Leonardo Frigo

Leonardo Frigo is an Italian-born artist and artisan working in London who has revived the nearly lost craft of handmade globes. Trained in art and restoration in Italy, he began with drawing and printmaking; his hand-painted violins and cellos, illustrated after Dante’s Divine Comedy, were exhibited in Italy and abroad.

His globes return to the 17th-century methods recorded by the Venetian cosmographer Vincenzo Coronelli in his Epitome Cosmografica of 1693. Each sphere is drawn, printed from copper plates with oil-based inks on handmade paper, watercoloured, gilded and assembled by hand, with materials sourced from artisan workshops across Italy. There is no production line: every globe passes through his hands, made slowly and intended to acquire its own history.