Gio Ponti. The collection of the Richard-Ginori Museum of the Doccia Factory

The ceramics designed by Gio Ponti for Richard-Ginori are well known to collectors and design scholars all over the world. Their aesthetic qualities, due to the originality of Ponti's inventions and their impeccable execution, are often extolled, but no one had previously tackled a systematic philological study of the entire corpus preserved at the Doccia Museum. This volume and its catalogue entries aim to fill this gap.

The result of a degree thesis, they are the fruit of a meticulous study of the artefacts and the various documentary sources available: Gio Ponti's autograph correspondence, drawings, catalogues, registers, price lists, period magazines, etc.. Theprecise chronology of most of the decorations and shapes is reconstructed, verifying attributions and investigating, case by case, the iconography of the rich and fascinating imagery that populated Doccia art ceramics in Ponti's time.

The references to the Italian tradition, to architecture, to archaeology, which have often been correctly, but generically, highlighted by critics, are here defined with precision, revealing sometimes unexpected sources: the Baroque ivories of the Bargello Museum, Baldassarre Peruzzi's 16th-century frescoes in the Castle of Belcaro, Petrarch's literary Triumphs, the Empire porcelain of Sèvres up to the biblical image of the Grapes of the Promised Land.