Paris auction house PIASA has announced the sale of the personal collection of Cleto Munari, the Italian designer and patron who died earlier this year aged 96. The 189-lot auction draws on the contents of Munari's villa and studio at Brendola, near Vicenza, and covers the full span of a career spent commissioning work from the leading architects and designers of his generation.

The headline lot is Andy Warhol's Portrait of Carlo Scarpa, made in 1980, two years after the Venetian architect's death. Munari commissioned the portrait himself, and the work — a one-off silkscreen collage on Rhodoid — carries an estimate of €70,000 to €90,000. It is joined by further design landmarks: Alessandro Mendini's hand-painted Proust armchair of 2000, a unique piece estimated at €25,000–35,000, and Gaetano Pesce's Gioia of 1986, estimated at €60,000–90,000.

Ettore Sottsass is represented by the Cubica console, a 2002 prototype estimated at €20,000–30,000, while Mendini's Cavaliere di Dürer of 2008 is estimated at €18,000–25,000. A solid-silver cutlery service for twelve, designed by Scarpa in 1977, is estimated at €16,000–20,000. Doors designed by Sottsass, Mendini, Milton Glaser and others are offered at €5,000–7,000 apiece, and the sale also includes gold jewellery by Frank Gehry, Alex Katz, Sottsass, Arata Isozaki and Michele De Lucchi.

Munari's path into design was set in 1973, when he met Scarpa — an encounter that redirected his life toward commissioning and collecting. His first silverware collection followed in 1982, and his work is now held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The PIASA sale turns a private world of collaborations into a public record of post-war Italian design.