Gio Ponti. La collezione del Museo Richard-Ginori della Manifattura di Doccia

The publishing project developed by the Association Amici di Doccia is dedicated to the publication of the complete catalog of works by Gio Ponti at Doccia Museum began with a research on iconographic sources carried out by Dr. Maria Teresa Giovannini during her thesis in 2007. The book aims to give Ponti's ceramic works a precise chronological order, currently lacking, based on correspondence and documentation from the Museum's archive. The most recent catalog of Gio Ponti's collection at Doccia Museum dates back to 1983: Gio Ponti Ceramiche 1923-1930. Le opere del Museo Ginori di Doccia. Ceramics designed by Gio Ponti for Richard-Ginori are well known to collectors and design scholars around the world. Their aesthetic qualities, for the originality of Ponti's inventions and their flawless execution, are often enhanced, but no one had previously faced a systematic philological study dedicated to the whole corpus preserved at Doccia Museum. This volume and its catalog sheets are intended to fill this gap. Born as a dissertation project, they are the result of a meticulous study of artifacts and various documentary sources: autograph correspondence by Gio Ponti, drawings, catalogs, registers, rate tables, vintage magazines etc.
On the basis of verified data this volume reconstructs the detailed history of most of decorations and forms belonging to the collection, certifying their attribution and investigating, on a case by case basis, the iconography of rich and fascinating imagery that populates Doccia's ceramic art at the time of Ponti. Any reference to the Italian tradition, architecture, archeology, which were several times correctly, but generally, highlighted by critics, are here precisely defined revealing unexpected sources: the Baroque ivories from Bargello Museum, the Baldassare Peruzzi's frescoes at Castello di Belcaro, the literary Triumphs by Petrarch, the Empire Sevres porcelain till the biblical image of Grapes of the Promised Land. His choices are not random, but partakers of classicism that in the same decade animated Italian artistic movements at world level. We find, translated to ceramics, ancient themes and yet recurrent in contemporary works of painting, sculpture and architecture, as the Winged Victory, Sirens, and Allegories of Virtue. The culture of Gio Ponti reveals itself as wide, fed on books, visits to museums, but also on human relations and a lively interest in contemporary arts, including cinema, modern dance, circus, or social phenomena like sports.
Thus tying up all the threads that bind the figurative explosion of Gio Ponti's ceramics to the world and the culture of that time, this catalog is the necessary foundation in order to understand his style in depth and to value the immense patrimony preserved by Doccia Museum.