Mosaic

In the eighties, when I started working in mosaic, there were two suppliers of glass – Udny and Milano. Milano was somewhere in the outer reaches of North London. It might have been High Barnet — those depressing leafy conservative places all look the same to me.

I did enjoy the occasional trip into this unfamiliar world though. Milano’s showroom was a portacabin. The warehouse was a big shed topped by a kidney shaped harlequin mosaic made by ‘Old Man Zanelli’. I never knew Signor Zanelli, but he was a figure of legend, referred to reverentially by the staff.  The company ‘Zanelli’, by this stage, seemed to be the same thing as ‘Milano’, but at one time I think they were two enterprises. There were different numbers in the Yellow Pages, but when you rang, you were greeted by the same gruff tones on both lines.

Milano was run by Otello Cavallo — and an English guy. I can’t remember what the English guy was called. He was nice, and very helpful, but the name Otello Cavallo is somehow more memorable.

Eventually, when Milano closed down, I paid a token sum for the kidney shaped harlequin mosaic and brought it to the workshop. I couldn’t allow it to be thrown away. It was part of a legacy, part of the history of British mosaic. I wanted a place in that history too.  It wasn’t that I liked the harlequin especially, but the object was symbolically important. The staff at Milano liked it very much.

‘Old Man Zanelli thought he might sell it to the Harlequin Centre in Watford’ they told me admiringly ‘but he never did.’ At the time I identified strongly with these mild but thwarted aspirations, and of course I still do.

I confess I understood the reluctance of The Harlequin Centre in Watford — Palace of Thatcherite Consumer Culture, to purchase Mr Zanelli’s running Harlequin, with his brightly-coloured diamond-patterned catsuit, and curious short truncheon. He cut a slightly sinister figure, an impression only enhanced by the anachronistic kidney shaped board on which he was mounted. He was not a slick, shiny symbol of contemporary consumerism. He was a richer, odder, creature from another era.

Historically, Venetian masks, like his Batman’s Robin-style one, were worn to protect the wearer’s identity during decadent pursuits, or transgressive behaviour of questionable morality traversing class boundaries. Furthermore there is a tradition of ‘Hellequin’ – found in French passion plays, in which the harlequin is an emissary of the devil, chasing the damned back to hell.  These were the worlds of Signor Zanelli’s harlequin.

A more appropriate icon for the Palace of Shopping in Watford was the jester in a clown-suit and a buffoon’s belled hat – a symbol that we’d all become fools and children now.

Grown up art at the Harlequin Shopping Centre, Watford.

Photo: Nigel Cox. Permission: Creative Commons Licence 2.0

Posted under: History, Mosaic by Emma Biggs | Tags: Emma Biggs > History of Harlequin > history of mosaic in the UK > Milano Mosaic > Mosaic Workshop > Otello Cavallo > The Harlequin Centre