Piero Fornasetti's imagined Jerusalem first appeared at the end of the 1940s on the walls of the entrance hall of his own Milan residence, under the name Gerusalemme, before migrating onto trays, magazine racks, lamps and furniture. Vista Mediterranea is that city: architectural styles from every direction overlapping and chasing one another in a continuous pattern, multiple viewpoints held in one field, all described by a precise black line.
There is no single perspective and no horizon to orientate you, which is the point. The eye keeps travelling because there is nowhere for it to settle, and buildings sit above and behind buildings that could not possibly support them. A shining sun peeking through cloud was added to the landscape in the early nineties, and it gives the whole sprawling print a focus it managed for forty years without.
It is sold by the panel, one panel to a roll, measuring 140 cm wide by 3.5 m high. When the wide-width paper is unrolled there is a clear indication of where each drop should be cut to create the two drops of the design, so hanging it is a matter of following the marking rather than judging it. As a single panel it works like a large framed drawing, in a hall, a stair, a study or beside a chimney breast, and it needs nothing else on that wall.
