Gio Ponti for Venini Old Lady Bottle model 4492. This lovely bottle has the shape of a female made in glass with two colors joined together using the incalmo technique – lower body and stopper opening sections in blue and upper body and stopper in yellow.
Engraved signature venini 90.

The collaboration between Gio Ponti and Paolo Venini began in 1927 with the formation of il Labirinto group, which also included Emilio Lancia, Michele Marelli, Pietro Chiesa and Tomaso Buzzi.  During this exciting fruitful period, Ponti brought the art industries including architects and manufacturers into contact with each other to create for the wealthy Italian bourgeoisie furniture and decorative objects that managed to combine simplicity, elegance, modernity and practicality.

The relationship between the architect and the Milanese entrepreneur continued in the following decades and led to the birth of new lines of objects for the home designed by Ponti for the Venini glass laboratories. In 1946, Ponti created, for example, a series of transparent and milky glass bottles in bright or contrasting colours, characterized by an evident ironic and playful spirit and by a modern take on neo-eighteenth-century elements, according to a typically Pontian creative process. The curved lines and hourglass shapes in fact reveal the desire to transform the traditional shape of the bottle with stopper into a female figure with a sinuous body and a full skirt, revealing at the same time a renewed interest in figuration.

Ponti’s bottles were published in the last number of “Domus” in 1950, together with other glasses produced by Venini, some dating back to a few years earlier, others more recent, presented on the occasion of MUSA, a very important exhibition of modern craftsmanship and decorative arts which took place in twelve prestigious US museums between 1950 and 1953 ( Murano , in Domus, n. 252-253, November-December 1950, p. 59).