Piattella “Tattered Venus”

At the center of the plate, in the foreground, stands a female nude with a long reed, a hat with a torn crown, and a tattered cloak. She appears to be ascending the last step of a staircase scattered with a bracelet, a ring with its case, and two fruits. In the background, like perspectival wings, are two imaginary and symmetrical architectures, reminiscent of the famous Milanese Ca’ Brütta, designed by Gio Ponti's friend Giovanni Muzio in the early Twenties, and the houses on Via Randaccio and Via San Vittore, the first buildings Ponti designed in Milan with his partner Emilio Lancia. Niches, obelisks, spheres, vases, and balustrades enliven the facades in a fanciful game of references to ancient architecture.

The enigmatic depiction, which in the pose alludes to the iconography of the Venus de’ Medici, can be read as an ironic reference to the classical tradition, revived thanks to Muzio, Buzzi, Alpago-Novelli, Cabiati, and the other Milanese architects with whom Ponti shared, in those years, the search for a new language through the rediscovery of classicism.

What is certain is that the invention of the so-called “ragged” Venus is dear to Ponti, who not only proposed several variants of it for Richard-Ginori, but also reworked it years later for a sculpture project documented by a drawing dated around 1946 and from the collection of engineer Antonio Fornaroli, his partner and collaborator.