“I want to make ceramics that overturn tradition. Polycentric, anti-imitative, mechanical forms. Colored, futuristic, violent, dazzling, luminous layers.” This is how Torido Mazzotti’s brother and fellow ceramist Tullio d’Albisola described their practice in 1930. Though polemicizing on Futurist ceramics as a whole, his statement is an equally apt description of the present Motorato (or “Motorized”) vase created during the same period.

The first Futurist ceramics consisted of geometric and bright forms transposed onto traditional ceramic bodies. Eventually, though, the forms themselves became Futurist in nature, often taking on machine-like shapes. The present vase, for example—and as its name suggests—clearly takes inspiration from the shape of a turbine engine. Despite the fact that the vase was created by one of the leaders of the Futurist ceramic movement, the vase’s luminous glaze and its emphasis on the machine harken the Art Deco period and the Machine Age, respectively. It is this straddling of aesthetic and academic boundaries—whirling between styles yet simultaneously grounded within its historical context—that make this vase “mechanical, dazzling, luminous.”