It's funny - or Ironic - having started as
a small-scale collector I have all the 35/40/50mm stuff, but in storage, so
we'll look at all the commoner stuff (pirates, native warriors and nativity
figures, along with cake decorations) probably as separate posts, years hence
by which time there will be so much about them on the web they'll all, only be
box-tickers, so may go straight on the A-Z listing?
While what I've picked up in the larger
scales is bitty, and mostly Hong Kong copies, but it helps illustrate the
variety of Fontanini's production
which is the aim of this post.
I am less and less a fan of 'absolute'
scale-gauge-ratio-size but I understand that some people do get excited by it,
so throughout this article will give a double measurement thus; 65/75mm. The
first number being the approximate distance between soles of feet and eye-line
of an upright-posed figure (in millimetres), the second being the approximate
total height of the item with integral base and/or added plinth, excluding
plumes, feathers, crown-shards etc..
Tourists are funny animals, they don't like
to be seen buying the cheapest option available, but few will go for the
top-end either, as a result the main size of Carrara marble memento found is the mid-sized ones; five, seven,
eight or ten-inch figures, which tend to turn-up in charity shops (thrift
stores) regularly.
Here I shot two in the window of just such
a shop - after closing time - only to purchase them a couple of weeks later
when I noticed they'd been moved to a shelf at the back! They are probably not
'a pair', their bases are finished differently; one highlighted in gold the
other left faux-ivory and the marble plinths are of different dimensions, but
they have been brought together by someone recognising their common ancestry!
There are - as we saw the other day - much
larger versions of these figures (up to nearly a meter) and smaller figures 70-100mm
were also sold, these two are 150/190mm (6/7½
inches) and are finished in PVC washes from a subdued pastel palette, which
gives a sun-faded, antique'y look to them.
These articles have been in preparation for
a while and were going to be a quick overview about a year ago, but as items
came-in the folder grew, and in recent months I have been actively seeking the
stuff, and this chap came in last week!
He's another Carrara marble tourist's sample and the same 150/190mm as the
previous pair, this is the commonest form of these to be found. The pose is one
of four that go back to the 1960's, a second set of sculpts were issued as
small scale 'toy soldiers' in the 1970's as boxed trays (one of each pose) and
point-of-sale counter display boxes as individual 'pick-and-mix' figures.
Both sets bear the unmistakeable hallmarks
of Elio Simonetti's work with the flowing garb, both hands occupied, facial
expression bringing each figure to life and giving them not only character but
'personalities'. There were also pairs of earlier Georgian types.
Here we see Mr. Simonetti's work on the
left with a set of Turkish figures from Fonplast's
toy soldier range next to a set of US cavalry plainly designed by someone else,
both are 65/75mm and in the same dense PVC of the bulk of Fontanini's products of the time, the raw material colour being the
same as that used by the 45/50mm and 65/70mm nativity ranges of the time
(1970-80's).
The Turkish set are also very similar to
the Elastolin set copied/carried by Cané, it is likely
Simonetti was behind both - I can't emphasise how important this sculptor was
to the toy/model figure oeuvre, just as Stadden's (or Musgrave's) stuff turns
up in every size, material and subject matter from sports trophies to HO
footballers, so more and more stuff is becoming recognisable as Simonetti's
work.
Compare
the flowing bloused trousers of the Turks with the more rigid or padded look of
the bloused cavalry trousers; the animation of the Turks against the more
stilted, upright and uncomfortable-in-their-own-skin posing of the cavalry.
Anatomically too, the cavalry are not quite as good as the Turks having rather
too-long (yet somehow visually 'stumpy') legs for too short; almost childlike,
torsos. While the kneeling firer has been to the Airfix school of pointless posing!
Although
one can see in the Cavalry the influence of the master on the pupil, as the
sculptor has learnt the both-hands-occupied rule and the sticky-out-stuff rule
- Simonetti likes his sword-scabbards askew, coat tails flying, pointy hats,
fishing rods, his are complicated figures to tool-up (as we will see in part 4),
and the [trainee?] sculptor of the cavalry has clearly learned at Simonetti's side.
These
(also 65/75mm) are harder to ascribe as they
have little clothing and equipment, but their similarity to other Indians
credited to Simonetti suggest these are the maestro's work, they're more
naturalistic than the cavalry although it's fair to say the chap running with
tomahawk and dagger is a bit of a dancing loon!
They
also proved impossible to photograph so I've collaged the best of the flash
images and the best of the heightened-contrast no-flash images. We will look at
these again in a later post as I managed to purchase them a few months later
and have shot them again.
A collection of copies, Fontanini were pirated to the n'th
degree in the former British colony of Hong Kong, as well as closer to home,
and these are a reasonable sample of those copies.
On the left we have a blow-moulded copy
(68/85mm) of one of the Fontanini knights
(75/95mm and probably not by Simonetti) usually sold as tourist trinkets at
Italian historical sites, castles, museums, that sort of thing, and sometimes styrene
in the original.
Next are the very common Chinoiserie
premiums, these are copies (and came in several sizes) and while one tends to
assume HK as the origin, the smaller ones (55/65mm and unmarked) were mostly
issued in France or by French products, so there is a suspicion they may
originate in France, although whether with permission is another matter and
we'll look at them closer in a future post (part 5).
The larger one is clearly marked HONG KONG
and comes in at 95/110mm but is missing his base which would adjust that second
numeral, he has also been given a wash of 'antiquing' grey-brown.
The next figure is the most copied/licensed
of all the output of Fontanini; the clowns (55/65mm). Again I have loads of the
smaller ones in storage as their commonest form is as HK-sourced cake
decorations, this one however is A) damaged (broken walking stick) and B)
marked CHINA and not very old at all!
The last two are both those older Hong Kong
copy cake decorations from the 1970/80's, a dancer (55/65mm) from the ballet
set and a rococo/regency lady (45/50mm) of the same set as seen at the top of
the page; a forth pose - a gentleman - is found, holding a candle/night-light.
The Men! We have compared the knights before,
but putting a few together gives a better guide to the vast range available to
anyone choosing to specialise in Fontanini
(and their thieves), although were someone to seriously collect the Carrara
marble sample figures that someone would need to reinforce the foundations of
their property first as their plinths are not light, and there must have been
hundreds produced in a dozen sizes and several decorative finishes over the
years - a good set of the figures would result in tons of marble!
I'm seriously considering removing the marble samples as the figures come in and saving them up to make some sort of fancy door-step or something . . . but they've all got a hole in? Thinks . . . put round studs in the holes and voila! A heavy-metal 'cut-off', shoe-scrape, door-step . . . genius!
The Ladies - with a close-up of the little
HK cake decoration, I have a lot more of
these in storage; so we may well return to them one day.
It would appear that Hong Kong only copied
the one pose in this size Certainly as a hard polystyrene plastic cake
decoration you only ever seem to find the one (I have several more in storage),
however they were also copied in soft ethylene at the larger size for French
premiums . . .
(New
rule -If you've stolen images from me
I'll
have ten from you)
. . . as we can see here. Actually the girl
second from the top of the staircase is also common as an HK copy, but smaller
and often without a base, being attached to springs on jewellery boxes, or to a
turntable on musical boxes as well as appearing as a 40/45mm cake decoration in
gold or silver polyethylene.
Again believed to be the work of Simonetti,
they are harder to ascribe as like the Indians above; they are a bit bereft of
clothing, but the girl smelling the flowers is the give-away I think!
This is one of the sets where in the larger
sizes there are variations in the sculpting, the fully overlapping
crossed-hands of the Hong Kong cake decoration being absent from the 70mm
premiums, but found with the larger Carrara
marble figurines.
The variations in base style in the above
image is due to them being cobbled together from more than one set by the same
plagiarist who Photoshop'ed my Kellogg's divers into a cocked-hat!
I went to the Plastic Warrior show last month hoping to get a few Fontanini items to add to the growing
folder these articles are the result of, and came away with 24 additions, of
which this was one! Approximately 45/50mm and in a softer PVC, I think it's
from the late 1980's or 1990's and has the new fountain mark we looked at
yesterday. This seems to have been part of a reorganisation around 1983, as
Simonetti started to take a more part-time/contract role in the firm he'd been
with for 40+ years.
The nativity figures (from which this cow
comes) were the bread & butter of Fontanini's
output, and were issued in various sizes and vast numbers, with individual
sculpts being retired and replaced with similar sculpts on a regular basis.
There are a dozen or more Three Kings/Wise Men both mounted on camels and on foot,
along with a kneeling trio, by the time you add the size variations, you could
indulge in a cameo collection of just wise men!
Part 3 - Napoleonics next.
