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L’Arte dell’Automobile

Christian Gulliksen

February 4, 2003

Although Pininfarina emerged as the most able practitioner of the berlinetta, the rest of the industry did not automatically cede hegemony. Bertone, founded by Giovanni Bertone and then passed to his son Nuccio, provided Pininfarina’s stiffest competition. While Pininfarina presented a relatively unified face to the world without making celebrities of individual designers, Bertone indulged in a series of superstars: Franco Scaglione, Giorgietto Giugiaro and Marcello Gandini. Pininfarina routinely produced judiciously restrained yet beautiful cars, and while Bertone could match that elegance, it also liked occasionally to go for broke. For example, Franco Scaglione’s outrageous take on the berlinetta resulted in the Alfa Romeo BAT series from the 1950s. Taking its name from an Italian acronym (Berlinetta Aerodinamica Tecnica), it bore serendipitous meaning for English speakers, as the car’s stylized fins literally resembled bats. (The Batmobile featured in 1960’s campy television show Batman was a Lincoln Futura show car built by Ghia and then modified by George Barris. While the Batmobile shares design cues and—seemingly—a name with the BATs, they are not directly related.) The BATs toyed with the berlinetta form in a way that more conservative Pininfarina would not likely consider exploring.

Other significant carrozzerias included Zagato, Ghia, Touring, Frua, Vignale and Ital Design (run by Bertone alum Giorgietto Giugiaro). Each of these coachbuilders provided two essential services for private clients and manufacturers: design and production. Simply because a carrozzeria designed a car, it did not necessarily follow that it would also build the car. And so arises the sometimes confusing array of names associated with any given model. The Ferrari 365GTB/4, known colloquially as the Daytona, for instance, was designed by Pininfarina but built by Scaglietti. Ghia found a niche building cars for Chrysler that had been designed by American Virgil Exner; so, while Imperial limousines bore Ghia emblems, they reflected craftsmanship but not design. Also, the fact that a certain carrozzeria produced the coupe version of a car was no guarantee that it also created the spyder (industryspeak for “droptop”); in the case of the Maserati 3500GT, Touring provided the coupes and Vignale handled the convertibles. But even this statement must be qualified by saying that other coachbuilders designed one-offs or limited production runs on the same chassis. Much like the English language, any rule in Italian coachwork has a list of exceptions.