Piero Fornasetti (Milan, 10 November 1913 – Milan, 15 October 1988) was an Italian artist and designer. Biography Piero Fornasetti was born in 1913 into a well-off. middle-class family in Milan. A multifaceted figure in the Italian art scene of the twentieth century, Fornasetti was active as a designer, decorator, painter, curator and printer. His works - produced in series but in limited numbers – characterise his eclecticism within the Italian culture of design. During his artistic career, he created over 13,000 works, including a vast production of 20th century objects and furniture, especially in terms of diversity of decorations. Art critic and collector Patrick Mauriès said: In the 1940s in Milan Fornasetti founded the design and decorative arts atelier that bears his name, Fornasetti, which, under the artistic direction of his son Barnaba Fornasetti, has become known throughout the world. One decisive factor in starting this activity was meeting Gio Ponti, who pushed him to develop his intuition: to produce everyday objects enriched by the kind of decoration that would bring art into ordinary people's homes. This was the origin of the Fornasetti atelier, an example of the principle of "practical madness", where creativity is in perfect harmony with the utility of the object. Then as now, porcelain items, furniture and furnishing accessories represented the heart of Fornasetti's production. The choice to work with everyday objects is not accidental. Fornasetti constantly sought reproducibility in series in his works, explaining this choice in terms of democratic and technical principles. Even in this climate of seriality, the theme of "variations" is central to the artist's activity, reaching its greatest importance in the Tema e Variazioni series. These are the works inspired by the face of Lina Cavalieri, Piero Fornasetti's long-term muse. To date there are over four hundred variations, extended and expanded by the work of the Fornasetti atelier. Fornasetti's work straddles different media, from furniture to paintings by way of tapestries and fashion, applied to a diverse variety of surfaces but maintaining a particularly coherent stylistic code. This eclecticism gained admirers of equally diverse origins: Pablo Neruda defined him as "a magician of precious and precise magic", while Bruno Munari affirmed that "Fornasetti can only be measured by the yardstick of Fornasetti", affectionately seeking to underline his artistic uniqueness. Childhood and education Piero Fornasetti spent his childhood in the apartment building built by his father Pietro, in the Città Studi