They pretty well got everywhere, tourist
traps; breakfast cereals and coffee, washing-powders and cake decorations; high-end collectables and Hong Kong carded rack-toys, yet because they were
never really a dedicated 'toy soldier' maker, you may have crossed their path
without even knowing it.
Still-going; in the hills to the North of
Florence and Pisa famous for the production of Presepi Artistici or
nativity (Crèche, Krip[pen]) figures, they share the location with Marchi & Figli (Marchi and Sons) who (about the same time Fontanini were opening the Fonplast
works) set up ISAS for their toy
production, the four sites as good as filling the valley with figure production
- both on the four main sites; and in all the little villages around the region
where the (mostly female) out-workers completed the painting and finishing of orders.
Marchi came second (1930's) and are now (having re-absorbed ISAS
and stopped the rack-toy production) known as Euromarchi while Fontanini set-up in 1908 and are now mostly making poured resin
models for their main partner (and marketing guru's) in the US, Roman Inc; who have generated a whole
fan-base of bible-belt and suburban 'soccer-mom' collectors with their own
web-sites and forums, like Bradford
Exchange, Danbury or Franklin Mint collectors!
Both companies are also now run by the
forth generations of their families, and it was under the third generation of
Fontanini's that Fonplast was set-up
in 1963 to manufacture plastic figures in volume as the older ranges were
phased-out.
Now: to the English-speaker it's probably
easier to say that those older ranges were composition; however, some sources
(including the current Fontanini)
translate some of the early production as being papier mâché, others as 'plaster' or
plaster-covered papier mâché, while in 1951/2 they were registering groups of
figurine designs (from 6 to 13 inches high) with the US Library of Congress as
'ceramic', so the picture is not entirely clear.
Certainly though; we know they made composition
figurines of the Elastolin/Lineol
type between the wars and through to the 1960's until the switch to plastic.
Away from the Nativity ranges and limited
dips in the toy market, Fontanini are
best known (or instantly recognised - once you know what you're looking at) for
their larger mouldings, supplied in various finishes to the tourist trade in
Carrara and the surrounding regions, where they are affixed to a block or tile of 'sample' marble, for sale as mementos of a trip to the region, Fontanini's own
plastic-based statuettes being sold more widely around/elsewhere in Italy in the same vein.
It is sure that Elio Simonetti (who joined
the company after the second World War, and not Emilo!) and the other sculptors at Fontanini worked with the tourist trade
to produce figurines they thought would sell, and that they also worked with
the Val Pelro (valley of lead, or
'lead valley') metal foundry where much cross-over or cross-pollination
existed, while his work with Cané ('canine' or dog) between 1971
and 1975 was almost certainly with the blessing of the Fontanini's and probably
to the financial gain of Fontanini/Fonplast.
As can be seen on the map these firms were
all relatively near each other, and Ferrero
who would produce small-scale, die-cast copies of many of the Fontanini, Cane and/or and Peltro
sculpts (along with the much pirated Lone
Star 'Metallion' sculpts - also
Simonetti's work) in their chocolate Kinder
Eggs, set-up in the 1970's in the same Northern-Italian 'neighbourhood'.
The fact that the Cowboys and Indians of
all the above named resemble the Marx
sets is probably because Simonetti designed them too, and I wouldn't mind
betting (this was all happening in the late 1960's/early 1970's) that he got
the gig through Roman in the US who
were on the scene by then, but A) I'm getting ahead of myself, and B) it's my
own thoughts - so treat it with a pinch of salt.
Markings are many and varied with Fontanini and can lead to confusion,
some of the older members of the hobby will tell apocryphal stories of people
coming up to them at shows and announcing that they've "...found a new company; Depose!",
while the logo is itself problematical, or at least: it was; it's now been
replaced with a graphic of a fountain.
On the left we see an image of a typical
base mark on one of the larger statuettes with the Depose Italy (registered
[in] Italy) a mould-tool/stock number and the logo, along with the standard
Carrara marble's self-adhesive, chrome-metallised, paper (later: vinyl-plastic)
label.
On the right - a close up of 'That Mark'.
Now - the company themselves tell a tale of papier mâché toy spiders, most people - now -
refer to it as a spider -despite the lack of legs being present in the
correct number, Garratt thought it was representing a crab, for which job it is
lacking the prerequisite claws while I think it looks more like a sheep-keg or
blood-sucking, burrowing tick before it's fed (although they have eight legs too!), and on some toys it (the logo) looks to have only four legs
and two antennae!
I suspect it was originally meant to be a beetle; clockwork, hand-powered or spring-loaded automata of walking
beetles (usually painted-up as ladybirds/ladybugs) were common, popular
playthings between the wars in wood, tin-plate or composition and if they were making
spiders, they were probably making more beetles, spiders being less popular?
Whatever the truth, it is considered to be a spider now, was present
(usually on the base underside) from the early composition figures through to the mid-1980's or even
early-1990's and has now been replaced, yet without a full explanation as to
why - why would you replace a logo which was over 70 years old and instantly
recognisable?
On the left - a late vinyl cow from the 1980's onwards (it could be
quite recent, I don't follow the Roman
Inc. era stuff closely) with a cloudy blob for the fountain, a full
'Fontanini', a copyright ©-mark and 'Italy'.
On the right - the plain 'Italy' mark of the Fonplast figures from a short lived attempt at a slice of the 'Toy
Soldier' market. Someone (guess who!) has been trying to pass these off as
being from a company called err . . . Italy,
quite vociferously, in recent months, in various grubby corners of the
internet, but he tends to make stuff up as he goes along and is best ignored in
his pontificating.
Other marks (along with any cavity/stock numbers and/or 'spider') can include any
combination of the above and/or including:
- 'Dep. ITALY'
- 'DEPOSE'
- 'Depose Italy'
- 'Depositato Italy'
- 'Fontanini'
- 'ITALY'
- 'MADE IN ITALY'
Variations in base/plinth attachment with an all-hard polystyrene
plastic combination on the left and a vinyl (PCV) figure to polyethylene plinth
pairing on the right.
There was a limited use of both styrene and ethylene from time to time
or with certain sets (possibly from the old Fontanini
facility up the road at Bagni de Lucca?), but most of the 'classic' Fontanini/Fonplast production circa
1965-1985 was in a very dense PVC which takes a lot of punishment some (softer
batches) coming across as ethylene on casual inspection, some cured so hard it
can be mistaken for styrene - this would have been from the Chifenti Fonplast works - down the road!
The flexibility and 'give' of PVC also takes an old-fashioned, slotted
wood-screw far better than either polystyrene or polyethylene would have, which
made the fixing of a plastic figure to a chunk of the planet's harder surface
material a lot less problematical!
Spirit-based glue was also applied to the join between the figure's
integral-base and the additional plinth; to prevent the figure coming loose
easily under the scrutiny of small, inquisitive, juvenile fingers back in the
tourist's home location.
"Ah-Harrrh
Jim-ladd ! Oi's bee wiseerrh noww! . . .
. . .
Oi's bee Farnt'aaan'innii!"
Next - we'll look at the figure types using my rather small sample - no
internet images here and I'm not copying it all out of someone-else's book!
