Serveware, Ceramics, Silver and Glass

Piero Fornasetti.

Small dish in green glass, Venini Murano ca. 1930s A small glass dish in transparent green glass, most probably designed by Carlo Scarpa. Manufacture...

1950s Fornasetti original astonishing porcelain vide poche/catchall "Sonate- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart" by Piero Fornasetti . Heavy porcelain construction for use as beautiful desk acc...

Vintage celadon/mint green ceramic ashtray/trinket dish with cigarette slots by Piero Fornasetti, (circa 1950s, Italy). Features lithographic tra...

Laura Diaz de Santillana (b. 1955) for Venini rare Sommersi Oro vase from "Laura" series, Italy, 1993. This elegant hand-blown Murano glass vase is an exquisite blue color with gold ...

Eight drinks coasters designed by Piero Fornasetti in the 'Vini E Liquori' pattern, each depicting a different liquor bottle label in 22 karat gold.

Cocktail Fornasetti Time! Fabulous complete set of 8 spirits and wine coasters including Whisky, Rum, Port, Brandy, Sherry, Rhenish, Gin and Madeira called 'Vini e Liquori'. A vintage classic and perfect for entertaining. Note with lighting some of the golds vary however they are all consistent color of a nice gilt but lighting creates...

Pair of rare Piero Fornasetti Fish Plates, Pesci pattern or Passage of Fish, Numbered # 2 & 3, circa 1960s The porcelain plates depict two diff...

Large Vetro Sommerso Vase by Carlo Scarpa for Venini Murano, circa 1930s. A large vetro sommerso bollicine vase designed by Carlo Scarpa between 1934 a...

Piero Fornasetti Porcelain Sezioni Di Frutta Dessert Plates, Nos 4 and 12 Made Exclusively for Tiffany, Circa 1970 The tromp l"oeil porcelain plates each depicts a section of ...

Piero Fornasetti Rosenthal Porcelain Themes & Variations Plate, Motiv 27, With Original Box, 1980s The Piero Fornasetti Themes & Variation design is made on Rosenthal porcelain....

“Poliedri” chandelier designed by Carlo Scarpa and produced by the Italian manufacturer Venini in, 1958. Made of opaline Murano glass. Born in Venice on June 2nd, 1906, Carlo Scarpa began working at a very early age. Only a year after he had first qualified as an architect in 1926, he began working for the Murano glassmakers Cappellin & Co. in a consultative capacity; from 1927, he began to experiment with the Murano glass, and this research not only gave him excellent results here but would also inform his progress for many years to come. Between 1935 and 1937, as he entered his thirties, Carlo Scarpa accepted his first important commission, the renovation of Venice’s Cà Foscari. He adapted the spaces of this stately University building which stands on the banks of the Grand Canal, creating rooms for the Dean’s offices and a new hall for academic ceremonies; Mario Sironi and Mario De Luigi were charged with doing the restoration work on the frescos. After 1945, Carlo Scarpa found himself constantly busy with new commissions, including various furnishings and designs for the renovation of Venice’s Hotel Bauer and designing a tall building in Padua and a residential area in Feltre, which are all worth mention. One of his key works, despite its relatively modest diminished proportions, was the first of many works which were to follow in the nineteen fifties: the [bookshop known as the] Padiglione del Libro, which stands in Venice’s Giardini di Castello and shows clearly Scarpa’s passion for the works of Frank Lloyd Wright. In the years which were to follow, after he had met the American architect, Scarpa repeated similar experiments on other occasions, as can be seen, in particular, in the sketches he drew up in 1953 for villa Zoppas in Conegliano, which show some of his most promising work. However, this work unfortunately never came to fruition. Carlo Scarpa later created three museum layouts to prove pivotal in terms of how twentieth-century museums were to be set up from then on. Between 1955 and 1957, he completed extension work on Treviso’s Gipsoteca Canoviana [the museum that houses Canova’s sculptures] in Possagno, taking a similar experimental approach to the one he used for the Venezuelan Pavilion at [Venice’s] Giardini di Castello which he was building at the same time (1954-56). In Possagno Carlo Scarpa was to create one of his greatest ever works, which inevitably bears comparison with two other museum layouts that he was working on over the same period, those of the Galleria Nazionale di Sicilia, housed in the Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo (1953-55) and at the Castelvecchio in Verona (1957- 1974), all of which were highly acclaimed, adding to his growing fame. Two other buildings, which are beautifully arranged in spatial terms, can be added to this long list of key works that were started and, in some cases, even completed during the nineteen fifties. After winning the Olivetti award for architecture in 1956, Scarpa began work in Venice’s Piazza San Marco on an area destined to house products made by the Industrial manufacturers Ivrea. Over the same period (1959-1963), he also worked on renovation and restoration of the gardens and ground floor of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice, which many consider being one of his greatest works. While he busied himself working on-site at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Carlo Scarpa also began work building a villa in Udine for the Veritti family. To shed some light on the extent to which his work evolved over the years, it may perhaps be useful to compare this work with that of his very last building, villa Ottolenghi Bardolino, which was near to completion at the time of his sudden death in 1978. Upon completion of villa Veritti over the next ten years, without ever letting up on his work on renovation and layouts, Scarpa accepted some highly challenging commissions which were to make the most of his formal skills, working on the Carlo Felice Theatre in Genoa as well as another theatre in Vicenza. Towards the end of this decade, in 1969, Rina Brion commissioned Carlo Scarpa to build the Brion Mausoleum in San Vito d’Altivole (Treviso), a piece he continued to work on right up until the moment of his death. Nevertheless, even though he was totally absorbed by work on this mausoleum, there are plenty of other episodes which can offer some insight into the final years of his career. As work on the San Vito d’Altivole Mausoleum began to lessen from 1973, Carlo Scarpa began work building the new headquarters for the Banca Popolare di Verona. He drew up plans that were surprisingly different from the work he was carrying out at the same time on the villa Ottolenghi. However, the plans Carlo Scarpa drew up, at different times, for a monument in Brescia’s Piazza della Loggia commemorating victims of the terrorist attack on May 28th, 1974, make a sharp contrast to the work he carried out in Verona, almost as if there is a certain hesitation after so many mannered excesses. The same Pietas that informs his designs for the Piazza Della Loggia can also be seen in the presence of the water that flows through the Brion Mausoleum, almost as if to give a concrete manifestation of pity in this twentieth-century work of art. Carlo Scarpa has put together a highly sophisticated collection of structures, occupying the mausoleum’s L-shaped space stretching across both sides of the old San Vito d’Altivole cemetery. A myriad of different forms and an equally large number of different pieces, all of which are separate and yet inextricably linked to form a chain that seems to offer no promise of continuity, rising up out of these are those whose only justification for being there is to bear the warning “si vis vitam, para mortem”, [if you wish to experience life prepare for death] as if to tell a tale that suggests the circle of time, joining together the commemoration of the dead with a celebration of life. At the entrance of the Brion Mausoleum stand the “propylaea” followed by a cloister which ends by a small chapel, with an arcosolium bearing the family sarcophagi, the main pavilion, held in place on broken cast iron supports, stands over a mirror-shaped stretch of water and occupies one end of the family’s burial space. The musical sound of the walkways teamed with the luminosity of these harmoniously blended spaces shows how, in keeping with his strong sense of vision, Carlo Scarpa could make the most of all of his many skills to come up with this truly magnificent space. As well as a great commitment to architectural work, with the many projects which we have already seen punctuating his career, Carlo Scarpa also made many equally important forays into the world of applied arts. Between 1926 and 1931, he worked for the Murano glassmakers Cappellin, later taking what he had learned with him when he went to work for the glassmakers Venini from 1933 until the 1950s. The story of how he came to work on furniture design is different, however, and began with the furniture he designed to replace lost furnishings during his renovation of Cà Foscari. The later mass-produced furniture started differently, given that many pieces were originally one-off designs “made to measure”. Industrial manufacturing using these designs as prototypes came into being thanks to the continuity afforded him by Dino Gavina, who, as well as this, also invited Carlo Scarpa to become president of the company Gavina SpA, later to become SIMON, a company Gavina founded 8 years on, in partnership with Maria Simoncini (whose own name accounts for the choice of company name). Carlo Scarpa and Gavina forged a strong bond in 1968 as they began to put various models of his into production for Simon, such as the “Doge” table, which also formed the basis for the “Sarpi” and “Florian” tables. In the early seventies, other tables that followed included “Valmarana”, “Quatour” and “Orseolo”. While in 1974, they added couch and armchair “Cornaro” to the collection and the “Toledo” bed...

Article: Murano glass bowl element Producer: Venini Glass, Murano Origin: Murano, Italy Decade: 1970s These original vintage glass element was designe...

Colletti series vase in greenish blown glass with two-tone incalmo band decoration designer Alessandro Diaz de Santillana. Venini engraved signature. After graduating in architecture...

Set of eight ceramic coasters by Fornasetti, in the "Pallino" pattern. Each painted with an historic hot air balloon on the front with English translat...

Piero Fornasetti Fleming Joffe Porcelain recipe plate, Beautiful Soup, 1960s. This rare Piero Fornasetti porcelain plate is from a series of fourteen made for the Fleming Joffe company in New York City. It depicts an improbable and amusing recipe with an image of a toad. Diameter: 10 1/4 inches x 1 inch high. The Fleming Joffe company was a small leather goods...

Vintage Piero Fornasetti astrolabe plate, Numbered #7 in Series 1960s-mid 1970s. The Piero Fornasetti porcelain plate depicts an astrolabe in a ...

Beautiful Venini vase in this canes twisted work, zanfirico technic that makes lattice patterns . This vase has a neck shape and is signed in bottom diamond point "Venini Italia" .

Beautiful Venini paperweight / abstract sculpture with a traditional swirl ribbon design. This is signed and is shown with circle marker in last picture, very faded, but is (Venini I...

Piero Fornasetti plate.

1960s Original astonishing porcelain catchall / vide-poche "La Gioconda" by Piero Fornasetti. Heavy porcelain construction for use as beautiful desk accessories. Marked on the bottom...

Beautiful antique Murano hand blown Sommerso clear bubbles in champagne or caramel color with gold flecks Italian art glass ashtray. Documented to Venini company, and created by mast...

Piero Fornasetti Ceramic Zodiac "Libra" Pebble Paperweight, Original Gold Box, 1960s This rare Piero Fornasetti Ceramic pebble paperweight in its original gold presentation box....

Circa 1930s, Venini, Italy. These early modernist tumblers were designed by Carlo Scarpa in 1932. Delicately toned with cobalt blue rims they are decades ahead of their time. Excelle...

Made in Italy, 1930s. These cherries are made by Napoleone Martinuzzi for Venini in Murano glass. This item might show slight traces of use since it's vintage as a chip on the top t...

An Italian porcelain jewelry tray or dish with Greco-Roman design by designer by Piero Fornasetti, circa mid-20th century, 1960s, Italy. Tray is black and gold with a Greco-Roman sce...

Vintage Fornasetti Surrealist Porcelain Themes & Variation Plate #319, Gorgonzola Cheese, Atelier Fornasetti 20th Century The Surreal Fornasetti porcelain plate in the Themes & Vari...

1960s Original astonishing porcelain catchall / vide-poche "Arturo Toscanini" by Piero Fornasetti. Heavy porcelain construction for use as beautiful desk accessories. Marked on the b...

Large Venini Art Glass vase with Inciso Decoration Paolo Venini, Murano 1956 A large vintage art glass vase in notte (night) blue pesante glass ...

Vintage Fornasetti Porcelain Themes & Variation Plate #14, The Keyhole, Atelier Fornasetti The Surreal Fornasetti porcelain plate in the Themes & Variation pattern depicts a keyhole...

Piero Fornasetti "Mitologia" set of 8 bar or drink coasters, circa 1970's. This stylish set of cocktail coasters were produced exclusively for the New York City department store Bonw...

Monumental Paolo Venini vase model 3556 for Venini in light grey Opalino glass. The second smaller vase measures Diameter 13 x H 38 cm. Both vases carry the Venini label and are Acid etched Venini Murano Italia...

Piero Fornasetti porcelain plate, Giastra di Frutta # 6, 1955-1965 The pattern "Giostra di Frutta" translates as a Merry-Go-Round...

Piero Fornasetti Porcelain Sezioni Di Frutta Dessert Plate, No 12 for Tiffany, Circa 1970 The tromp l"oeil porcelain plate depicts a section of fruit, a pear, on a white backgr...

Piero Fornasetti porcelain newspaper plate, Daily Express, Giornali (Newspapers) Late 1950s. (NY8534B) The Piero Fornasetti porcelain plate depicts the front page of the Daily Express from Saturday, February 11, 1956, with the main headline reading "Now, Shiver and Shake", regarding cold temperatures in Europe. Another amusing headline is "Marilyn charming says Vivien", referring to Vivien Leigh, Sir Laurence Oliver's wife on meeting Marilyn Monroe. Dimensions: 10 1/4 inches diameter x 1/2 inch height. (26.04 cm) Mark: Marked with a black rectangle, the classic Fornasetti hand...

Rare beautiful Tapio Wirkkala “Polipo” plate for Venini, from the serie “Piatti di Tapio” signed and dated Venini TW 90 on the back, made of Murano glass using Incalmo technique. The...

Eight stackable glass vases attributed to Timo Sarpaneva for Venini. Each glass vase measures about 6.5" high and 5" diameter.  

Rare Laura de Santillana for Venini blown glass designed in the 1980s, large “Klee” model, signed Venini Italia Laura 84. This beautiful murano piec...

VENINI - mid-century studio glass latticino 'handkerchief' vase - striking pink ribbons with copper aventurine edges - unsigned - Italy (Venice) - circa 1950. Excellent vintage co...

Beautiful vintage well sized Murano hand blown glass bowl. The bowl is fashioned using the famous Sommerso technique, creating clear bubbles in champagne or caramel colour with gold flecks. This is most likely the work of the famous Venini glass foundry. This technique has been published in various Venini books. Created in the "a Bollicine...

Vintage Piero Fornasetti astrolabe porcelain plate, #1 in Astrolabio pattern, 1960s-mid 1970s.   The Piero Fornasetti plate depicts an astrol...

Beautiful vintage Murano hand blown Sommerso blue and peachy color Italian art glass flower vase. Designed by Paolo Venini, circa 1955 for Venini e. Co. The vase has an elegant taper...

VENINI - mid century Murano Fazzoletto Filigrana glass vase - yellow, white and clear canes - rare large size - smooth polished ground pontil mark...

Rare Six Mid-Century Modern Handpainted Plates by Piero Fornasetti, "Floralia", 1950s. Plate from the Floralia series by Pierro Fornasetti for his...

Made in Italy, 1940s. This tiny bonbonniere is made in sommerso Murano glass, with gold flakes and few bubbles due to the process of glass blowing. It is a vintage piece, but it can ...

A stunning and large Venetian Murano art glass vase in peach colored translucent overlaid glass with gold aventurine inclusions made by...

1970s Rare Porcelain Ashtray/Vide Poche by Piero Fornasetti for Winston accessories. Signed at the bottom. The item is in very good condition. Dimensions: W 7,28 in. x D 7,28 in. x...

Unusual early plate by Pierro Fornasetti. This design is no longer in production and relates to his early work but is not a theme he later continued into production. In 1945 he advertised Camus' tragedy Caligula and this is th closest reference to this motif in which he advertises Le Scala...

Article: Murano glass bowl elements set of 2 Producer: Venini Glass, Murano Origin: Murano, Italy Decade: 1970s These original vintage glass elements ...

Fornasetti Porcelain Surrealist Themes & Variation Plate #83, The Light Bulb, Atelier Fornasetti The Surreal Fornasetti porcelain plate in the Themes & Variation pattern depicts the...

Made in Italy, Murano, 1930s. Between 1932 and 1933 the Milanese architect Tomaso Buzzi, a spirited protagonist of the Milan “neoclassicist” movement, a friend and associate of Gio Ponti, and a partner of Il Labirinto, established a fruitful collaboration with the Venini glassware company, which would continue, albeit episodically, in later years. The architect’s creative contribution was evident both in the glass forms and in their innovative manufacturing technique. When Buzzi arrived at the Venini company in Murano, in 1932, he brought with him a remarkable cultural baggage and a thorough knowledge of ancient art, particularly the Etruscan period...

Piero Fornasetti Rosenthal porcelain themes & variations plate, Motiv 27, 1980s The Piero Fornasetti Themes & Variation design is made on Rosenthal porcelain. The pattern, Motiv ...

964.10 Triedri Crystal/Amber color glass. Chandelier composed of “Triedri“ elements in solid cristallo- and amber-coloured glass that when curved take on a hemispherical shape. The structure and chain are in chrome-plated metal. The Triedri, conceived between 1958 and 1960, are solid cristallo glass elements that, used as vertical modules for lighting fixtures, can be assembled to form various shapes. The trihedron, as a crystalline prism with a triangular section...

A beautiful Corroso a Bugne vase by Carlo Scarpa for Venini. With acid signature "Venini Murano" Literature: "Venetian Art Glass: An American Collection 1840 - 1970", Barovier, pag...

1970s Rare Porcelain Ashtray/Vide Poche by Piero Fornasetti for Winston accessories. Signed at the bottom. The item is in very good condition. Dimensions: W 7,28 in. x D 7,28 in. x...

A beautiful Venini Fazzalleto vase of green and white Zanfirico. A Fulvio Bianconi Design. Acid signed on the bottom with the 'three line signature'. Venini Murano Italia

Rare Laura de Santillana for Venini blown glass designed in the 1980s, “Klee” model, signed Venini Italia Laura 84. This beautiful murano piece feat...

A set of six (6) vintage catch all crescent shaped decorative dishes designed and manufactured by the Italian master of playful and surreal self-expr...