Giustini / Stagetti

Fulvio Bianconi was born on August 27, 1915, in Ponte di Brenta, in the province of Padua, and soon moved with his family to Venice. In Venice, he earned his diploma from the Liceo Artistico of the Convento dei Carmini and attended, albeit irregularly, some courses at the Accademia di Belle Arti. From a very young age, he was drawn to the world of glass, working as an apprentice decorator in several Murano furnaces. During these formative years, his talent for drawing - particularly portraits and caricatures - became evident, along with his interest in illustration and graphic design.

In the early 1930s, he moved to Milan, where his career as a graphic artist and illustrator began. There, he came into contact with key figures in the visual culture of the time, such as Cesare Zavattini, Bruno Munari, and Dino Villani, and began important collaborations with publishers such as Mondadori and Garzanti.

Between 1946 and 1947, he designed The Four Seasons for the perfume brand Gi.vi.emme - a series of anthropomorphic, feminine-shaped glass bottles inspired by the four seasons, to be produced at the Venini furnace. This project marked the beginning of his relationship with the company and its founder, Paolo Venini, with whom he developed an intense - though not continuous - collaboration that lasted from the late 1940s to the early 1990s. After an extraordinarily prolific initial period from 1947 to 1957, he resumed designing for Venini in the 1960s, under the direction of Ludovico Diaz De Santillana, continuing even after the company changed ownership.

Bianconi's style in glass is distinguished by its formal freedom, often irregular lines, vivid colours, in line with the spirit of the 1950s, and rich, original decorations. Particularly innovative within the Murano tradition is his figurative production: mermaids, mori inspired by 18th-century moretti veneziani, musicians, characters in regional or 1930s fashion, symbolic figures linked to the months of the year, African women, and his famous grotteschi, inspired by the bizarre 18th-century sculptures of Villa Palagonia in Bagheria (Palermo). The pinnacle of his collaboration with Venini is the collection dedicated to the Commedia dell’Arte (1947–48), in which iconic masks from Italian popular theatre are transformed into acrobatic and caricatured glass sculptures.

Over the course of more than sixty years of his career, Bianconi also curated the visual identity of numerous Italian and international companies, including Fiat, Marzotto, HMW, Pathé, Columbia, and Pirelli.

He died in Milan on May 14, 1996.