Three Pierrots in lattimo glass for Venini, circa 1950

Born in Padua in 1915, Fulvio Bianconi first encountered Murano glass in Venice, where he was apprenticed in the workshop of the decorator Michele Pinto. Noticed as a caricaturist, he settled in Milan in the 1930s and became a graphic designer and illustrator for publishing and advertising, working for Mondadori, Rizzoli and Garzanti, a house with which he remained associated until 1975.

In 1946 a commission for perfume bottles for Giviemme brought him to Murano, where he met Paolo Venini. This marked the start of a close collaboration that lasted until the mid-1950s. There Bianconi created figurines inspired by the commedia dell'arte, shown at the 1948 Venice Biennale, and then, in the late 1940s, the Fazzoletto vase, conceived with Paolo Venini. These were followed by the Pezzato series, assembled from tesserae of coloured glass, and by the A fasce and Scozzese series, with their crossed polychrome bands.

He later designed for other Murano glassworks, including Cenedese, Vistosi, Seguso and Toso, and returned to Venini in 1967 and again in the late 1980s. He died in Milan in 1996. His glass is held notably by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

All pieces by Fulvio Bianconi (2)

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