Architectures for a plate from the series My Women

The drawing depicts a composition with imaginative architectures, featuring handwritten notes by Gio Ponti (1881-1979), including the indication ‘Architectures for the Agata’. Agata is one of the nine female figures that make up the series ‘Le mie donne’, a successful family of decorations for ornamental majolica vases and plates, created by the Milanese architect between 1923 and 1927. In the case of the plates, each female figure was accompanied by a different architectural caprice, of which the drawing under consideration is an example.

The indicated pairings do not always correspond to those actually realized. In this case, for example, a similar architecture, albeit with variations, is paired with Donatella on ropes, rather than Agata. Ponti himself spoke of the enormous impression he had “living, during the war, in periods of rest from the front, in Palladian buildings, and with the possibility of seeing as many as I could”; many of his decorations for Richard-Ginori art ceramics, as well as the first buildings he designed in the 1920s, confirm this inspiration.