The sumptuous new Ponti exhibition at London’s Design Museum, running right through summer to October, will do much to revive his reputation and won’t do the museum any harm, either. But it also makes it very clear what the problem is with Ponti. It’s our problem, not his. We like to categorise, we like consistency, we like to know an artist from his work. In Ponti’s case, this is impossible. Pinpointing exactly what he was about, is like trying to catch quicksilver with a pitchfork. What’s the Ponti style? What does he stand for? Where do you start?

On the one hand, you have the architect - by turns classical, modernist, and towards the end distinctly post-modern. A man as happy doing stage sets at La Scala or ocean liner interiors as office blocks. Then you have the designer, who might be functionalist or expressionist or just out-and-out slap-it-on decorative. Many know him for only one object of 1952, a somewhat tongue-in-cheek reworking of a traditional rush-seated Italian chair that he called the “superleggera” or super-light, in reference to the exotic sports cars of the time. It’s the kind of thing the celeb French designer Philippe Starck gets up to these days. Add to this diversity a distinctly homespun, not to say rambling, philosophy, a magpie collector’s instinct, a generosity to others, and a seeming determination not to be typecast or pigeonholed, and you have a person who might come over as a bit of a dilettante. A gadfly, someone with no manifesto, or too many - which was anathema in the stern modernist era. Ponti, you might say, was an inclusivist. Nothing was ruled out, so long as it was good on its own terms. Which is admirable. But it doesn’t help the compilers of encyclopaedias.