Piero Fornasetti Arcimboldesca Vegetable Face Pottery Plate, No. 12, After Giuseppe Arcimboldo

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Description

Piero Fornasetti Arcimboldesca Vegetable Face Pottery Plate, No. 12, After Giuseppe Arcimboldo
Circa 1960s–1970s

This Piero Fornasetti pottery plate is … Read more Piero Fornasetti Arcimboldesca Vegetable Face Pottery Plate, No. 12, After Giuseppe Arcimboldo
Circa 1960s–1970s

This Piero Fornasetti pottery plate is number 12 in the Arcimboldesca series, in which a human face is composed from fruit, vegetables and foliage in homage to the sixteenth-century Milanese painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo. The circular plate has a shallow well and a plain upcurved rim, and the design is printed in black by transfer and colored by hand in green, yellow, brown and crimson.

Two pale beans form the eyes, a single asparagus spear stands upright as the nose, and a strawberry laid on its side, its stalk and calyx to the left, serves as the mouth. The hair is a garland of currant branches, their serrated leaves washed in green and yellow, which arches over the brow and falls to either side in heavy clusters of red currants. Each element casts a soft gray printed shadow, so that the produce appears to rest on the white surface of the plate, a trompe l’oeil device that recurs throughout Fornasetti’s work.

The plate hangs well singly or grouped with others from the series on a kitchen, breakfast room or dining room wall, and may equally be shown on a stand on a shelf or dresser.

Dimensions
Diameter: 9⅛ inches (23.2 cm)
Height: 1 inch (2.5 cm)

Marks
Printed in black on the reverse with the Fornasetti mark of a hand holding a paintbrush above FORNASETTI-MILANO / MADE IN ITALY, and with the series mark of an open peapod inscribed ARCIMBOLDESCA and numbered 12. A painter’s mark, M, is added by hand in green.

Provenance
Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge

References
Barnaba Fornasetti (ed.), Fornasetti: The Complete Universe (Rizzoli), p. 616, no. 168, for a 10¼ inch example.
Patrick Mauriès, Fornasetti: Designer of Dreams (Thames and Hudson), p. 259, top of page, for a set of these plates.

Historical Context
Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526–1593) was born and died in Milan, but made his name at the Habsburg courts of Vienna and Prague, where he painted for Maximilian II and Rudolf II the composite heads, assembled from fruit, vegetables, flowers, fish and books, on which his fame rests. Long regarded as curiosities, they were taken up in the twentieth century by the Surrealists, who claimed him as a forerunner. Piero Fornasetti (1913–1988), also Milanese, shared that taste for visual puns and illusion, and in the Arcimboldesca plates he reduced the composite head to a few pieces of produce laid out on a white ground, which read as fruit and vegetables at close range and as a face from across the room.

(Ref: NY10396A-nau) See less