The aeroplane is drawn as though it were made of glass. You can see the ribs of the cowling through the propeller, the far wing through the near one, the cloud through the fuselage. It is an advertisement for an aircraft factory that has decided to show you the idea of an aircraft rather than one.
Single blue again, and every device of 1930s commercial graphics used at once. A twin-engine monoplane climbs across the sheet, rendered in transparent line work with the propellers as spinning discs; below it its own shadow, or a second machine, in the same ghost technique. Behind, a cloud built from a halftone dot screen, hard-edged like a cut-out. The word CAPRONI sits at the top in fat slab capitals; across the lower third the word Aeronautica runs in a streamlined italic script sliced by horizontal speed lines — the standard graphic sign for velocity in that decade — and under it BERGAMASCA in heavy display capitals with S. A. stacked at the right. Down the right margin, small, a cursive signature.
Ponte San Pietro
The company was older than its Caproni name. It was founded on 23 July 1920 as Airone, based at the airfield of Ponte San Pietro near Bergamo, doing aerial photogrammetry, running a flying school and, under the technical direction of the engineer Carlo Maria Calligaris, designing, building and repairing both civil and military aircraft. In 1927 it became Cantieri Aeronautici Bergamaschi, keeping the initials CAB; in the early 1930s it was absorbed into the Caproni group, and in 1938 renamed Caproni Aeronautica Bergamasca — the name on this sheet, which therefore dates the printing to 1938 or later. Ponte San Pietro is where the Ca.310 family of light bombers and reconnaissance aircraft was built. After the war the Caproni companies were closed or sold off, and the Bergamo works went with them.
So the sheet advertises a factory that had already changed its name twice and would not survive the decade that followed. The graphic language is confident to the point of swagger; the institution behind it lasted seven more years.
The signature
Set vertically in the right margin, in a small hand, is a cursive signature that clearly begins with a capital D. The collector reads it as Nino Dabaz, whom he identifies as the pen name of Giovanni Battista Dabusti, born at Voghera in 1908 and dead at Milan in 1980, and attributes to the same hand a companion sheet for Aeronautica Caproni Predappio.
We have looked for that artist and not found him: no entry in the Italian literature on poster design, nothing in auction records, no biographical repertory, no confirmation of either date. That is not proof the attribution is wrong — commercial illustrators of the period vanish from the record with depressing regularity, and the initial on the sheet is at least consistent with it — but it is as far as the evidence goes, and we prefer to say so rather than print a name as though it were established. If anyone can document Dabaz, or read this signature better than we can, we would like to hear from them.
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, and since the author of this sheet is not established that term cannot be considered 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 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
- Caproni Aeronautica Bergamasca — Airone (1920), Cantieri Aeronautici Bergamaschi (1927), the Caproni group and the 1938 renaming
- The airfield at Ponte San Pietro
- The attribution to «Nino Dabaz» is the collector’s and could not be verified.
