Fornasetti Inspiration / Art

“Dear contemporaries, don’t you realise how different we are? Although I depict you as equals and like the ancients you never change.” Piero Fornasetti (1913 - 1988)

Piero Fornasetti could be described as a visionary. He was a designer but at the same time an artist, illustrator, printer, graphic designer, craftsman, manufacturer and businessman, whose products were sold in shops and department stores throughout the western world. Although a modern designer, he celebrated surface decoration. He challenged formal conventions: neither form nor decoration follow function, nor does decoration follow form.

He had a keen sense of the life of two-dimensional decoration on three-dimensional form. He was influenced by renaissance painting (Giotto, Piero della Francesca) but also by his friends, Italian metaphysical painters (Sironi, Savinio, De Chirico) and writers (Leo Longanesi). Much of his furniture was designed by Gio Ponti and decorated by Fornasetti.

For Piero Fornasetti a single idea provided a pretext to develop others. He gave full vent to his imagination to the point where most of his work is based on infinite variations on a number of themes. Among these the most recurrent are the sun, playing cards, harlequins, hands, self-portraits and so on, but the most famous, the one that he himself called...

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