond blossom with its leaves and fruit. The bowls are of plain rounded form on a low turned foot. A broad band of gold runs around the inside of each bowl below the rim, the well left white, and a further band of gold encircles the foot, the gold set against the white ground and the black printing with the economy that is the whole point of the design. The six are the same shape and differ only in their subjects, which is what makes them work as a set on a tray.

On a bar cart, a drinks tray, or a sideboard the six bowls read as one object, the gold bands catching the light and the black printing holding its own against dark or pale finishes alike. They are as useful for olives and nuts today as they were sixty years ago, and equally good lined up on a shelf.

Dimensions
Diameter: 3 1/8 inches (7.9 cm)
Height: 2 inches (5.1 cm)

Marks
Each printed to the underside with the black sunburst mark enclosing the hand-and-paintbrush device, lettered around the border FORNASETTI · MILANO · MADE IN ITALY, some with a small painted gilder’s numeral beside the mark.

Provenance
Private collection, Ontario, Canada.

Condition
Excellent condition. The printed designs are crisp and unrubbed, the gilding to the interiors and foot rings is bright and unworn, and the bowls are free from chips, cracks, and restoration.

References
Fornasetti, Barnaba, Mariuccia Casadio, and Andrea Branzi. Fornasetti: The Complete Universe. New York: Rizzoli, 2010, page 560, number 13, where the bowls are called appetizer bowls and are recorded as sold in sets of six from twenty-six different designs.

Historical Context
Piero Fornasetti (1913–1988) produced something in the order of thirteen thousand objects from his Milan studio, almost all of them made by marrying a printed image to a useful form, and the small wares for the drinks table, the bowls for stuzzichini, the little things eaten with an aperitivo, are among the most characteristic of them. The images are borrowed from the vocabulary of old engraved plates and printed absolutely straight, without irony in the image itself, so that the wit lies entirely in the placing, a cheese or a handful of beans blown up to fill a bowl three inches across. Objects of this kind were made for the Italian home of the 1950s and 1960s and for export, and they have never really gone out of use. See less