And please note that the figures in the Schlemmer are walking up the staircase. Upward movement in art often hints at lofty belief, as in, say, Titian’s “Assumption of the Virgin” or Barnett Newman’s emphatically vertical “zips.” Downward motion, by contrast, can evoke Dada irreverence and, in particular, Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase,” the Cubist painting that created a brouhaha at the Armory Show of 1913 because neither a nude nor the alleged staircase could be located in its welter of tilting planes.

Sottsass transcended the sameness of typewriter design to give it an endearing personality. He tuned into Pop art, citing the orange nipples and pink breasts in Tom Wesselman’s nudes as inspiration for the orange scroll caps.