Piero Fornasetti (1913-1988) was a prolific Milanese artist, poet and designer whose childlike curiosity spurred the creation of thousands of tromp l’oeil objects, furniture designs and interiors covered in everything from neoclassic motifs and Palladian architecture to seashells and playing cards. Fornasetti was a pivotal and playful figure at a time when postwar society was still ambivalent toward the traditional as well as the modern. Fornasetti’s enthusiasm for historical citation and the applied arts was not in defense against industrialization, but rather a compulsion to subvert the staidness of classical iconography. His whimsical reimaginings were more concerned with feeling than meaning. Fornasetti’s greatest talent was to find humanity in the historical vignettes he sourced from a vast array of 17th to 20th century printed material, and compose them into a “precious and precise magic,” as poet and client Pablo Neruda declared.