Fulvio Bianconi Biography
Fulvio Bianconi (Padua, 27 August 1915 – Milan, 14 May 1996) was an Italian artist and designer. Son of the musician Virginio (also called Emo) and Elvira, a housewife, he showed an incredible talent for drawing from a young age. When the announcement appears in a local newspaper that Madonna dell'Orto is looking for a young man with a very strong vocation for drawing, the mother, without any hesitation, exclaims that they are looking for her son Fulvio. In Venice he attended the Carmini School of Art and worked as an apprentice decorator in Michele Pinto's workshop. He marries Bruna and after the birth of his first daughter Maria works in various locations in northern Italy and Istria, designing and decorating churches and making portraits. In 1933 Dino Villani introduced him to work as a graphic designer at Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, Motta, and other Milanese publishing houses. During the Second World War he performed his military service, moving between the south of France, Milan and Rome, in the latter city miraculously escaping the Nazi raid for the attack on Via Rasella, clinging to the ledge of the house where he lived. After the war, the Gi. You. Emme tasks him with designing the new perfume bottles and sends him to Murano, to Paolo Venini. Having settled in Milan, he worked as a graphic designer for the major publishing houses and in the early 1950s he ended up working permanently with Garzanti for which, until 1975, he signed covers and dust jackets and took care of the company graphics, taking on the artistic direction of the publishing house. . At the same time he works on the graphic image for companies such as FIAT, Marzotto, Pirelli, Rai, HMV and other well-known companies. In the same period and in particular starting from 1957, following disagreements with Paolo Venini on the attribution of the paternity of the glass works he executed, he interrupted the collaboration and dedicated himself directly and personally to the creation and distribution of glass works collaborating with almost all the Murano glassworks, and not only that. In 1947 the second daughter, Musetta, was born. Bruno Munari writes introducing him: "When Bianconi has a certain quantity of sketches and notes relating to glass, he leaves and goes to Murano where, in some furnaces, the master glassmakers are waiting for him to work together. Because Bianconi is not a desk artist who he studies his vases with the compass and the golden ratio, he instead loves to go directly to the furnace to work together with the master and the fury with which Bianconi creates his glass is so great that he manages to enter the master's soul and make him act according to his own wanting." He himself defines glass as his favorite hobby and his great love as painting.
