Masenza
Mario Masenza was born in 1913 and became the first Italian to involve visual artists in the creation of jewelry. Mario was born into a family with a tradition of supplying jewelry to the Royal Family from their workshop on the via del Corso in Rome. After World War Two, in the elegant jeweler’s shop Gioielleria Masenza in the heart of Rome, he presented new jewels, designed and created by artists next to the traditional ones. The first exhibition dedicated entirely to jewelry by visual artists was organized by Masenza in 1949 at gallery Il Milione in Milan. These artists consisted of he Afro brothers, Mirko and Dino Basaldella, Franco Cannilla, Giuseppe Capogrossi and Giuseppe Uncini, and others. In the early 1960s, also in Rome, Danilo and Massimo Fumanti, members of a family of historic jewelers, decided to invest money and involve artists to increase their production. Mario set a trend of using these artists and others ran with the idea such as art galleries who began to commission jewelry from their artists to be sold alongside the paintings and sculptures. Mario passed away in 1985.
