Bombers coming down through columns of smoke, over a target already burning: a war subject cut into wood in 1941.
Two aircraft dominate the sheet, seen from above and behind as they dive; others are smaller, higher up, against the pale opening in the clouds. The smoke is the real substance of the print — dense masses built from thousands of short cuts, filling most of the surface. At the bottom the ground is a tangle of broken structures, small fires and a cylindrical tank. In the upper left corner the block is signed G. MAININI; in the upper right it carries the date 1941-XIX, the year followed by the year of the fascist era as dates were then written in official use.
The image documents how the air war was pictured in Italy in 1941, in the graphic language of the period. The engraver can now be named: Giuseppe Mainini (Macerata 1898 – Macerata 1981), a self-taught draughtsman who turned to engraving in the early 1920s and was called in 1930 to teach intaglio at the Scuola del Libro in Urbino. His usual subjects were rural — ploughing, the watering of animals, the country around Macerata — which makes this sheet an outlier. It was not his only war subject: at the Venice Biennale of 1942 the Ministry of Aeronautics bought his woodcut Attacco di autosiluranti. After the war he refused abstraction, and in 1964 founded the Arte Viva group against it.
About this image. Giuseppe Mainini died in 1981, so the seventy-year term of Italian copyright has not expired and the work is still protected. It is reproduced here for documentation, study and critical purposes only, under Art. 70 of L. 633/1941 and the fair-use provision of 17 U.S.C. §107. The scan was made by the collector from his own copy of the work — the period magazine printings and loose sheets he keeps in a private archive: owning the physical copy is not the same as holding the rights to the work. The image is not offered for sale and no reproduction rights are granted. Cultural Heritage Online publishes this material to document it, with no celebratory intent; see our terms and the DMCA contact published there.
