Cole & Son | Procuratie con vista

The Procuratie are the long arcaded buildings that enclose two sides of St Mark's Square, and Fornasetti drew them exactly: the repeating arches, the balustrades, the ordered ranks of windows above. Then he put monkeys in them. They hang from the cornices, sit along the balustrades and climb the columns, and the architecture carries on regardless.

Everything is described in intaglio line, with no wash and no shading, only engraved hatching of varying density. The drawing is fine enough that a wall of it reads as pale and structural from a distance and resolves into incident only on approach. The repeat is long at 101.8 cm and the roll wide at 0.69 m, which together let a full storey of arcading run before anything begins again. The straight match aligns the horizontals across the joins, which matters more here than in most papers.

A room with existing order suits it best, because the paper supplies more of the same: a hall, a stair, a dining room, a bathroom with good joinery. It sits close to monochrome in both colourways, which makes it unexpectedly easy to place beside strong furniture and dark floors. Two colourways are made, both close-toned and quiet, and neither competes with what is already in the room.