Fornasetti Tema e Variazioni Plate No. 89, Lina Cavalieri, Circa 1980
By Piero Fornasetti
Located in Downingtown, PA
This porcelain plate is number 89 in Piero Fornasetti’s Tema e Variazioni, the series he built across his career from a single borrowed face, that of the opera singer Lina Cavalieri. Here the face is shown half-immersed. Only the brow and the eyes rise above the surface of a still lake, the lower part of the face lying below the waterline, and the eyes appear a second time in the water as a soft reflection, so that four eyes look out of the plate at once. A stand of rushes crosses the foreground at the lower edge.
The image is printed in black by lithographic transfer on a white ground, the whole worked in the fine engraved hatching and stipple that Fornasetti used throughout the series, with the horizontal ripple of the water set against the dotted modeling of the face. The device is characteristically economical: a single unbroken horizontal line converts a portrait into a landscape, and the viewer supplies the rest.
Piero Fornasetti (1913–1988) found the face in a nineteenth-century French illustrated magazine and was held by it for the rest of his working life. He was drawn not to Cavalieri’s celebrity but to the formal character of the image, a face he described as archetypal, as classic as a Greek statue and as enigmatic as the Gioconda, and therefore able to carry any idea he brought to it. He produced more than three hundred and fifty variations under the title Tema e Variazioni, almost all of them on plates, and the series has been continued since his death by his son Barnaba under the Atelier Fornasetti name.
Patrick Mauriès observes that for Fornasetti a single product never exhausted the possibilities of an idea, and that much of his work therefore takes the form of variations on a theme; among the recurring subjects he lists the sun, playing cards, the harlequin, and hands, but above all this face, which appears through the series as a moon, a flower, a lake, a mask, a mosaic, a clock, and a single disembodied eye. The present plate is the lake. The porcelain blanks were bought in and decorated at the Milan studio, and the green Arzberg mark beneath the black Fornasetti stamp records the German factory that supplied this one. Hung on its own or grouped with other plates from the series, it holds a wall far beyond its size.
Dimensions
Diameter: 10 inches (25.4 cm)
Marks
Printed to the reverse with the Fornasetti eye...
Category
Vintage 1980s Italian Mid-Century Modern Dinner Plates
