The designer and journalist Giorgio Forattini, author of political cartoons which were the first to be published on the front page of newspapers and on a daily basis, earning him the nickname “king of satire” for a long time, has died at the age of 94 in Milan. Since 1973, for almost half a century, his drawings which have satirized the vices and virtues of many political protagonists have appeared in “Paese Sera”, “La Repubblica”, “La Stampa”, “Il Giornale”, “Qn”, “L’Espresso” and “Panorama”. The news of the death of the cartoonist who changed the way of satire in Italy was given by “Il Giornale”, one of the last newspapers with which he collaborated.
Funeral in Milan on Thursday 6 November
Forattini “passed away peacefully today in his home in Milan at the age of 94”, Michela Cappelletti, assistant to the designer and journalist for 35 years, confirmed to Adnkronos. Alongside Forattini, until the end, his wife Ilaria Cerrina Feroni. The funeral will be held on Thursday 6 November in the Church of Santa Francesca Romana, in via Alvise Cadamosto 5, in Milan.
The ashes will then be buried in the cemetery of Monte Porzio Catone (Rome), where the family tomb is located. Giorgio Forattini will rest next to his parents, his brother and his son Fabio who died prematurely.
The cartoons
Born in Rome on 14 March 1931, after graduating from high school, Forattini attended both the two-year architecture course at the University of Rome and the Theater Academy. In 1953 he began working, first as a worker in an oil refinery in northern Italy, then as a sales representative for petroleum products in Naples and southern Italy. In 1959 he returned to Rome from where he took care of the representation of a record company, first as a salesman, then as commercial director in Milan, dealing with the creation of pop music and classical music catalogs in Italy and the United States.
Between 1967 and 1970 Forattini worked in an advertising agency in Rome as an illustrator and copywriter, creating national campaigns for Fiat, Alitalia and other major companies. At forty he entered the Roman newspaper “Paese Sera” as a graphic designer, after having won a competition for comics artists organized by the newspaper itself. The first political satire cartoons appeared in color in 1973 in the Mondadori weekly “Panorama” and in “Paese Sera” in 1974. From that period, the cartoon of 14 May 1974 published on the front page of “Paese Sera” on the occasion of the victory of the “no” in the referendum for the repeal of the law on divorce, promoted by the then secretary of the Christian Democracy Amintore Fanfani, remains famous: Forattini draws a bottle of champagne with a cork, depicted in the likeness of the Catholic statesman, flying through the air. Since then Forattini’s cartoons no longer went unnoticed to the point that the Feltrinelli publishing house collected them in a small volume, entitled “Referendum Reverendum” which, released in 1975, was immediately a small editorial success and was reprinted within a short time in the Universale Feltrinelli economic series.
At the end of 1975, after becoming a professional journalist, Forattini left “Paese Sera” to contribute to the foundation of Eugenio Scalfari’s new newspaper “La Repubblica”: after collaborating on the graphic project, he permanently joined the editorial team as a satirical cartoonist on the comments page. For Scalfari’s newspaper, in addition to drawing the cartoon on the front page every day, in 1978 he created the “Satyricon” insert, the first in Italy dedicated entirely to satire, publishing some new authors, including Sergio Staino and Ellekappa. In 1978 he was director of the satirical weekly “Il Male” for three months.
In 1982 Forattini was called to “La Stampa” in Turin to renew the graphic system and was entrusted with the satirical cartoon on the front page. At the same time, he took care of the image and launch of the Fiat Uno advertising campaign and, for four years, the Alitalia product campaign. At the end of 1984 he returned to “La Repubblica” where he continued to publish a cartoon a day on the front page. Also in 1984 he began to collaborate with the weekly “L’Espresso”, until 1991, the year in which he returned to “Panorama”, where he collaborated until 2009.
On 30 December 1999, following a complaint for a cartoon by the then Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema (shown intent on purging the names of the Mitrokhin dossier with whitewash), Forattini left “La Repubblica”, then directed by Ezio Mauro, and returned in 2000 to “La Stampa” of Turin, at the invitation of the publisher Gianni Agnelli, with whom he collaborated for five years. From 2006 to 2008 he published in the Milan newspaper “Il Giornale” and from 1 August 2008 to the end of 2009 he collaborated with “Qn – Quotidiano Nazionale”, “Il Giorno”, “La Nazione” and “Il Resto del Carlino”.
From his production of over ten thousand cartoons, 55 books have been published by Mondadori, which have sold more than three million copies. The last two anthologies of his cartoons also appeared with Mondadori: “Il Forattone. 1973-2015” (2015) and “Arièccoci. History repeats itself” (2016). His latest book is “The Primer of Politics” (Clichy, 2017), which illustrates how a cartoon is born.
In his long career Forattini has received many awards, including: the Premiolino, the Bordighera Humor Award, the Tolentino Award and the Forte dei Marmi Satire Award, in which he was also part of the jury for several years, the Hemingway Award, the Pannunzio Award, the Special Ischia International Journalism Award, the Acqui History Award. He received honorary citizenship of the Free Municipality of Zadar in Exile, Civic Merit in Trieste and honorary citizenship in Asti. In 1997 he received the Ambrogino d’oro from the Municipality of Milan and in 2011 the National Cultural Award of Torre di Castruccio at the Academy of Fine Arts of Carrara.
Forattini’s cartoons not only made some of the targeted politicians smile but also angry. But not only controversies arose: in twenty cases the designer was also sued “only by exponents of the left”. “The left doesn’t accept satire when it’s directed at them,” he said in a 2008 interview.
Giorgio Forattini has also been criticized by the Vatican, particularly in 1982 for a cartoon on John Paul II and Lech Walesa. In 1987 it was Forattini who sued the DC for one of his cartoons on Salvatore Ligresti, transformed into a poster.
The Tangentopoli years gave him material to enrich his gallery of caricatures, but Forattini regretted not being able to attack Primo Greganti, Achille Occhetto and the PDS on the bribe front. In that period the cartoonist, the only one in Italy to work both for a newspaper of the Berlusconi group (“Panorama”) and for the newspaper then directed by Scalfari, saying he was “very happy” in this dual role, admitted however in 1993 that he was not completely free to “La Repubblica”: “Censorship is not the right word – he specified – With Scalfari there are furious arguments over certain cartoons but if any politician complains he replies: ‘Stop, Forattini is a free zone'”.
In 2000 Forattini attacked Scalfari and Giorgio Bocca in his weekly cartoon “Mascalzonate” on “Panorama”. The illustrator harshly sketched the two colleagues (Bocca is in a wheelchair, Scalfari, hunched over, pushes him) and had the founder of “La Repubblica” say: “A Giò, do you remember when we fought the enemy in the mountains?”. Bocca, sitting with flask and rifle in hand, replied: “We killed, we shot! We certainly didn’t create the Republic with this satire nonsense!”.
Forattini’s cartoons have often left their mark, if not even provoked heated debates. Memorable remains for the discussion that a cartoon from the end of the 1970s provoked among the left in which Enrico Berlinguer, secretary of the PCI, was seen sitting in an armchair in his home, dressed in a dressing gown while reading “The Manifesto” by Karl Marx, imperturbable despite the protests of the workers being heard from the window.
Equally debated were the cartoons that showed the then Prime Minister Giovanni Spadolini completely naked in the early 1980s with his private parts covered only by an ivy leaf, symbol of his Republican Party. The king of satire did not lack friction even during the long presidency of the Council of the socialist Bettino Craxi depicted with a strong jaw and black boots that recalled the figure of Benito Mussolini. He was also sued and convicted for a cartoon on Craxi, in which the socialist leader was depicted reading “La Repubblica” and commenting “How much I like this newspaper when Portfolio is on it!” (Portfolio was a competition attached to the newspaper), with the obvious implication that Craxi was a pickpocket, the judge wrote. In April 1993, in the midst of the Mani Pulite season, he depicted Craxi, in a black shirt, upside down with a noose tied to his feet: the cartoon alluded to the news of Parliament’s vote against the granting of authorizations to the Milan Prosecutor’s Office to proceed against the socialist leader.
One of the main reasons for Forattini’s success was precisely the caricature and irreverent characterization of the politicians: Giovanni Goria invisible, Piero Fassino skeletal, Giuliano Amato as Mickey Mouse, Silvio Berlusconi and Amintore Fanfani short in stature, Walter Veltroni as a caterpillar, Lamberto Dini as a toad, Rocco Buttiglione as a monkey, Nicola Mancino as a wild boar, Luciano Violante as a fox, Romano Prodi as a communist priest, Umberto Bossi as Pluto sometimes naked or dressed as a Templar knight, Vincenzo Visco as a vampire and Carlo Azeglio Ciampi as a dog, Rosa Russo Jervolino as a hen. Forattini was never tender even with Achille Occhetto (depicted as Charlie Brown) at the time of the fateful “Cosa”, i.e. the transition phase from the PCI to the PDS, between the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and 1991.
But Forattini’s worst relationship was certainly the one with Massimo D’Alema, depicted as Adolf Hitler (but in communist guise). A first clash with Botteghe Oscure dates back to the early 1990s when, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, news began to reach the West about the CPSU’s financing of sister communist parties, including the Italian one. A cartoon from that period aroused the ire of the then PDS leadership group: entitled “I ruble, you ruble”, it appeared in the weekly “Panorama”. Another cartoon from 1991 depicted Achille Occhetto and Massimo D’Alema who, dressed as prostitutes, received money from Mikhail Gorbachev, sitting in a luxury car driven by Enrico Berlinguer. Occhetto and D’Alema sued Forattini and the Court of Milan condemned the cartoonist on the grounds that “the cartoon is not a pure and simple satirical expression but a true vehicle of journalistic information and, as such, subject to the limits of reporting rights”.
The most sensational case was the cartoon dedicated to D’Alema and published in “La Repubblica” on 11 October 1999: it depicted the then Prime Minister while he was crossing out the names on the Mitrokhin list with a white pencil and a voice asking him: “so this list is coming??!!” and D’Alema: “Wait a minute! The whitewash hasn’t dried yet!”. D’Alema sued the designer and asked for compensation of 3 billion lire. Following this affair, not feeling defended by his newspaper, Forattini decided to leave “La Repubblica” at the end of 1999. Subsequently, in protest against the lawsuit and in defense of the freedom of satire, he drew D’Alema without a face for several months, with only his hair and mustache drawn. In March 2001 the former post-communist prime minister gave up the request for huge compensation: the peace signed by their respective lawyers avoided the satirical journalist’s trial. The case was closed with a statement from Forattini who said he “only wanted to make satire, without any reference to real events”.
Among Forattini’s myriad drawings, the cartoon with which in 1992, a few days after the Capaci massacre in which magistrate Giovanni Falcone lost his life, portrayed Sicily, ideally identifying it as the head of a crocodile crying following the event, remains famous. (Of Paolo Martini)