Piero Fornasetti Earthenware Coasters With Animals and Banknotes for Banca Unione, Set of Eight With Original Presentation Card

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Piero Fornasetti Earthenware Coasters with Animals and Banknotes for Banca Unione, Set of Eight with Original Presentation Card
Milan, Circa … Read more Piero Fornasetti Earthenware Coasters with Animals and Banknotes for Banca Unione, Set of Eight with Original Presentation Card
Milan, Circa 1967–1970

This complete set of eight Piero Fornasetti coasters, made for the Banca Unione of Milan, is printed in black on a white ground with a menagerie of creatures, each one hoarding, carrying or building with bundles of banknotes. A swan glides with three cygnets riding on her back, each holding a note in its bill; a long-eared hound sits squarely on a spread of notes; a spotted piggy bank is fed notes through the slot in its back; and a bee works over a honeycomb with a note packed into every cell. A hen broods on a nest lined with notes, a literal nest egg; a tortoise bears a towering stack on its shell; an ant shoulders a bundle many times its size; and a snail carries a spiral shell built of rolled notes.

The animals are drawn in the fine engraved line and dense crosshatching of Fornasetti’s printed decoration, and every note is lettered “£ 100.000”: the pound sign was the usual typographic stand-in for the Italian lira, and the full point marks the thousands in the Italian manner. The Banca d’Italia issued its first 100,000-lire note in 1967, which places the series in the later 1960s. The blanks were supplied by the Treviso pottery Pagnossin, whose green mark beneath Fornasetti’s own identifies the body as terraglia, a hard white earthenware.

The set retains the bank’s original square presentation card, which confirms the commission. Its cover is printed with one of Fornasetti’s idealized female faces, wide-eyed and long-lashed, framed by a cascade of curls formed entirely of Greek and Roman coins. Inside, beneath the Banca Unione name in gray, the dedication reads in italic capitals “LA BANCA UNIONE È LIETA DI OFFRIRLE QUESTA SERIE DI OTTO SOTTOBICCHIERI ESPRESSAMENTE CREATI DA PIERO FORNASETTI” (Banca Unione is pleased to offer you this series of eight coasters created expressly by Piero Fornasetti). The bank gave Fornasetti’s Monete coaster series to its clients in the same way, as its Christmas gift of 1970.

Used together, the eight coasters suit a bar cart, a library table or a study, and they can equally be framed or mounted as a group on a wall with the presentation card shown alongside. For a client in banking or finance, they make a particularly apt gift.

Dimensions
Diameter of each coaster: 4 inches (10.2 cm)
Height of each coaster: ½ inch (1.3 cm)

Marks
Each printed in black on the underside with the Fornasetti hand-and-brush device within a serrated sunburst roundel, lettered around the edge FORNASETTI MILANO / MADE IN ITALY; beneath it, a green printed mark of a cupid above the Pagnossin, Treviso name and the word Terraglia.

Provenance
Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge

References
Banca d’Italia 100,000-lire “Manzoni” note, first issue dated July 3, 1967 (Pick 100a).

Historical Context
Piero Fornasetti (1913–1988) spent his whole life in Milan, where he studied at the Brera Academy and found an early patron and collaborator in the architect Gio Ponti. His engraved, Surrealist-tinged imagery was applied to furniture, ceramics and objects of every kind, and Italian companies regularly commissioned him to design tableware as corporate and client gifts.

The imagery here is an emblem book of thrift. The industrious ant and bee have stood for prudent saving since Aesop, and the tortoise, the snail and the nest egg extend the moral to patience and steady accumulation. Milan was itself the birthplace of the World Savings Day, proclaimed on October 31, 1924, at the close of the first International Savings Congress held there, and Italian banks long marked the day with gifts that encouraged saving.

(Ref: NY11289-ilu) See less