Decorated leather as a family art
The craft of artistic leather has a long tradition in Italian furnishing history: since the seventeenth century this technique was used to upholster armchairs, chairs and sofas. From 1800 onwards, the women of Cecilia Bordoni’s family were trained in the art of embroidering and decorating “chiselled” leather — named after the chisel used to hammer the hide into a decorated surface.
At the beginning of the last century Cecilia’s grandmother, Ida Pasquali, started making leather objects using the techniques handed down through the family, until, in the post-war years, an antique dealer asked her to reproduce embossed leather for antique armchairs. After studying seventeenth- and eighteenth-century methods, Ida succeeded in reinventing a technique capable of reproducing the originals.
Ida was not alone in that work of recovery: at her side was Emilia Bordoni, Cecilia’s aunt, who devoted herself above all to recovering the ancient patterns.
Those very tools are still here. The case of chisels Cecilia opens every morning is the same one the women of the family have handed down: first Maria Bordoni, then her sister-in-law Ida Pasquali, then Cecilia.
Today that technique lives on in Cecilia’s hands. There are no departments, no machines: there is Cecilia, in her workshop, chiselling, embossing and painting every hide exactly as her grandmother did.
This is why every Bordoni Leathers creation is, by its very nature, a one-off: the time of two hands is not the time of a factory. And that is precisely what makes each piece precious.
