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• PHOTOGRAPHY: FORNASETTI AND HASSAN ISHFAQ

A wink. A sideways glance. A playful poke of the tongue. In ancient Greece, Helen of Troy’s heart-stealing face was said to launch a thousand ships. In ‘50s Milan, another launched five hundred plates. Welcome to the world of Fornasetti.

Artist and designer Piero Fornasetti was poring over a 19th-century magazine when he struck upon the enigmatic gaze of Italian soprano Lina Cavalieri. There was little hint of a Mona Lisa smile playing at the corners of her mouth, but something in that fixed, unknowable expression stopped the artist in his tracks.

Though he never met Cavalieri, she became his muse and most enduring motif. Today, that same steady gaze watches from plates, candle jars, trays, teacups, vases and vessels. Some are like a lucid dream: here’s Cavalieri wrapped in string, concealed by passing clouds and trapped in the mouth of an alligator – still serene, as ever. “What inspired me to create more than 400 variations on the face of a woman?” Piero later asked himself. “I don’t know. I began to make them and I never stopped.”

So distinctive is Fornasetti’s painting that a fragment of her face – just the plump lips, or a single soulful eye seen through a keyhole – is unmistakable. Out of these quirky riffs and recastings (see her masked, veiled, spliced in half) emerged a series of porcelain plates he dubbed Tema e Variazioni: his Theme and Variations.

Perhaps this was the moment that made Fornasetti, but it’s not where his story started. “I will never forget the thrill when, as a boy, one summer morning on the lake, for the first time my pen began to trace the outline of a leg, then a body, then a face,” he once recalled – according to the book Piero Fornasetti: One Hundred Years of Practical Madness. “I was astonished, ecstatic and in awe of this miracle, and am still always amazed every time at this blossoming of the image I have inside me, emerging all by itself from the page.”

The young Fornasetti set up shop as a decorative artist in 1940, after years spent turning out printed books and lithographs for Italy’s art scene. Three more exiled in Switzerland in the war did little to quash Fornasetti’s creativity, only expanding his remit into textile design, set decoration and costumery.

As mass-production picked up, Fornasetti stayed true to his artisanal roots. Likeminded friends followed: architect and designer Gio Ponti became a close collaborator. Together they designed and decorated lacquered chairs, veneered cabinets, rooms of radical imagination for the Sanremo Casino and Milan’s Casa Lucano apartment. Among lost treasures is the duo’s fantastical Zodiac Suite for the ill-fated Andrea Doria ocean liner, all bespoke wallpaper and bed linen wrapped in hand-drawn astrological figures.

Post-war Milan was a playground of new ideas. If Ponti’s dream was a ‘living, versatile home, always adapting to the versatility of our life,’ then Fornasetti thought he might do the same with something that could be held in the hand. His “objects of conversation”, as he coined them, called on classicism, mythology and the natural world to elevate the everyday: here are sunbursts and butterflies, there the rigorous lines of a Palladian villa. Chilean poet, diplomat and Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda called him “a magician of precious and precise magic”. Ponti was punchier: “he makes objects speak”.

The original multi-hyphenate, Piero Fornasetti was at times a painter, sculptor, interior decorator, printmaker, illustrator, collector and craftsman. By his death in 1988 he had designed more than 13,000 objects. “It is as if Fornasetti repainted all the existing world,” said Memphis Group co-founder Ettore Sottsass.

Enter Barnaba Fornasetti. Piero’s son is brand guardian as much as heir, but he hasn’t been afraid to put his own stamp on the cult favourite. Under his watch, interest in Fornasetti’s original designs has grown and hundreds of new pieces have been thoughtfully produced. An ambitious retrospective at the Triennale Milano on the centenary of his father’s birth in 2013 celebrated their shared gift for surrealism, with plates strung from the ceiling and two enormous classical profiles positioned in a face-off. Eight years later, Louis Vuitton went deep into the Fornasetti archive to design a collection of trompe l’oeil garments, bags and accessories drawing on the brand’s heritage illustrations.

Through it all, little has changed in production: Piero’s old muse may be in constant flux, but his methods are anything but. Every piece is still made strictly by hand in the Milanese atelier and released in limited annual editions to collectors across the world. “The value of making things by hand has acquired a deep meaning for me over time,” Barnaba has said. “It goes beyond technique and the desire to preserve a firm and coherent identity. It is a choice and a way of being today, in our modern world, an ethical line that puts people and what they make at the centre of everything.” No shortcuts here.

Barnaba has also overseen the creation of Fornasetti wallpapers, home fragrances and a series of vases based on a freshly discovered sketch by his father. From interior designer Kelly Wearstler to French-Belgian fashion designer Nicolas Ghesquière, the design house counts a slew of today’s biggest creatives among its admirers. Vintage pieces are particularly prized: designer Bethan Laura Wood has said that her most treasured possession is a Fornasetti plate with a golden jug and swirling malachite pattern.

For all the wit and wonderful reinvention, Piero knew his art theory. “The idea of design is Greek, and Greek architecture consists of mathematics, and mathematics is design,” Fornasetti Snr once said. Just as well he found his Helen of Troy.