Words from Francis Francis About the Jubelium Collection: Liturgical Iconographs Revisited

It had been years since I’d last seen Andrea. In the meantime she had been happily married and I had even asked myself if this artist, part Milanese and part Bolognese, had not given over to the middle-class life, leaving to a sweet but inexorable oblivion his original instincts of aggressive artist.

Suddenly she appeared at the Four Seasons Hotel of Milan, where she knew I stay almost every week, to propose to me a new collection of cups: the cups for the Jubilee.

Andrea has a very strange and very direct relationship with God and with the Catholic Church: for particular reasons, which unfortunately she bade me not to reveal, she must feel these things very much upon her. Indeed, already in Arms,limbs, hands, feet, parts (Amici Collection 1994) this declared tendency to appropriate classical liturgical iconography to express a work that swings uncertainly between the immense lightness of irony and the profound tragicness of being was noticeable.

In Jubilaeum she takes up this same theme with great mastery, creating a work – the collection as a whole – whose beauty unequivocally and immediately springs up even in the most profane eye, leaving suspended at the same time a whole interpretive territory that repositions this game between irony and tragedy, where it has always been and where it will always be: betwixt the great whys of life.

Congratulations, Manetti. The calm, burgher’s life (the wolf losing his skin?), hasn’t made you lose your brilliant and atavistic expressive capacity (habit?) and it shines even more than before.

(And just so that we are clear on this, I feel this to be the most beautiful and powerful collection of my entire career as an art surveyor.)

FrancisFrancis!

• Made from high quality porcelain
  
• Each set contains 6 cups and saucers
  
• Cups: Height 5cm(1.9") x Diameter 6cm(2.3"). Saucer: Diameter 11cm(4.3").
  
• Signed, Limited Editions, your set will have a edition number
  
• Made in Germany by Zeitler
  
• Presented in reusable tin, safely packed in preformed foam
• FREE 250g Bag of espresso coffee worth £4.95