Pietro Chiesa opened his Milanese stained glass workshop Bottega. in 1921, beginning to exhibit, always with greater success, in the most important decorative art exhibitions of the period. The Biennali di Monza are a privileged occasion of exchange with other artists and architects, among them Gio Ponti and Gustavo Pulitzer Finali, of Studio Stuard, with whom he collaborated from 1927 to 1932 in the interior design of six ships. The contribution reconsiders these works, paying attention to the development of the artist’s taste, from the initial neoclassical references, mediated by the twentieth-century current of Il Labirinto to which he was referring, towards a more modern “rationalist” design. In 1933 the Chiesa’s Bottega became part of the Fontana Arte company, of which Chiesa together with Ponti was art director, and with which he continues to collaborate in the interior design of ships. The impossibility of access to the Pietro Chiesa and Fontana Arte archives, as well as the fact that the Pulitzer archive kept in Parma, contains documentation that can be dated from 1938 onwards, has been made up for through the use of bibliographic sources, mostly from magazines, precise chronicles of the time, and iconographic sources that best illustrate the substance of Pietro Chiesa’s interventions.
