City of Brescia 2007 » by Visconti

The City of Brescia 2007 is a fountain pen so perfect in its pictorial execution that it doesn't seem real. Each piece is truly unique, making every pen something more than a classic limited edition. Only 123 pieces.

The Unbearable Lightness of Color
During an event at the Lazzaroni store, the master Claudio Mazzi paints the City of Brescia on a Visconti pen. Naturally, using the airbrush technique.

Brescia, Thursday, November 16: in the sanctuary of Lazzaroni's fountain pens, it's an opportunity not to be missed. Claudio Mazzi, a Modenese artist, paints a Visconti fountain pen with an airbrush.
The color sprayed from the "airbrush" draws the head of a lioness on the pen's cap and the Winged Victory on the body. On the milky background, the two main symbols of the Lioness of Italy city take shape. Mazzi chose monochrome, black, and shades of gray to illustrate this new creation, and the reproduction is done almost entirely by hand, although some effects are obtained thanks to a masking system, created by tiny films engraved by the artist with a small blade.
The challenge is to get into the detail with a tool like the airbrush, which paints from a distance. And the first thing that comes to mind for those watching this patient operation is: how far removed is this from the world of digital processing!

For graphics as a rudiment of art far removed from computer manipulations - Mazzi began his career as an advertising graphic designer - the kind done with backgrounds applied with a brush, lines drawn with an ink-loaded straightedge, and logos sketched in pencil and then painted in tempera, photographs retouched and then glued, the airbrush is a tool among others, but certainly the most suitable for giving softness and lack of thickness to the work one wishes to create.
The form of art used by Mazzi on Visconti pens can be classified as custom-art or custom-painting, meaning the personalization of objects through a painting that becomes a narrative path.

Let's be honest: the images obtained, their hyperrealism, their plasticity, are so "strong" that they do not fully convey the monstrous effort behind each object.
For each fountain pen in the Mazzi Visconti collection, it takes three to five hours of patient airbrush work, by one hand, two eyes only, and a single application: that of the artist, who like a Renaissance master leaves to others exclusively the application of the base on which to intervene, the finishing with protective varnishes, and the hand polishing.

Thus was born the City of Brescia 2007 by Lazzaroni, which, on the 20th anniversary of its activity, offers a limited edition of 123 pieces. The result is a fountain pen so perfect in its pictorial execution that it doesn't seem real, so little serial that it seems the result of an industrial process. Each piece is truly unique, making every pen something more than a classic limited edition.
This quality, the result of Claudio Mazzi's mastery, risks being a limitation if not properly supported by a precise illustration of the work that underpins it, and perhaps for this reason in the City of Brescia, next to the Winged Victory painted on the barrel and the lioness's face reproduced on the cap—symbols of the Lombard city—stands out, as a signature, a small red "triangle," almost signifying the uniqueness of the work proposed by Lazzaroni.

Built in resin and with a converter filling system, the City of Brescia fountain pens feature a 14 Kt gold nib and a bridge clip. The insert in the clip, enameled with the background color of the design, bears the full Visconti name, and the band reveals in the engraving the same fill color.

Features:
Body entirely hand-painted with airbrush technique.
Converter filling system.
23 kt palladium nib.

Convertible to Roller.