Cole & Son | Riflesso

Riflesso is Fornasetti's Baroque Rome, drawn around 1955 and then folded twice. The right half mirrors the left, and the whole scene reflects again in the water below, so the architecture is reproduced four times over within a single view. The city is recognisable and impossible at once, which is the effect Piero Fornasetti spent a career refining.

It is drawn in the engraved manner of the Fornasetti archive: fine line, no modelling, with icy silvered highlights picking out the water and the stonework. Depth comes entirely from the density of the linework rather than from tone. At 1.4 m wide the composition is architectural in its own right, and it is supplied by the design repeat rather than as a conventional roll. Because the reflection doubles everything, the eye keeps checking one half against the other, and the wall stays active in a way a straightforward view never would.

Because of how it is printed, the scale is fixed and cannot be adjusted, so the wall should be planned around the design rather than the reverse. Given that, it is best treated as a single considered gesture: one wall of a dining room, the end of a corridor, a small bar or a cloakroom where the mirrored city can be met head-on.