Piero Fornasetti designed the present lot for his personal bedroom, also referred to as the “yellow bedroom,” of his family’s holiday home, the Villa Varenna, in Lake Como. Built by his father in 1900 and originally decorated in the neo-renaissance style, Fornasetti re-designed the villa in the early 1950s. He worked on it for the rest of his life, and it is now considered one of his defining projects. Fornasetti filled the home with a mix of his own designs and antiques, with both acting as references to the cultural and architectural histories that were a constant pre-occupation and influence in his work. Color was used as the point of departure for each room’s decorative scheme: its choice informed by the room’s placement and function and then expressed in a monochromatic palette overlaid with two-dimensional imagery.

In addition to the “Giardino settecentesco” (“eighteenth-century garden”) furniture, the yellow bedroom also contained a large Sicilian partial gilt and silver wrought-iron bed from the sixteenth-century and a suite of chairs designed by Fornasetti which echoed the bed’s decoration in the crossed arrows of the seat backs. The present lot is a unique piece, and the pattern was only used outside the private Fornasetti home on a four-panel screen that was produced in very limited quantity.