These fans come from the collection of the Turin-based antiques dealer Pietro Accorsi, but they were not purchased directly from him. The recent rediscovery of his accounts in the years between World War I and his death (in 1982) enables us to rule out Cerruti being one of his customers, as his name never appears in the records. Instead, the accountant’s friends and suppliers of objets d’art included Giulio Ometto, who took over from Accorsi in the running of the gallery and, above all, Gianni Pron who, according to the oral account given by the restorer Renzo Ceregato, sold Cerruti the series of fans in around the middle of the 1980s. They must have originally included a mirror, like the ones published by Roberto Antonetto,¹ on which the candle light reflected, ensuring greater illumination. It was only later on (probably when the articles were in the possession of Pron) that changes were made and the bucolic landscapes were added, painted in imitation of the style of the famous landscape artist Vittorio Amedeo Cignaroli, whose critical success coincided, from the 1930s onwards, with the intensification of Piedmontese Baroque studies.² We would not hesitate to describe this type of intervention as “invasive” today, but it was quite widespread in Turin during the second half of the 20th century, entrusted to the “imitative” abilities of artisans revolving around Accorsi,³ mostly based at Via Po 57 and Via Bava 5 and 8, inside the socalled “courtyards of miracles”. They included the aforementioned Renzo Ceregato, author of the Genoese-style Rococo decorations of the stairwell at Villa Cerruti, and Angelo Visca, a talented “restorer” of furniture by Luigi Prinotto, Pietro Piffetti and Giuseppe Maria Bonzanigo.⁴ 

In terms of contextualising and dating these fans, useful comparisons can be made with Piedmontese furniture from the 1740s and 1750s, rich in asymmetrical decorative motifs deriving from the natural world, such as flowers and pelacette, but also in stuccowork and bronze decorations made in Turin during the same period. Formal points can particularly be observed in common with the metalwork of the famous sculptor Francesco Ladatte, whose return to Piedmont from Paris in 1744 fostered the circulation of ornaments owing a strong debt to French Rococo and the printed production of Juste-Aurèle Meissonier: the inventor of dynamic ornamental flourishes, his name must have been known to Italy’s sophisticated aristocracy, for whom his father Ètienne worked (he died in Turin in 1746).⁵ 

Serena D’Italia and Luca Mana 

¹ Antonetto 2010, pp. 243-251. 

² Bosso 2001; Mana 2018. 

³ R. Antonetto, “Pietro Accorsi. ‘La vita’”, in Antonetto, Cottino 1999, pp. 17-109. 

⁴ Gribaudi Rossi 1984, pp. 84-85. 

⁵ L. Mana, “Argentiere torinese (Francesco Ladatte?)”, cat. 131, in Venaria 2020, p. 391.