Piero Fornasetti Rosenthal Porcelain Plate, Temi E Variazioni, Motiv 34, Soap Bubbles

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Piero Fornasetti Rosenthal Porcelain Plate, Temi e Variazioni, Motiv 34, Soap Bubbles
German, 1980s

Piero Fornasetti multiplies the face of … Read more Piero Fornasetti Rosenthal Porcelain Plate, Temi e Variazioni, Motiv 34, Soap Bubbles
German, 1980s

Piero Fornasetti multiplies the face of Lina Cavalieri into a cluster of floating soap bubbles on this Rosenthal porcelain plate. Against a black ground, seven roundels of differing size drift across the well. A large central bubble frames her face from brow to chin, its features printed in an enlarged dot screen as though seen through a magnifying glass, while a second face above it looks out directly. The smaller orbs to either side carry her features tilted and turned on their sides, as if tumbling through the air, and at the lower left a partial bubble, cut by the rim, closes in on a single eye. The design is printed in black and white within a gilt rim.

During the 1980s Rosenthal of Germany produced a series of wall plates reproducing designs from Fornasetti's Tema e Variazioni, each printed in black and white with a gilt edge and numbered on the reverse as a Motiv. Rosenthal's own label calls them Sammelteller, or collector's plates, and they are often known in the trade as Julia plates. They were made for display, and the foot rim of this example is pierced for hanging. In our experience the bubbles design is one of the less often seen in the series.

Hung alone or within a grouping of Fornasetti plates, the bubbles design suits a powder room, study or entrance hall, its black ground reading strongly against a pale painted wall or a patterned paper.

Dimensions:
Diameter: 9¼ inches (23.5 cm)
Height: 1¼ inches (3.2 cm)

Marks:
Printed in white on a black roundel: Rosenthal Germany, the Fornasetti hand-and-paintbrush device, FORNASETTI, Dekor: Temi e variazioni, Motiv 34; a small numeral 8 to the reverse.

Provenance:
Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge

Condition:
Excellent, with its original box.

References:
Patrick Mauriès, Fornasetti: Designer of Dreams (Thames & Hudson, 1991), p. 192.

Historical Context:
The image that gave rise to Tema e Variazioni is the face of the Belle Époque soprano Lina Cavalieri (1874–1944), which Fornasetti found while leafing through a nineteenth-century French magazine. He called it an archetype, classic like a Greek statue and enigmatic like the Gioconda, and returned to it for the rest of his career; the series now numbers around 400 variations and has been continued by his son Barnaba. Rosenthal's plates of the 1980s, the decade of Fornasetti's death in 1988, helped bring his work back to international notice.

(Ref: NY9876-cin) See less