Buildings for a plate from the series My Women
Gio Ponti
The drawing depicts a composition with imaginative architectural structures, featuring handwritten notes by Gio Ponti (1881-1979), including the indication ‘Buildings for Agata’. Agata is one of the nine female figures that make up the series ‘Le mie donne’, a successful group of decorations for ornamental majolica vases and plates, created by Ponti between 1923 and 1927. In the case of the plates, each female figure was accompanied by a different architectural caprice, of which this drawing is an example.
The pairings indicated do not always correspond to those actually made. In this case, for example, a similar architectural structure, 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.
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The drawing depicts a composition with imaginative architectural structures, featuring handwritten notes by Gio Ponti (1881-1979), including the indication ‘Buildings for Agata’. Agata is one of the nine female figures that make up the series ‘Le mie donne’, a successful group of decorations for ornamental majolica vases and plates, created by Ponti between 1923 and 1927. In the case of the plates, each female figure was accompanied by a different architectural caprice, of which this drawing is an example.
The pairings indicated do not always correspond to those actually made. In this case, for example, a similar architectural structure, 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.
