Punchinello is a harlequin, the diamond lattice of the commedia dell'arte costume taken off the stage and put onto a wall. It is named for the scheming servant of the Neapolitan tradition, and it has something of his character: formal on the surface, not quite trustworthy underneath.
The diamonds are not mechanical. Each is drawn with a slightly uneven edge and printed so the colour sits unevenly within it, which stops the grid from reading as a grid and gives the wall the quality of painted plaster or of pieced cloth. At a 46 cm repeat on a 0.52 m roll the scale is medium, large enough to be read as a pattern and small enough not to dominate a small room, and the straight match keeps the diamond rows level across the joins.
Harlequin is one of the few patterns that works equally in a nursery and in a dining room, and this one covers that range because its colourways run from chalky and pale to sharply contrasted. Give it plain floors and simple curtains; it is a pattern that fights other patterns. In a stairwell or a long corridor the repeated diamonds give the eye a rhythm to travel along.
