Fornasetti collected images the way other people collect objects, and the flying machine was among his recurring finds: the balloon, the winged contraption, the optimistic apparatus of an age that believed the air could be occupied. Macchine Volanti gathers them into a single sky.
The drawing is engraved in character, all fine parallel line and cross-hatching, and the machines are described with the seriousness of a technical plate even where they are entirely invented. Around them the sky is populated: figures, creatures belonging to no natural order, and cloud rendered in the same tight linework. The effect is of an eighteenth-century plate enlarged and set loose, which is very much the Fornasetti method.
It comes as a two-roll set with a 76.2 cm half-drop repeat, and when ordering it is the combined width of the pair that should be used in the calculation. The design is an enveloping one and it earns its keep in an enclosed room where the sky can meet itself in the corners: a study, a small dining room, a child's room that will not be outgrown. Give it plain surfaces and let it talk. Lamplight suits it better than daylight, since the engraved line comes forward as the room darkens.
