Printed in a single blue, an armoured figure in a plumed helmet and cape stands beside a weighing machine, holding up a small hand-balance in one fist as if it were a trophy. The company name doubles as an image: a knight for San Giorgio — Saint George.
The scale itself, drawn with the same care as the figure, is a self-contained automatic model with a round dial, a loading plate on top and a drawer below — the kind of shop or warehouse equipment the company built its industrial reputation on. The lettering runs in bold outline above the two figures: «Bilance Automatiche San Giorgio», with the maker’s name and its works, Genova-Sestri, spelled out beneath.
San Giorgio was a real Genoa-Sestri Ponente firm, founded in 1905 by the industrialist Attilio Odero. It began by building cars and rail carriages, dropped that line after the 1907 economic crisis, and rebuilt itself around precision engineering: optics, electromechanics and rangefinders, eventually a major supplier to the Italian Navy, growing from around 3,000 workers in the First World War to more than 12,000 by 1942. Automatic scales were a smaller, secondary line of the same precision-manufacturing business — a 1936 advertisement for «Bilance automatiche» and «Affettatrici» (slicing machines) under the San Giorgio name survives in an Italian library catalogue, confirming the product existed, though not pinning down when it began.
The collector who sent us this poster dates it to 1927 and names the illustrator as Diego Santambrogio, a real Italian poster and magazine artist (1898–1969) who trained in architecture in Milan and fine art in Bologna, exhibited at the Monza decorative-arts biennials of the 1920s, and illustrated for magazines including Emporium and Il Corriere dei Piccoli. His career timeline makes a 1927 poster plausible in principle. What we could not independently confirm is this specific attribution, or the specific year: the earliest documented trace of San Giorgio’s scale advertising found so far dates from the mid-1930s, and no signature is visible on this sheet. We publish the poster on the strength of its own documentation — the company, the product line, the period style — and note the artist and date as the collector’s own record, not as facts we have independently verified.
About this image. If the attribution to Diego Santambrogio (d. 1969) is correct, the work is still protected by copyright: under Italian law (L. 633/1941) rights run for 70 years from the death of the author, and that term has not expired. 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 — 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.
