Bulgari

Lot 474, Sotheby's St. Moritz 22 and 23 February 1991

This brooch recalls how left-wing political sympathies were widespread in Italian fashionable and intellectual circles during the 1970s. At the time the Italian communist party was the second largest party in the country which was going through a tumultuous decade that saw the kidnapping of several high-profile industrialists and politicians.

The mood of Italian society in the 1960s and 1970s is immortalised by the legendary generation of Italian filmmakers that included Frederico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Pier Paolo Pasolini. They used experimental and innovative imagery, non-linear storytelling and slow pacing to give expression to typical left-wing subjects such as the inherent emptiness and loneliness of modern urban living, commercialisation and its corruption of society and the demise of traditional sexual mores. Very often these films focused on the existential angst of bourgeois intellectuals and portrayed the existence of the self-absorbed upper classes in a way that laid bare their futility, emptiness and decadence.