Mid-Century Console by Paolo Buffa for Permanente Mobili di Cantù, 1930s

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Mid Century Modern mirror Fontanit by Fontana Arte with gilt brass frame, Gio Ponti attributed

About Fontana Arte
Best known … Read more Mid Century Modern mirror Fontanit by Fontana Arte with gilt brass frame, Gio Ponti attributed

About Fontana Arte
Best known for its elegant and innovative vintage lighting pieces, the Milan-based firm Fontana Arte pioneered one of the key features of 20th-century and contemporary Italian design: the union of artistry and industry wrought by partnerships between creative talents — chiefly architects — and entrepreneurial businesses. Fontana Arte is further distinguished by having had as artistic director, in succession, four of Italy’s most inventive modernist designers: Giò Ponti, Pietro Chiesa, French transplant Max Ingrand and Gae Aulenti.The bread and butter of the glassmaking company that Luigi Fontana founded in 1881 was plate-glass panels for the construction industry. In 1930, Fontana met Ponti — then the artistic director of the Richard-Ginori ceramics workshop and the editor of the influential magazine Domus— at a biannual design exhibition that became the precursor to today’s Milan Design Triennale, and the two hatched an idea for a furniture and housewares firm. Fontana Arte was incorporated in 1932 with Ponti as its chief of design. He contributed several lamps that remain among the company’s signature works, including the orb-atop-cone Bilia table lamp and the 0024 pendant — a stratified hanging sphere. The following year, Fontana Arte partnered with the influential Milan studio glassmaker and retailer Pietro Chiesa, who took over as artistic director. Chiesa’s designs for lighting — as well as for tables and items including vases and ashtrays — express an appreciation for fluidity and simplicity of line, as seen in works such as his flute-shaped Luminator floor lamp and the 1932 Fontana table — an arched sheet of glass that is held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Six years after Chiesa’s 1948 death, the École des Beaux Arts–trained Max Ingrand took over as head of design at Fontana Arte. Ingrand brought a similarly expressive formal sensibility to wares such as lamps and mirrors, but he also had a masterful eye for the manipulation of glass surfaces — whether they be cut, frosted, acid-etched or sand-blasted. His classic design is the Fontana table lamp of 1954, which has a truncated cone shade and curved body, both of which are made of pure, chic white-frosted glass. Following Ingrand, the often-audacious Italian architect Gae Aulenti served as the company’s artistic director from 1979 to 1996, and while she generally insisted that furnishings take second place aesthetically to architecture, she made an exception for Fontana Arte pieces such as the Tavolo con Ruote series of glass coffee and dining tables on wheels, bold lighting pieces such as the Parola series and the Giova, a combination flower vase and table lamp. As a key incubator of modern design under Aulenti’s tenure, Fontana Arte remained true to its long-held commitment — creating objects that have never been less than daring.

About Gio Ponti


Giovanni “Gio” Ponti (born November 18, 1891, Milan, Italy–died September 16, 1979, Milan, Italy) was one of the most influential Italian architects, industrial designers, furniture designers, artists, and publishers of the 20th century. He is considered the father of modern Italian design and is associated with the development of modern architecture in Italy. Throughout his long creative career, which spanned more than six decades, Gio Ponti created numerous furniture, decorative art, and industrial product designs using artisanal and modern production techniques, in addition to creating important works of architecture in Italy and abroad.

Early Influence Of Decorative Arts In Gio Ponti’s Approach to Architecture, Product, and Furniture Design
Ponti graduated from the Politecnico di Milano in 1921. In 1923, he started his first industrial design work designing ceramics for the Richard Ginori pottery factory, close to Florence. Two years later, he convinced Richard Ginori to participate in the Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (a 1925 Paris exposition), where Ponti’s ceramic designs were very successful. During this time, Ponti forged a lasting relationship with Christofle executive and shareholder Tony Bouilhet, who later married Ponti’s niece–Carla Borletti–and for whom he designed Villa Bouilhet at the Saint-Cloud golf club near Paris, one of Ponti’s earliest house designs.

During his 15-year involvement with the Richard Ginori pottery factory, but especially during the early years, Gio Ponti collaborated with craftsmen and artisans to create rich designs with abundant colors, elaborate shapes, and skilled craftsmanship, mostly in the neoclassical style. This style and approach was at great odds with the functional and minimal approach of the then-prevalent Italian Rationalism, and it was distinctly present in Ponti’s work in the 1930s and 1940s, becoming less so over later years.
Gio Ponti Founds Domus Magazine, A Platform For The Emerging Italian Modernist Design
In 1928, Ponti started Domus, an architecture and design magazine with a mission to energize Italian architecture, interior design, and decorative arts. In his first editorial, as well as in several of his later writings at Domus, Ponti articulates some differences regarding the Italian house, La casa all’italiana, in which he suggests that the Italian house “does not just consist in the correspondence of things to necessities and needs of our life or in the organization of services” and that the house is “meant to shape our thoughts, suggest simple and healthy habits, invite to peaceful and serene recreation thanks to its opening towards nature.”

His leadership at Domus would allow him to play a pivotal role in this interwar period by asserting the Italian perspective and tradition to the European modernist trends of the time and by expressing his consideration to the ideas regarding the Novecento artistic movement, a counter-movement to Rationalismo.
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