The autarky series advertised what companies made. This one advertises what the war needed. Under a single script word — Vincere! — a heavy gun on its tracked carriage fires past a tank, and the copy at the foot no longer talks of prosperity: «al servizio della patria in armi per l’immancabile vittoria».
The sheet is a tall banner, half a page, drawn in soft pencil greys quite unlike the hard photomontages of the 1938 campaign. Between the word and the guns hang three stylised fasci drawn like daggers. At the foot: ANSALDO S.A., and under it, in a cartouche, GENOVA — CORNIGLIANO.
«Vincere» dates the series
The word is not a slogan the advertising invented. Mussolini’s speech declaring war on 10 June 1940 ended on it — «vincere! E vinceremo!» — and it became the regime’s one-word watchword of the early war. The group of tall «Vincere» banners in this collection — Ansaldo, Pirelli, Alfa Romeo, Ilva, Marzotto, BPD — therefore dates itself after June 1940: industrial advertising converted to war footing, each company restating its peacetime identity as a contribution to victory. For Ansaldo, the Genoa heavy-industry group founded in 1853 whose peacetime marine diesels appear on another sheet here, the conversion needed no metaphor: guns and armour were its own catalogue.
Marks
The collector attributes the drawing to Erberto Carboni; a few minute marks at the lower edge of the drawing do not resolve into a monogram or signature on our scan, and the sheet is published without an attribution.
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.
