Meet the Maker Crafting Exceptional Ceramics Installed in Private Homes, Glamorous Resorts, and the Vatican

July 7, 2026

Guiseppe Durcot likes to say he is “two or three different people in the same person.” Looking across his work, it’s easy to see why. The Rome-based artist has built a career creating religious sculpture—ecclesiastical commissions in marble and bronze, several of them in the Vatican—using traditional techniques. But he also crafts ceramic fireplaces, fountains, mirrors, and consoles that look like bits of Baroque architecture gone slightly rogue. For Ducrot, the two sides of his practice are closely related. “If you train yourself in the classical way, you are free to get started in something more free, more fast,” he says. 

 Over the past decade, Ducrot’s ceramics—available through Twenty First Gallery— have attracted a growing roster of hospitality and residential clients. He has conceived fountains for Le Sirenuse in Positano and Le Sirenuse Mare, the hotel’s beach club on the Amalfi Coast, and designed façade elements for Vermelho, Christian Louboutin’s hotel in Melides, Portugal. Interior designers including Georgis & Mirgorodky, Jessica Schuster, and Tony Ingrao have also solicited works for private residences. 

 

  • Featured Artist

    • Featured Artist

      Giuseppe Ducrot

      Born in Rome in 1966, Giuseppe Ducrot is the leading Italian ceramicist of his generation. His family heritage dates back to a French ancestor who worked construction on the Suez Canal in the 19th century and died of cholera in Palermo, Italy, leaving a widow and a son. The latter would later found Studio Ducrot, celebrated in the 20th century Italian decorative arts for its Liberty style furniture, a variant of Art Nouveau. Giuseppe Ducrot showed a talent for drawing at an early age, holding his first exhibition at age 14, then studying at the painting studio of Giovanni Colacicchi and learning sculpture from Vito Cipolla, who trained him in traditional methods and materials. A virtuoso of classical sculpture techniques, Ducrot has spent much of his career creating religious iconography in the form of marble monuments, busts, and other elements under the direction of the government of the Catholic Church in the Vatican. His talent for both figurative and ornamental styles has guided his distinctive approach to ceramics, which melds Greek and Roman influences with a riotous Baroque expressionism, often glazed with a signature shade of yellow. His ceramic furniture and decor pieces are lush with embellishment, boasting gravity-defying asymmetrical curves, executed with the self assurance of a vastly skilled technician with an exhaustive grasp of art historical styles. The casual mastery on display in Ducrot’s design works places them firmly into the sphere of the contemporary, where an experimental gesture can coexist timelessly alongside the masters of the mythological realm. Ducrot is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Fine Arts and Letters of the Virtuosi al Pantheon, one of the academic honorary societies under the direction of the central governing body of the Catholic Church. He has created public commissions for the Vatican at several locations including the Basilica of Santa Maria deli Angelinas, the Noto Cathedral and the Basilica of Saint Peter. In addition, he also does commissions for private clients.