Resumen de Tomaso Buzzi e Venini: clienti e committenti
Tomaso Buzzi and Venini: clients and patrons.
The analysis of Buzzi's work, from his debut to the end of the 1930s, highlights the close connection between the activities of a specific group of Milanese architects, including Buzzi himself, and the work of Ugo Ojetti. Studying some exemples that illustrate the specific nature of the antiquarian references used by some members of the group, Ponti and Muzio among others, has allowed a nucleus of iconographic sources to be defined and the model used by Buzzi for his illustrations in the "Quattrova" to be identified as the etchings in the very rare collection of "Bizzarie" by Bracelli, owned precisely by Ojetti. The interest in the seventeenth-century painter and engraver links Buzzi's work to that of many of his contemporary French surrealists, suggesting probable channels of exchange and comparison, at present only conjectured, between Milan and Paris, but also defining some characteristics of the possible client of some items designed by the architect for Venini.
The study has analysed Venini's methods of production and distribution in the 1920s and 1930s and examined Italian institutions and bodies involved in promoting the national production of applied arts. A scrutiny of the outcomes of Venini's participation in Biennials and Triennials has shown the purchase by the Regia Aeronautica of some Venini products exhibited at the 1932 Venice Biennale and, alongside, the order for the decorations in the Casa dell'Aviatore in Rome. The designer of the latter has been documented and new photographic documentation presented portraying, among numerous other works in glass, the extraordinary 150 cm tall Flora of which, until now, only the working drawing by Carlo Scarpa held in the Venini archives had been known.
