An electric hoist hangs from a runway beam at the top of the sheet, its drum lettered MAS TORINO. From it, on four chains, hangs a small tracked armoured vehicle, tilted, its tracks clear of the ground. Behind, out of focus and enormous, the spire and dome of the Mole Antonelliana. Nothing in the picture is where it should be, and that is the point.
It is a photomontage of the kind Italian industrial advertising had learned to make by the early 1940s: a real product photographed against a real monument, joined at an impossible scale. The manufacturer’s data is set out in full along the bottom of the page — SOCIETÀ ANONIMA, MACCHINE APPARECCHI SOLLEVAMENTO E FERRAMENTA IN GENERE; OFFICINA PER RIPARAZIONI · UFFICI E MAGAZZENO: TORINO · PIAZZA S. RITA DA CASCIA 11 · TEL. 31968; and a line of trades: MACCHINARIO · APPARECCHI SOLLEVAMENTO · UTENSILERIA E FERRAMENTA · ATTREZZATURA DA IMPRESA · ORGANI TRASMISSIONI.
The joke in the roundel
At the lower left is the trademark, and it is worth a moment. A circle reads SOCIETÀ ANONIMA — MAS — TORINO around three heavy letters, and under the letters, drawn small and neatly, a motor torpedo boat throwing a wake. The initials of Macchine Apparecchi Sollevamento happened to be the initials of the MAS boats, the fast Italian torpedo craft that had been a national emblem since the First World War; the firm took the coincidence and put the boat in its logo. It is a hardware wholesaler wearing a naval decoration.
The lifted object is in the same register. It is a small turretless tracked vehicle, riveted, with a machine-gun mount at the front and the leaf-sprung bogies of the Carden-Loyd family — the shape of the light tankettes the Italian army called carri veloci. Hanging on four chains from a hoist the size of a suitcase, it is there to say one thing about the product: whatever you have, this will pick it up.
What we could not find
Of the firm itself we have found nothing beyond what the sheet prints. There is no entry for a Turin company called MAS — Macchine Apparecchi Sollevamento in the usual reference works, and the lifting-gear businesses that carry similar initials in Turin today are unconnected later companies. So the address, the telephone number, the trades and the roundel on this page are, for the moment, the whole of the record: which is a fair argument for keeping a sheet like this one.
The note that came with the scan attributes the design to a Milan studio and dates the sheet to about 1941–43. We could not verify either. The only mark on the page is the company’s own roundel; there is no designer’s signature, and the article is published without an author.
About this image. The work is still protected by copyright: under Italian law (L. 633/1941) rights run for 70 years from the death of the author. Since the author has not been identified, that term cannot be considered expired, and the image is treated as fully 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 sheet, part of the period material he keeps in a private archive: owning the physical sheet is not the same as holding the rights to the work. The image is not offered for sale, no reproduction rights are granted, and any request concerning the work should be addressed to the rights holders. Cultural Heritage Online publishes this material to document it, with no celebratory intent; see our terms and the DMCA contact published there.
Sources
- The sheet itself, for the company name, the full postal address and telephone number, the list of trades and the trademark roundel with the MAS boat.
- The Mole Antonelliana — for the building that identifies the city in the background
