CARONTE cartoons for “La Luna, giornale umoristico e di teatri”

“La Luna, giornale umoristico e di teatri” (The Moon, humor and theater newspaper), is one of the most irreverent satirical newspapers of the nineteenth century, was founded in Turin in 1881 by piedmontese artist, cartoonist and caricaturist Giorgio Ansaldi (1844-1922), one of the most important Italian illustrators of the Belle Epoque period. The newspaper took a sarcastic look at the political and social life of the time, particularly the world of salons, fashion, sports, and theater. The newspaper’s gaze is aimed at a male audience and supports a masculinist narrative of women, the main subject around which the cartoons revolve.

The woman, the main subject the cartoons dealt with, was mocked and sometimes virilized to jeer the emancipationist and suffragist battles that saw the early 20th century woman in a completely new style, in masculine clothes, smoking cigarettes and no longer in homely contexts. If in the second half of the 19th century the caricature on women is good-natured and aims to highlight female virtues, with the arrival of the new century the timbre becomes more acrid, with the intention of sneering the “fairer sex”.

Arturo Calleri, Caronte, was one of the magazine’s main illustrators and the last editor of “La Luna”, who, despite his lack of notoriety, turns out to be a master of page structure. Caronte brings back stylistic features found in 19th-century French affiche first and foremost in Jules Chéret and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, permeating the characters and letters of his vignettes with phytomorphic motifs, thus creating a harmonious unicum. His vignettes are thus marked by so-called whiplash lines, asymmetrical cuts and colors spread in flat backgrounds, enhancing their decorative and symbolic value, derived from Japanese art that would influence European art movements between the mid-19th century and World War I.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Archivio Storico della Città di Torino (2015). Torino e lo sport, storie di luoghi ed immagini.
• Fondo GEC (Enrico Gianeri). Periodici illustrati di satira, umorismo, caricatura e varia umanità 1840-1980. Archivio Storico della Città di Torino (2015).