The Italian artist and designer Piero Fornasetti is best known for his classically oriented, engraving-like style. He grew up in Milan, where in the early 1940s he founded the design and decorative arts atelier that bears his name. A decisive factor in starting this activity was meeting the architect and industrial designer Gio Ponti, who pushed him to develop his intuition and produce everyday objects enriched by the kind of decoration that would bring art into ordinary people’s homes. This was the origin of the Fornasetti atelier, an example of the principle of follia pratica  or ‘practical madness’, where creativity is in perfect harmony with the utility of the object. 

During his long career Fornasetti designed thousands of examples of clothing, ceramics and furniture, and produced paintings, sculptures and engravings, almost always with an anthropomorphic twist. One notable series of over five hundred images and objects entitled Tema e Variazioni was inspired by the image of the face of the nineteenth-century opera singer Lina Cavalieri, which he saw in a magazine dating from her time. The images were applied to everything from porcelain plates to cabinets, wallpapers to chairs.

Fornasetti also collaborated with Ponti on a series of hand-painted credenzas, fabric designs and interiors, including those aboard the doomed ocean liner Andrea Doria, with patterns that featured celestial bodies, anthropomorphised flora and fauna, and magical flying machines. In addition he was an engraver, a collector, a gallerist, a stylist, a sculptor, and not least of all a painter. ‘He was in love with his work – that was the most important thing in the world for him,’ says his son Barnaba Fornasetti, who took over the family atelier after his father’s death.

We are very grateful to our Russian friend Yuri for suggesting the inclusion of this artist, and for supplying the images.