RAVASCO

Alfredo Ravasco (1873–1958) was one of the most distinctive Italian goldsmiths of the twentieth century. Working in Milan through the great stylistic upheavals of the early decades of the century, he developed an intensely personal language in which precious stones, hardstones and natural materials were combined with an extraordinary sensitivity to colour, form and the inherent character of the material itself.

Born into a family of goldsmiths, Ravasco trained within the Milanese tradition and established himself in the city, where his work encompassed jewellery, precious objects, ecclesiastical commissions and presentation pieces. His practice was unusually broad: diamond and coloured-stone jewels sit alongside chalices, reliquaries, clocks, boxes, trophies and fantastical vessels carved from agate, rock crystal, jade, onyx, lapis lazuli and malachite.

Ravasco emerged at a moment when Italian decorative art was negotiating both its extraordinary historical inheritance and the radical new artistic movements of the twentieth century. His response was neither nostalgic nor doctrinaire. He could employ the fractured geometry and abstraction associated with contemporary jewellery, but never allowed them to become restrictions. Colour, ornament, naturalism and fantasy remained fundamental to his work.

This is perhaps most apparent in his hardstone objects. Ravasco was fascinated by stones whose veining, inclusions, translucency and irregular forms already possessed a visual life of their own. Rather than suppressing these accidents of nature, he made them part of the composition. Agate, rock crystal and other stones became miniature landscapes, occasionally inhabited by jewelled birds, fish, serpents and fantastical creatures, or embellished with flowers, fruit, coral and pearls.

The vocabulary was already established by the mid-1920s. In 1926 Architettura e Arti Decorative illustrated Ravasco's vessels in jade, rock crystal and onyx decorated with serpents, a siren, a peacock and bunches of coral grapes. Its author situated Ravasco within the long tradition of Italian goldsmithing, praising his use of human and animal figures and motifs of leaves, flowers and fruit, and describing him as one of the few genuine Italian successes in Paris.

As with most artists of the period, international exhibitions played an important role in his career. Ravasco exhibited in Italy and abroad, and his work was shown at the Venice Biennale and the Milan Triennale. His patrons included members of the Italian royal family, the Church and prominent Milanese collectors, while his commissions ranged from intimate jewels to important works of sacred goldsmithing.

His work of the 1920s and 1930s reveals an artist fully aware of the competing currents of contemporary European design. At times his forms become strongly architectural and geometric; elsewhere they remain exuberantly naturalistic. These were not contradictory tendencies. Ravasco seems instead to have regarded modernism as another vocabulary from which he could draw, absorbing its geometry, simplification and abstraction without relinquishing colour, ornament, virtuoso craftsmanship or pleasure.

This independence gives Ravasco's work its unusual character. He was not an Italian approximation of contemporary Parisian jewellery, nor an artist insulated from international modernism. He remained inherently himself in the face of it, combining the discipline of modern design with an enduring Italian delight in precious materials, fantasy and beauty.