Daprato Rigali Studios × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
An August study.
Daprato Rigali Studios began in 1860, when four brothers from Barga, a hill town in Tuscany, opened a statuary studio in Chicago. Their younger cousin John E. Rigali, a prodigy with a chisel, became president in 1890 and turned the house toward ecclesiastical art; by 1909 the work was fine enough that Pope St. Pius X named the company a Pontifical Institute of Christian Art. Five generations of the family later, the studio is still restoring stained glass and carved interiors across the country, and it still quotes its founder: “Our name is an absolute guarantee.”
A firm that offers its own name as the guarantee, and has the domes to back it, is our favorite kind of company. We spent a while inside their story, then pressed what we found into leather.
The mark, as found
Ornate gold blackletter over a single rule, with ESTABLISHED 1860 tucked at the lower right. The mark is more than four times as wide as it is tall, and it asks for a long surface to run on.
Pressed
A wordmark this wide lies along a luggage tag the way an inscription lies along a lintel, so the tags carry it lengthwise. We pressed it into a golden tan close to the gold of the original lettering, and into a deep brown with the gravity of carved walnut. The third tag is black, and black is where the gold belongs: there the mark is stamped in gold foil, the same gold on dark ground the studio wears on its own site.
A name as a seal
John E. Rigali left behind one sentence that does the work of a whole brand book: “Our name is an absolute guarantee.” We set it in a round seal, a close cousin of the pontifical marks of the world the studio serves. The words circle the band. Inside, the D and the R interlock beneath a small cross, and a rosette of five petals sits below them, one petal for each generation.
On the toiletry kit, golden tan over deep brown, the seal sits low in the corner – the quiet place where a maker signs.
The keychains give the same seal the whole face of the fob, a pair for the pocket. One is golden tan, pressed blind. The black one takes the seal in gold foil, since gold on black is this studio's native dress.
A ceiling for the tray
In 2022 the studio restored the Grand Army of the Republic art glass dome at the Chicago Cultural Center. We kept thinking about the view a restorer earns and a visitor rarely takes, flat on your back on the marble, looking straight up into the leading. The tray design is that view drawn as a die: sixteen ribs radiate from an eight petal oculus and two leading rings cross them. Alternate panes are ruled fine, to catch the shimmer of glass. We wanted more ribs at first, since the real dome holds far more, but a stamp is a distillation and sixteen let the panes breathe.
Pressed into the golden tan of the catchall tray, it turns the end of the day gentle: keys and coins come to rest on a floor that remembers a ceiling.
The fifth stroke
The studio's timeline notes, almost in passing, that fifth generation family members began working there in 2013. We kept returning to that line. The journal die became a tally: five chisel strokes above the family name, with the year 1860 and the words FIVE GENERATIONS beneath. A carver's count, kept in stone time.
The journals come as a pair, deep brown and golden tan, the tally pressed generously into the lower corner. A journal is where a studio's next work first appears, in pencil, long before marble or glass hears about it. It seemed right that those pages should open under five strokes.
We made this out of love. Leatherius Woodman is on a mission to create and share artifacts of beauty, craft and love – this study is one of them, and we hope the feeling is mutual. Every image is a render – how we prototype before cutting a die.
If you're Daprato Rigali Studios and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.