The Robb Report Collection

L’Arte dell’Automobile

Christian Gulliksen

02/04/2003

In the 1920s and ’30s, premium marques in Europe and America served up a veritable smorgasbord of technically brilliant chassis wrapped in stunning coachwork. It was the age of V-16 Cadillacs and supercharged Duesenbergs, roadsters and Sedanca de Villes, hood mascots and two-tone paint schemes, and hyphenated Hispano-Suizas, Rolls-Royces and Mercedes-Benzes.

Nearly all came fitted with custom bodies from coachbuilders like Le Baron, Murphy and Figoni et Falaschi. Customers whose fortunes had managed to survive the stock market crash continued to commission luxurious cars well into the 1930s, but the Jazz Age couldn’t last forever. As World War II approached, a sea change saw the marques that had survived the Depression bringing their design in-house; independent coachbuilders became increasingly rare. By the 1950s even Rolls-Royce—a postwar holdout—offered a “standard” ex-factory sedan, and by the mid-’60s custom coachwork was all but finished in Crewe.

A winged 1947 Cisitalia "Aero" is caught in midflight. (Click image to enlarge)

Italy never got the memo. Just as the coachbuilding tradition in the rest of the world went gently into that good night, Italy’s automotive workshops entered their golden age. This is not to suggest that prewar Italian design lacked panache. The Flying Star roadster built by Touring and fitted to Isotta Fraschini and Alfa Romeo chassis in the early ’30s, for instance, featured a spectacular plunging beltline and is counted among the finest designs of the era. But it was with the Pininfarina-designed Cisitalia in 1947 that the Italian carrozzerias came into their own. Pininfarina was not the only concern experimenting with the berlinetta form—an aerodynamic, streamlined body featuring a long nose with a cabin that tapered into an abbreviated tail—but the Cisitalia was the most successful amalgam of cutting-edge design. (The Turin-based carrozzeria founded by Battista “Pinin” Farina in 1930 was known as Pinin Farina until the nickname and surname were officially fused in 1961.) The Cisitalia wound up on display at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and its formula informed sports car design for two decades. The berlinetta remained preeminent until the end of the ’60s, when it was replaced by the wedge.

A sleek prewar Alfa Romeo 2.9 B coupe by Touring shows off its curves. (Click image to enlarge)

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.

1953 Alfa Romeo BAT 5 by Franco Scaglione

Franco Scaglione fashioned the outrageous Alfa Romeo BAT series while working for Bertone in the 1950s. This is BAT 5 from 1953. (Click image to enlarge)

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.
Importantly, because of the carrozzerias’ facilities and abilities, it was still possible at the coachbuilders’ zenith for a customer to have just about anything he wanted. Today some of the most dramatic customization happens under the watch of tuners, who significantly alter engines, suspensions and bodywork. But imagine sitting down with a designer and specifying a car from the ground up. Most customers at that time did not do that; rather, they selected from the limited production designs a carrozzeria might offer. But, it was entirely possible. Say you loved the Lamborghini Murciélago’s engine but wanted yours in a voluptuous convertible. In the 1950s it was yours for the asking. One client asked Frua to design a two-door convertible on a Rolls-Royce Phantom VI chassis. Frua happily obliged, even though most Phantom VI buyers requested the body the chassis was designed for: a limousine with three rows of seats.

Commissioning a car from one of the carrozzerias would have put you in illustrious company. These cars were not inexpensive, and client lists had a decided jet-set quality—the Aga Khan, King Leopold III of Belgium, Generalissimo Franco and a motley assortment of movie stars and rock singers represented a cross section of these cars’ buyers. Rather like what everyone hopes for in a family tree, it is hard to dig too far through such a car’s provenance without bumping into a royal title. Some of these models enjoy an exclusivity rivaled only by the Rolls-Royce Phantom IV, which in theory was sold only to heads of state or a member of a royal family.

Pininfarina cozied up to Ferrari during the 1950s and ’60s, supplanting the flashier Vignale—and its usual designer Giovanni Michelotti—from its former dominance there. As noted above, Pininfarina’s reign did not exclude other carrozzerias from executing designs on Ferrari’s chassis, but most of Ferrari’s clientele asked for Pininfarina. Over the course of these decades, this meant a plethora of limited runs, from an extensive variety of 250GTs to the Superamericas to multiple variants on the 365.
The other carrozzerias focused on other domestic marques like Maserati, Alfa Romeo and Lancia. And unlike the earlier era in America and Europe, high fashion also made its way to fairly ordinary transportation. Open a book on the subject of carrozzerias and you will see just as many cars like Fiats suiting middle-class families as Ferraris destined for the superrich. The Fiats might not have had the sex appeal of the Ferraris, but they benefited from many of the same design principles. It is a pleasing note of egalitarianism in the midst of luxury goods. How often did coachbuilder James Young cast its glance away from Rolls-Royce to, say, Rover?

The carrozzerias also cast their nets into international waters. Touring, Bertone and Zagato all designed bodies for Aston Martin DBs, each with its own aesthetic approach. The Zagato berlinetta bears a strong resemblance to Pininfarina’s Ferraris of the same period, but maintains the Zagato trait of a strongly rounded nose; Plexiglas covers for recessed headlights aid in its uninterrupted line. The Bertone, by contrast, features protruding headlights mounted at the leading edge of each fender, and Touring’s version splits the difference. Despite these variations, each car can be clearly identified as an Aston Martin.

Italian design additionally found its way onto random one-off coachwork. Some of the less successful attempts by Frua, Ghia and Pininfarina involved Rolls-Royce. Perhaps because the proportions of the Rolls-Royce chassis did not mirror those of a Maserati or Ferrari, these bodies often came off as awkward. The monumental grille does not lend itself to graceful curves, and the rear three- quarters views of these cars often appear strangely hunched. This might presage the general failure of Pininfarina’s design for the Rolls-Royce Camargue later in the ’70s; beauty being in the eye of the beholder, many can’t find it in the slab-sided Camargue.
The berlinetta had a far-reaching international impact, and would successfully influence everything from the Corvette to the Jaguar E-Type to the Datsun 240Z (itself a masterful design by BMW 507 penman Albrecht Goertz). Chevrolet even appropriated the name “Berlinetta” for a Camaro trim level. And though berlinettas were preeminent, they were not the only body styles offered. There were notchback coupes and spyders from each of the carrozzerias, and also four-door sedans such as the first Maserati Quattroporte by Frua and the Lagonda Rapide from Touring. The Quattroporte was easily the prettier of the two, with more delicate lines and a less busy front end design. A second Quattroporte styled by Bertone arrived in 1974, and a third by Giugiaro in 1976.

Italian design, particularly in the ’50s, managed to avoid the pitfalls into which its American counterpart fell headlong. While fins surged ever higher at Chrysler and General Motors, and exuberant ornamentation became the norm, this design had, with a few exceptions (BATs among them), only a negligible impact in Italy. There is the hint here or there of a fin and even of a dogleg window, but most cars escaped lurid color combinations and the overly generous application of chrome. On balance, few designs could be considered in dubious taste. The industry escaped unscathed into the early 1960s, when the berlinetta’s form started to evolve, gaining more defined angles as the Italian design aesthetic marched toward the wedge. This movement is very apparent in upstart marques like Iso and Bizzarini. Bertone supplied each with low-slung coachwork, and while in profile both still qualify as berlinettas, the sensuous curves are being gradually flattened. Vignale’s Jensen Interceptor picks up on the squared-off theme, primarily in its nose, as does Ghia’s DeTomaso Mangusta and Maserati Ghibli. The Ferrari Daytona from Pininfarina modulates angles carefully, but there is no question regarding its sharply angled nose and tail.

This Ferrari 410 Superamerica was bodied by Turin-based Pininfarina and represents classic period design. (Click image to enlarge)

The ’60s also brought the ambitious Lamborghini 350GT and its follow-up, the 400GT 2+2, Touring’s swan song. While they flirt with sharp edges and elaborate compound curves, it is their stablemate Miura that takes a far more significant step with its mid-mounted engine. The Bertone coachwork by Gandini could be described as an utterly flattened berlinetta, and signals the beginning of the end for the form that started with the Cisitalia in 1947. As well as being a departure from the stylistic norm, the Miura and the Daytona helped create the new category of supercar, where a new challenge was to achieve a top speed as close to 200 mph as possible, even if it meant edging out its challenger by only 1 or 2 mph. Aerodynamics became that much more critical, and a dedicated wind tunnel appeared at Pininfarina's facilities. The competition was getting more scientific.

The 1964 Ferrari 330P was tuned for power and extensively raced in both the United States and Europe. (Click image to enlarge)

Ital Design championed the wedge shape in its show cars. A consistent theme in the late ’60s and early ’70s, variants included prototypes for Maserati, Alfa Romeo and Porsche. Pininfarina, with its fetish for aerodynamics, also produced some remarkably wedge-shaped prototypes. The difference between Ital Design and Pininfarina is that the former put its thinking directly into production while the latter massaged what it had learned in its test beds into less dramatic packages. One of Pininfarina’s experiments in the late ’60s was with a three-seat layout that placed the driver at the center of the car, with two passengers on either side and staggered somewhat to the rear. It never found its way into series production, but McLaren ran with the idea for the million-dollar F1 in the 1990s.

Giugiaro’s design-by-origami at Ital Design appeared nearly unmolested in dealer showrooms under the guise of the Lotus Esprit, the DeLorean DMC and the Maserati Merak and Bora. Pininfarina’s 512 and 308 for Ferrari, meanwhile, incorporated the new approach without entirely losing the company’s traditional curves. Of all the cars introduced in the ’70s, the Ferraris are among those whose designs have best stood the test of time. Ghia added Tom Tjaarda’s DeTomaso Pantera to the new look, and Bertone’s Gandini topped his groundbreaking Miura with the eye-popping Countach (perhapsthe most photographed car of all time). With nary a curve in sight, the Countach struck an elegant profile before the ungodly defacement later in its evolution by every sort of scoop, skirt and wing imaginable. And despite owners who were optimistic it could hit 200 mph, it would take the Countach’s successor in the 1990s to pass that mark consistently.

Lamborghini Countach LP400 by Marcello Gandini

Marcello Gandini’s sublime Lamborghini Countach LP400, unadorned with the aerodynamic additions that took their aesthetic toll on subsequent versions. This is the first production example recently acquired by the factory for its museum collection. (Click image to enlarge)

By the early 1970s, hardly a quarter-century since the Cisitalia, the Italian car industry had experienced substantial change. No longer did manufacturers offer chassis for custom bodies, nor did a number of carrozzerias provide coachwork for the same model. Most of the coachbuilders were still in business, although Ghia (now defunct) was absorbed by Ford and the illustrious name subsequently reduced to a trim level on Mustang IIs and Granadas. What guaranteed the survival of Pininfarina, Bertone and Ital Design was that each evolved seamlessly to the new paradigm, continuing to offer their expertise to manufacturers who appreciated it. If that meant leaving behind the private client forever, so be it. Gone are the days of one-off Ferraris, but unlike their forebears in the 1930s, these coachbuilders are still in business today.