Gio Ponti (1891-1979) mirror for Fontana Arte, circa 1930, with a later 1955 mirror plate.  Bronze, mirror (plate marked “Galvanit / Fontana / 17 January 1955 / Cantù”).  Comes with certificate from the Gio Ponti Archives.  H: 33 ½” W: 24”  D:  1 ¼”  $20,000

As the most important Italian architect and designer of the twentieth century, Gio Ponti, who designed this early 1930s mirror, needs no introduction.  Nor, to the design cognoscenti, does its fabricator Fontana Arte, maker of furnishings in glass and mirror.  This firm was an offshoot of Luigi Fontana e Compagni, an industrial glass and mirror plate company founded by Luigi Fontana in 1881.  It soon came to dominate the industry on the peninsula.  At the 1906 Milan World’s Fair, they exhibited industrial glass and mirror plate in their own pavilion, where they included a line of art glass in the Liberty style, the Italian equivalent of Art Nouveau.  In 1910 a controlling stake in the firm was acquired by Satin-Gobain, the French glassworks and an industrial giant, which left Fontana’s founder in charge.  At the 1923 launch of the Monza design fair, later the Milan Triennale, Fontana exhibited art glass in the Art Deco style.  And then, in 1930, Gio Ponti [below left] began working with the firm.  Appointed design director in 1931, he promptly persuaded Fontana to buy the small artisanal glass firm of Pietro Chiesa. In 1933 Fontana and Ponti launched Fontana Arte for home furnishings, and turned the reigns over to Chiesa.  In the decades that followed, Ponti continued to submit designs for production.

In the late 1920s, Ponti was working in a stripped-down neo-classical style that can be seen in his cheval mirror and stool [above right].  Nevertheless, he was well aware of the Modern movement that was then gaining steam.  Its protagonists focused on manufactured goods priced within the reach of the masses, rejected historical references, prized undecorated form, and fetishized industrial materials [the cover of a 1925 Fontana catalog below left].  But their designs, ironically, appealed to aesthetes craving novelty, and the well-heeled intelligentsia, rather than the masses.  In Italy Modernism had an additional handicap.  There, legions of artisans were still crafting unique pieces that were competitive in price to manufactured ones, thus diminishing the movement’s moral imperative.  No wonder, then, that Ponti’s early designs for Fontana Arte included both a Neo-Classical table whimsically embellished with motifs of mermaids and sea creatures [below right], as well as a Modernist glass one [below center].

Our Ponti mirror has a bronze frame in the shape of a shield.  One might assume it was inspired by ancient Roman shields, given Ponti’s love of neo-classical motifs, and Mussolini’s efforts at the time to present his Fascist government as the natural successor to the Roman Empire.  But ancient Roman shields were circular, ovoid, or rectangular, often with chamfered corners [a first-century Roman mosaic below left], whereas our mirror has a triangular shape, characteristic of Medieval shields [one in a manuscript dating to the Middle Ages below right].  And so, while Ponti was adapting ancient Roman motifs in his work, he was also making use of ones derived from the Renaissance, Baroque, and Risorgimento periods, when he wasn’t being stridently modern.  What this goes to prove is that Ponti was a design magpie who felt free to take inspiration wherever he found it.   

Today, the appeal of our mirror derives from its elegant minimalism.  That minimalism, however, is undercut by the bronze meander, or squiggle, that forms its cresting [below left].  Ponti fondness for the flourish resurfaces throughout his career, as seen in his back support for a 1949 chair [below center].  Around 1930 it was also something of a design tick among Ponti’s colleagues, as seen in Napoleone Martinuzzi’s glass designs for Venini [below right].  There, a pair serve a purpose as handles for a vase, just as ours does too, as it screens from sight the metal plate and screw from which the mirror hangs.  Needless to say, medieval references, decorative handles, and hidden hardware, are the antithesis of Modernist doctrine, yet they’re typical of Italian Modernism.

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