Photography by David Gooley
L’Arte dell’Automobile
February 4, 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.
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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.
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