Lina Cavalieri by Piero Fornasetti

Piero Fornasetti (1913-1988) was an Italian painter, sculptor, interior decorator and engraver, whose obsession with Cavalieri’s face led him to create more than 350 variations on plates, glasses, paperweights and candlesticks. Fornasetti never met Cavalieri in person, he first saw her in a nineteenth-century French magazine and he was bewitched. Starting in 1952, he transformed her face “as he wished”. She was more than a motif in his work; she became his muse. Franco Fagioli is a countertenor born in 1981 in Tucuman, Argentina. Lina Cavalieri (1874–1944) was an Italian operatic soprano, actress, and monologist, who was known as “The Most Beautiful Woman in the World” The Italian writer and poet, Gabriele D’Annunzio, wrote that she was able “to create with her art, a rare harmony between her physical beauty and the passion of her voice”