Edoardo “Dady” Orsi (1917-2003) has produced from the Sixties to the Nineties a large
number of reverse-glass paintings. This corpus constitutes a unicum in the context of Italian
art of the Twentieth Century. In the article, the particular connotation of Orsi’s work
as a cultured operation, although situated on the borderline between pure painting and
handicraft object, emerges on the basis of the comparison of Orsi’s work with the traditional
and folkloric reverse glass painting and the one practiced by naïf painters. We
examine the cultural background of the artist and his relationship with the craftsmanship
and design of glass between Venice and Milan in 900 (Aldo Carpi, Bottega di Pietro Chiesa,
Fontana Arte). Finally, we describe the particular poetics in which references to seventeenth-
century art, symbolism and metaphysics are declined in a “pre-post-modern” key.
