Objects that stay with us
The Object Edit
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Painted Profile
Pocket Record
Travel Grooves
First blown for Venini in 1921, Vittorio Zecchin’s Veronese vase takes its profile from a glass vessel in Paolo Veronese’s Annunciation of 1580. Mouth-blown in Murano, it turned a small painted detail into one of Venini’s most recognisable forms.
Frank Smythson created the Panama diary in 1908 as a book light enough to travel in a pocket. Its cross-grain leather cover and exceptionally thin paper (later developed into pale blue Featherweight paper) replaced the weight of a desk diary with a portable record.
Rimowa introduced its first aluminium suitcase in 1937 and added vertical grooves in 1950, drawing on the metal surfaces of early aircraft. The lines gave the suitcase an identity that remains recognisable as its surface accumulates the dents and scratches of travel.
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Repeated Face
Anatomical Support
Visible Tension
In 1952, Piero Fornasetti began altering a portrait of opera singer Lina Cavalieri found in a 19th-century magazine. Across hundreds of Tema e Variazioni plates, he concealed, divided and rearranged her face, turning one image into an expanding system of variations.
Designed by Carlo Mollino in 1949 and first made in 1950, the Vertebra table turns the structure of a human spine into a support for glass. Only two examples were realised before Zanotta introduced its first serially produced version in 2026.
René Herbst’s 1927 Sandows chair replaces conventional upholstery with elastic cords stretched across a chrome-plated tubular steel frame. Petite Friture’s 2026 reissue preserves the same structural idea almost a century later.