Piero Fornasetti collected books on the applied arts obsessively, and the library became one of the recurring subjects of the Milanese atelier. Ex Libris is drawn from a screen he made in 1953: shelves of bound volumes, stacked, leaning, some pulled forward and others set back, rendered as a trompe l'oeil so that a flat wall acquires the depth of a bookcase.
The trick works because the drawing is precise rather than painterly. Each spine is described in line, with its bands, its label and the ridges of the binding, and the illusion is carried by the discipline of the perspective rather than by shading. At 76 cm the repeat is long enough that the shelves do not obviously recur, and the half-drop match staggers the courses so they meet across a seam the way real shelving would. The volumes themselves vary in height and thickness, which is what keeps the shelving from looking ruled.
Papering a small room in it is the point. A study, a cloakroom, the back of a bookcase wall, a windowless hall: anywhere the illusion can close around you. Against dark timber, a good reading light and a leather chair it stops being a joke and becomes a room.
