For three weeks last January, I studied the original plaster models that would come to define the most celebrated silhouette of the mid-century. What struck me was not the form itself — that long, undulating profile had been familiar since childhood — but the restraint of it. Every surface dissolved into the next without a single abrupt edge, as though the entire body had been shaped by wind rather than hands.
The Discipline of the Unbroken Line
Castellani, the sculptor who became a designer, approached his work from a place the engineers could not follow. He began not with technical specifications or market projections, but with a single continuous line drawn across paper — a teardrop that swept from nose to tail, uninterrupted. His studio smelled of wet plaster and turpentine, and the models he shaped there possessed a quality no technical drawing could capture.