The sky was a lifelong subject for Fornasetti, and Nuvolette is its most portable form: the mural Nuvole reduced to a scale that will hang in an ordinary room. The clouds are etched rather than painted, built from fine hatched line, with weight given by the density of the mark rather than by tone. Nothing about it is soft-focus. It is a very precise drawing of something imprecise.
At a distance the wall behaves as weather. The 80 cm repeat is generous enough that the eye does not catch the point at which one cloud bank becomes the next, and the half-drop match staggers those banks across the joins so the sky keeps moving sideways as well as up. Supplied as a two-roll set, the design is intended to be read as a pair of matched drops on a 10 m length.
This is one of the few patterns that improves a low ceiling, because the movement is horizontal and the eye is drawn across rather than down. In a small dining room, a study, a stairwell or a bathroom it gives the walls something of the quality of a lantern room. It rewards restraint elsewhere: plain floors, plain textiles, and the drawing left to do the work.
