Modernist Curved Blue Glass Fireplace Screen on Brass Feet. Fontana Arte. Italy. Circa 1970.

This exceptional fireplace screen exemplifies the refined modernist aesthetic that distinguished Italian design of the postwar decades. Composed of a single sweeping sheet of blue-grey tinted glass, its form describes a gentle convex arc — wider at the base and tapering slightly toward the crest — creating a sense of fluidity and poise that is at once functional and sculptural. The profile view reveals the sophisticated curvature that gives the piece its dynamic silhouette, a design solution both formally elegant and technically demanding.

The glass, suffused with a cool slate-blue tint, is worked with remarkable precision: its edges are polished smooth, and an elongated oval aperture is cut directly into the upper register to serve as a handle, a detail that underscores the designer's commitment to integrating function invisibly within form. The screen rests on three small brass ball feet, whose warm golden tone provides a deliberate contrast to the cool glass surface, lending a note of classical refinement to an otherwise thoroughly modern object.

The piece bears all the hallmarks of Fontana Arte, the celebrated Milanese glassware and lighting house founded by Gio Ponti and Luigi Fontana in 1933. Renowned for its mastery of worked glass — whether cast, blown, engraved or curved — the firm consistently elevated the material to the status of high art. This fireplace screen, likely dating to circa 1970, is characteristic of Fontana Arte's later production, in which pure geometric form and the inherent beauty of glass are allowed to speak without ornamental distraction.

In fine original condition, the glass retaining its full depth of colour and clarity, this screen stands as a distinguished example of Italian modernism at its most assured — a museum-quality object equally at home in a collector's apartment or before a fireplace of architectural ambition.