The Ricordi Portfolio
Casa Ricordi, founded in Milan in 1808, was originally an Italian publisher of classical music and opera. As the publishing house grew, it opened the "Litografia Ricordi," a printmaking operation whose elaborate graphic design work became a hallmark of the company. In the 1870s, Ricordi expanded this in-house lithography shop to promote its operas and sheet music business, and quickly became the leading lithographer in Italy. By 1895 it was creating posters for outside clients such as Campari, the Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera, and the Mele Department store of Naples.
The print studio's artistic direction was shaped decisively by Adolfo Hohenstein, a German-born painter and designer who joined Ricordi's Graphical Workshops in 1889. Under his tutelage, artists including Cappiello, Caldanzano, Cavaleri, Dudovich, Laskoff, Metlicovitz, and Mataloni brought Art Nouveau, known as Stile Liberty in Italy, to a world-class level.
Published around the time of World War I, the rare commemorative Ricordi Portfolio consisted of 70 small lithographic plates of Ricordi's greatest posters printed between 1895 and 1914. The set was sold commercially in Italy, England, Germany, France, and the United States. Much like the Maîtres de l'Affiche ("Masters of the Poster") curated by Jules Chéret in France, the Ricordi Portfolio celebrated the rise of the poster as an art form in Italy. Many of the images in the series are so rare that they can be found today in no other format.
The plates are printed on heavy weight paper, which was typical for fine chromolithographic portfolios of this era, helping to preserve the density and vibrancy of the multi-stone color printing process. The paper is neither a laid nor a vellum stock as seen in some French contemporary portfolios like the Maîtres de l'Affiche, but rather a sturdy wove stock suited to commercial printing at scale.