Fornasetti lined the dining room of his villa on Lake Como with shells, as a twentieth-century answer to the sixteenth-century grotto, those artificial caves encrusted with shell and mineral that Italian gardens built for the pleasure of the surprise. His wife Giulia made a shell ceiling light for the same room. Conchiglie is drawn from that preoccupation, which ran through the atelier's scarves, vases, trays, mirrors and tables.
The design puts the shells into a geometric structure of boxes and diamonds rather than scattering them, and the tension between the two is the whole interest. Geometry supplies the order; the shells supply the incident, each drawn as a specimen with its ribbing, spiral and aperture described. The result reads as a cabinet of curiosities laid out on a grid.
Detail is dense enough that the design gives up something new on each viewing, which is the quality Fornasetti's work is built on. A wide 0.69 m roll and a 68.5 cm straight repeat let the grid square up cleanly across widths. It suits an enclosed room where the conceit can be complete, a dining room, a study, a cloakroom or a bathroom, and it sits particularly well against plain stone and unpolished timber.
