Through the case of the Zileri art institute in Rome, the essay reflects on the contribution of

the handicraft schools to the renewal of the repertoires and taste of Italian decorative arts

between the end of the WWII and the affirmation of industrial design. Considering the first

years of activity of this all-girl private high school, run by the Ursuline nuns and specialised

in textile production and leatherwork, is relevant for the quality of the education given to

the students. Responsible for that was the painter Toti Scialoja, headmaster of the school

until 1950, and a very selected teaching staff that included valued artists and/or artisans

like Bice Lazzari (who was starting to affirm herself as an abstract painter), Maria Marino

and Marcella Toppi.

A year-end exhibition hosted in the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome in the summer

of 1950 demonstrates how the students had developed a modern sensibility in art, embracing

a non-referential language. At the same time, the press reviews of the exhibition

document the reception of their works, giving an insight into the debate around abstract

art. This event and the participation of the school at the 9th Milan Triennial in 1951 reveal

the appreciation recognised to the Zileri institute from two of the most prestigious institutions

active in Italy at that time in support of the contemporary artistic research and the

attention paid by these realities to the new generation in training.

Giorgio Levi

Giorgio Levi, triestino di nascita e pisano di adozione, è stato professore ordinario di Informatica fino al 2012: uno dei fondatori della prestigiosa scuola pisana, ricercatore noto a livello internazionale, insignito dell’ordine del Cherubino. Da anni collezionista di ceramica italiana del primo novecento, si è trasformato in studioso, dedicandosi alla riscoperta e valorizzazione di ceramisti, manifatture e distretti ceramici dimenticati o mai studiati in modo scientifico. Ha pubblicato 7 libri e curato 2 mostre.

The essay takes its cue from a text that Gio Ponti published in 1949 to describe the multifaceted

activity of Pietro Chiesa (1892-1948), a longtime friend and fellow artist, and with

him artistic director of Fontana Arte. The «romantics» and «amusements» are, in fact, for

Ponti objects in which the exuberance of Chiesa’s imagination grants him explorations

into other eras or ironic games. The expression “storehouse of ideas”, penned by Chiesa in

some of the sheets in which he notes and imprisons fleeting ideas to be sifted and, if appropriate,

developed, is worth recalling the multiplicity of cues that makes up his visual and

creative baggage and that is particularly reflected in the «romantics» and «amusements»:

from objects from all eras and origins in his heterogeneous art collection (including those

from the Romantic period) to his encounters with contemporary Italian and international

artists (including the Surrealists).

Proposing a selection of examples, the text aims to show how in the «romantics» and

«amusements» objects the creative process of Chiesa does not follow schemes or programmatic

principles, but relies on falling in love with a form or matter and the fun of creation,

without ever forgetting the rigor and seriousness necessary for perfect execution:

all indispensable elements for achieving what he himself had called the «joys of art that

cannot be constrained in a formula».

Giorgio Levi

Giorgio Levi, triestino di nascita e pisano di adozione, è stato professore ordinario di Informatica fino al 2012: uno dei fondatori della prestigiosa scuola pisana, ricercatore noto a livello internazionale, insignito dell’ordine del Cherubino. Da anni collezionista di ceramica italiana del primo novecento, si è trasformato in studioso, dedicandosi alla riscoperta e valorizzazione di ceramisti, manifatture e distretti ceramici dimenticati o mai studiati in modo scientifico. Ha pubblicato 7 libri e curato 2 mostre.

The Sicilian carts have been, and are, the expression of an important popular artistic culture,

heritage of the Sicilian people, which has influenced industrial and artisanal artistic

productions and even contemporary design. The essay analyzes three cases: the series

of furniture by Ernesto Basile, produced by Ducrot around 1906 and some creations by

Ducrot and others from the mid-1920s; a group of furnishings made in the 1920s and

1930s, in the style of the Catania carts; the dazzling contemporary creations of Dolce and

Gabbana stylists.

Giorgio Levi

Giorgio Levi, triestino di nascita e pisano di adozione, è stato professore ordinario di Informatica fino al 2012: uno dei fondatori della prestigiosa scuola pisana, ricercatore noto a livello internazionale, insignito dell’ordine del Cherubino. Da anni collezionista di ceramica italiana del primo novecento, si è trasformato in studioso, dedicandosi alla riscoperta e valorizzazione di ceramisti, manifatture e distretti ceramici dimenticati o mai studiati in modo scientifico. Ha pubblicato 7 libri e curato 2 mostre.

Paper furnishings: the designs for furniture from the Lenci manufacture

The Lenci manufactory, founded in Turin in 1919 by Elena König and her husband Enrico

Scavini, specialized in the creation of puppets and dolls in colored fabric, wooden toys,

clothing and fashion items, adding a more limited production of furniture for children’s

rooms and home decoration accessories, designed by leading artists called to collaborate

over the years with the company. The paper analyzes Gigi Chessa, Mario Sturani and

Giuseppe Porcheddu’s inventions through a corpus of drawings and technical projects

conserved in a private collection in Turin, which allow us to highlight the co-existence

within the Lenci repertoire of different stylistic trends, starting from furnishings inspired

by shapes and models of the past to arrive at the experiments closer to the innovations

of international Déco, up to the typical production in Lenci style, characterized by bright

colors, original forms and iconographic references taken from the world of fairy tales and

childhood.

Giorgio Levi

Giorgio Levi, triestino di nascita e pisano di adozione, è stato professore ordinario di Informatica fino al 2012: uno dei fondatori della prestigiosa scuola pisana, ricercatore noto a livello internazionale, insignito dell’ordine del Cherubino. Da anni collezionista di ceramica italiana del primo novecento, si è trasformato in studioso, dedicandosi alla riscoperta e valorizzazione di ceramisti, manifatture e distretti ceramici dimenticati o mai studiati in modo scientifico. Ha pubblicato 7 libri e curato 2 mostre.

TIn the two decades during which Angiolo Mazzoni del Grande (Bologna 1894 - Rome 1979)

worked as an architect-engineer, and therefore as a technical manager, of the Ministry of

Communications of the Kingdom of Italy, starting from 1921 and up to the Second World

War, draws up projects and builds buildings relating to a large number of institutional assignments;

his architectures for post office buildings, railway stations, social housing, and

technical or service buildings (but also for free time) cover a significant share in the category

of public buildings identified as a witness to the institutional mystique of the Fascist

period. Mazzoni vigorously interprets the ethos based on the principle of robustness as

a metaphor for virtue and reliability; but at the same time his position as an integral designer,

and therefore also oriented to the (often planned) insertion of works of art both as

endowments and as an integral part of the architectural context, is almost an updated

re-proposition of the ideal of design culture of the modernist period, albeit with aesthetic

decks of very different sign. His will and the actual achievements for his architectures of

iconic accessories, whose cultural possibilism reveals a versatile profile even in consideration

of the declared preference for the Futurists (even if limited in time), have contributed

in a decisive way to that movement. of ideas and opinions which, within a few years, would

lead to the formulation of the Law of 11 May 1942, n. 839, with which the then Minister of

National Education Giuseppe Bottai established the principles to regulate and encourage

the creation or introduction of works of art in public buildings; Republican Italy, in 1949,

would have relaunched these proposals with very different political and cultural purposes

but, nevertheless, similarly indebted to the direction indicated by Mazzoni’s work.

Giorgio Levi

Giorgio Levi, triestino di nascita e pisano di adozione, è stato professore ordinario di Informatica fino al 2012: uno dei fondatori della prestigiosa scuola pisana, ricercatore noto a livello internazionale, insignito dell’ordine del Cherubino. Da anni collezionista di ceramica italiana del primo novecento, si è trasformato in studioso, dedicandosi alla riscoperta e valorizzazione di ceramisti, manifatture e distretti ceramici dimenticati o mai studiati in modo scientifico. Ha pubblicato 7 libri e curato 2 mostre.

The purpose of this paper is to reconsider the vicissitudes of Albisolese ceramics inspired

by the past, which, during the twentieth century, though undervalued compared to the

privileged circuit of art although his production has been conspicuous and uninterrupted

in the area’s factories. Buoyed by the examples of the historicist revival of eclectic taste

and the vehicle of knowledge and dissemination constituted by the proliferation of major

exhibitions, local entrepreneurs, beginning in the late 20th century, intended to revive the

Baroque splendor and Rococo graces of Ligurian majolica of the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries, creating a composite style, defined as “ancient Savona.” Among the most

talented creators of this decoration were Dario Ravano and Romeo Bevilacqua. Their repertoires

and not the antique prototypes came to be the models to be followed by the painters

who worked in the manufactories, which sprang up in large numbers in the Albisole

after World War I, thanks to the contingency favorable to crafts and applied arts and, after

World War II, thanks to the economic boom and the considerable flow of tourism that had

poured into the Ligurian Riviera.

Giorgio Levi

Giorgio Levi, triestino di nascita e pisano di adozione, è stato professore ordinario di Informatica fino al 2012: uno dei fondatori della prestigiosa scuola pisana, ricercatore noto a livello internazionale, insignito dell’ordine del Cherubino. Da anni collezionista di ceramica italiana del primo novecento, si è trasformato in studioso, dedicandosi alla riscoperta e valorizzazione di ceramisti, manifatture e distretti ceramici dimenticati o mai studiati in modo scientifico. Ha pubblicato 7 libri e curato 2 mostre.

The work reflects on the comparative method that distinguishes the production of Leonardo

da Vinci, whose multifaceted ingenuity finds practical application in his ability to

bring together apparently extraneous faculties and applications in coherent logical units,

according to an approach that fully embodies the aspiration to the characteristic syncretism

of his time.

In the analysis of the man and the work, I have traced a useful medium to connect three

forms of expression which can be considered themselves as media, vehicles of “images”

that have been belatedly recognized and formalized: fashion, painting and cinema, completely

autonomous fields, although interconnected within underground strata, being

sources of endless analytical and interpretative ideas.

The title should also be understood in an analogical and comparative sense: Leonardo’s

“plots” are the traits of his personality and refer to the allegorical narratives that run

through his canvases and to the interwoven motifs that the artist drew throughout his

life, as if they were the leitmotif of his entire sensitive experience. The plots are also those

of fashion, its stories and its fabrics which tell, including the cinematographic plots as well,

the constituent values of an era.

The first part of this article relates to the “universal genius” and the great Russian film

director Sergei M. Ejzenštejn, who passionately studied Leonardo’s work, drawing inspiration

from the master’s pictorial compositions for the shots of his films. Linked by surprising

attitudinal and character connections, Ejzenštejn and Leonardo were both set designers

and ‘costume designers’, as well as artists capable to revolutionize the concept of the image.

The second part focuses on the years Leonardo spent at the sumptuous court of Ludovico il

Moro (1482 - 1499), the beating heart of a Milan which at the end of the 15th century was

experiencing an extraordinary economic and cultural boom.

In what today we would call the “Milano da bere” (literally, “Milan to drink”, an expression

that in Italian indicates Milan’s rich and lively social life in the 1980s), a cultural capital

that found its main form of expression in appearances and in the seductive artefacts of

fashion, Leonardo, a refined connoisseur of fabrics, now urged on by patrons and by direct

contact with Milan’s luxury factories, practiced his skills in matters of clothing, developing

ingenious machines for the textile sector and real paper patterns for clothes destined to

enrich the sumptuous Sforza wardrobe.

Giorgio Levi

Giorgio Levi, triestino di nascita e pisano di adozione, è stato professore ordinario di Informatica fino al 2012: uno dei fondatori della prestigiosa scuola pisana, ricercatore noto a livello internazionale, insignito dell’ordine del Cherubino. Da anni collezionista di ceramica italiana del primo novecento, si è trasformato in studioso, dedicandosi alla riscoperta e valorizzazione di ceramisti, manifatture e distretti ceramici dimenticati o mai studiati in modo scientifico. Ha pubblicato 7 libri e curato 2 mostre.

Ten years after the untimely death of the artist Ugo Marano, which took place in October

2011, the author resumes the ‘dialogue’ with the sculptor, ceramist and designer who

marked a significant page in Italian contemporary art. The attention focuses on two aspects

of his extensive creative experience, narrowing the narrative into a chronological

span and which, from the late Sixties, reach the very early Nineties. An analysis aimed at

clarifying the tones, the innovations that, dialectically, Marano, by the end of the Sixties,

did, challenging the Arte Povera, Conceptual, Minimalism movements and, then, challenging

the groups active in the vast Italian scenario of the 1980s, marked by that jungle of

individual experiences, of groups that will feed the postmodern condition, which sent a

new vision of art, of the market and of criticism, above all.

The artist’s experience, in those years, left no room for the uncertainty of identity or for

feverish hesitations of thought: all that happened at a precise moment of Italian and international

artistic culture, projected towards the triumph of appearance, of excess rush

to zero out any vitality or ferment that had plowed through the immediately preceding

decades. Marano, on the other hand, with his work which, on several occasions deliberately

touched utopia, affirmed the identity of an existential experience, charged with an

original, primary force: that of a new Prometheus.

Giorgio Levi

Giorgio Levi, triestino di nascita e pisano di adozione, è stato professore ordinario di Informatica fino al 2012: uno dei fondatori della prestigiosa scuola pisana, ricercatore noto a livello internazionale, insignito dell’ordine del Cherubino. Da anni collezionista di ceramica italiana del primo novecento, si è trasformato in studioso, dedicandosi alla riscoperta e valorizzazione di ceramisti, manifatture e distretti ceramici dimenticati o mai studiati in modo scientifico. Ha pubblicato 7 libri e curato 2 mostre.

The essay presents two private collections of handcrafted furniture, produced in Sicily in

the 1920s and 1930s, in various styles (secessionist, futurist, deco). Most of the furnishings

are due to unknown artisans, influenced by the work of important players also on a

national level, such as Basile, Ducrot, Bevilacqua, Fallica, Morici and Rizzo. There are many

furnishings from the dismantling of workshops and shops of artistic and historical interest,

which should be protected with the imposition of constraints.

Giorgio Levi

Giorgio Levi, triestino di nascita e pisano di adozione, è stato professore ordinario di Informatica fino al 2012: uno dei fondatori della prestigiosa scuola pisana, ricercatore noto a livello internazionale, insignito dell’ordine del Cherubino. Da anni collezionista di ceramica italiana del primo novecento, si è trasformato in studioso, dedicandosi alla riscoperta e valorizzazione di ceramisti, manifatture e distretti ceramici dimenticati o mai studiati in modo scientifico. Ha pubblicato 7 libri e curato 2 mostre.

Hans Stoltenberg Lerche (Düsseldorf 1867-Rome 1920)

Painter and sculptor devoted to applied art, Lerche, despite living abroad, has always

claimed his Norwegian nationality. After years of training in Paris where he made his

debut at the Salon as a portrait sculptor and as a ceramist, he settled in Rome in 1901.

From then on, he participated in all the most important art exhibitions held in Italy: he

was present in Turin in 1902, in Milan in 1906, in Venice at the Biennale in different years,

and in Rome at the annual exhibitions of the Amatori e Cultori di Belle Arti. He exhibited

sculptures in terracotta or bronze, plates and vases in porcelain or ceramic, jewels in gold

or silver and semi-precious stones, jugs, boxes, inkwells in pewter, silver or bronze. Artworks

that aroused the admiration of the public and the applause of critics intrigued by

the twisted and sinuous shapes of the metal objects, by the original combination of the

ceramic with-metal (that is, the application to the ceramic of bronze or silver trimmings,

edges, sockets, handles), and by the decorations: extravagant picturesque silhouettes

of crustaceans and insects or orchids and other flowers in the ceramics and disturbing

animals, spiders, scorpionfish, or mocking mythological figures, satyrs and fauns in the

metal artifacts. A free interpreter of Art Nouveau, Lerche combined the oddities of Nordic

sagas with the culture of classical Mediterranean mythology. A craftsman artist, he was

himself the executor of the objects he conceived. Always intent on experimenting, in 1911

he began a fertile collaboration with the Fratelli Toso furnace in Murano and created glass

vases, cups, and plates, operating a revolution toward modernity in both form and decoration.

At the height of his success and notoriety he died in 1920 crushed by Spanish fever.

Giorgio Levi

Giorgio Levi, triestino di nascita e pisano di adozione, è stato professore ordinario di Informatica fino al 2012: uno dei fondatori della prestigiosa scuola pisana, ricercatore noto a livello internazionale, insignito dell’ordine del Cherubino. Da anni collezionista di ceramica italiana del primo novecento, si è trasformato in studioso, dedicandosi alla riscoperta e valorizzazione di ceramisti, manifatture e distretti ceramici dimenticati o mai studiati in modo scientifico. Ha pubblicato 7 libri e curato 2 mostre.