Fornasetti Tema E Variazioni Porcelain Gold Plate No. 41, Heart Face

Details

Description

Fornasetti Tema e Variazioni Porcelain Gold Plate No. 41, Heart Face
Atelier Fornasetti, Milan, after 1988

This porcelain wall plate … Read more Fornasetti Tema e Variazioni Porcelain Gold Plate No. 41, Heart Face
Atelier Fornasetti, Milan, after 1988

This porcelain wall plate presents motif No. 41 of Fornasetti’s celebrated Tema e Variazioni series: the face of the opera singer Lina Cavalieri, printed in black halftone within a white heart reserved on a lustrous gold ground. The heart crops her face to its essentials — the two great steady eyes, the nose, and the lips at its point — so that she gazes out from within the emblem of affection itself, one of the wittiest and most romantic conceits in the series. The reverse bears the Tema e Variazioni backstamp with the single-eye device, the numeral 41, and the Fornasetti Milano hand-and-brush mark, and the plate retains its original Fornasetti box, black with the white Soli e Lune sunburst faces and a gilt interior.

Hung singly, the plate gives a powder room, entrance hall or bedside wall a compact focal point, its gold ground reading well against dark lacquered or papered walls. It also groups naturally with other Tema e Variazioni plates in a gallery arrangement, and the original box makes it a ready gift.

Dimensions
Diameter: 10¼ inches (26.0 cm)
Height: 1 inch (2.5 cm)

Marks
Printed backstamp to the reverse: an eye above TEMA E VARIAZIONI, the numeral 41, and the hand-and-brush device above FORNASETTI · MILANO / MADE IN ITALY. Paper label on the original box: PTVZ041 / Wall Plate / T&V N°41 B/W/Gold.

Provenance
Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge

Historical Context
Tema e Variazioni is the defining obsession of Piero Fornasetti’s art: variation after variation on the face of Lina Cavalieri (1874–1944), the Belle Époque soprano whose portrait he found in a nineteenth-century magazine and transformed, from the early 1950s onward, into an inexhaustible theater of invention. Piero had produced 299 variations by 1966, and the series has been continued by the Fornasetti atelier in Milan under his son Barnaba, which today counts around 400. The Atelier Fornasetti gold-ground editions, like the present plate, rank among the most decorative expressions of the theme, and No. 41, the heart, remains one of the most sought-after motifs of the entire series.

(Ref: NY11205-iplx) See less