The great cartoonist Giorgio Forattini died at the age of 94. Il Giornale reports this on its website. Born in Rome in 1931, Forattini was in fact among the first political cartoonists, starting in 1971 from Paese Sera to arrive first at Panorama and then at Repubblica, where he created the Satyricon insert.
He was a cartoonist also to the pressthen in the 2000s to the newspaper and QN publications. His irreverent portraits of the main protagonists of politics are famous: Bettino Craxi represented as Pietro Gambadilegno or even Mussolini, Giovanni Spadolini nudeMassimo D’Alema come Adolf Hitler (but in communist guise), 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.
Among the many cartoons that have made history, the one he made in 1974 on the occasion of victory of the no votes in the referendum on divorce: it represented a bottle of sparkling wine on which “NO” was written which was uncorked by throwing a cork in the air that had the features of Amintore Fanfani. Numerous controversies and complaints: Forattini was sued and convicted for a cartoon about Bettino Craxi, in which the socialist leader is depicted reading La Repubblica and commenting “How much I like this newspaper when Portfolio is in it!” (Portfolio was a competition attached to the newspaper), insinuating that Craxi was a pickpocket.
The cartoon he always depicts is also famous Craxi, in a black shirt (as usual in his cartoons), upside down with a noose tied to his feet: this cartoon dates back to April 1993 and immediately follows the news of Parliament’s vote against granting authorization to the Milan Prosecutor’s Office to proceed against the socialist leader.
In 1991, when the Democratic Party of the Left was accused of still receiving the funding that the USSR had guaranteed to the Italian Communist Party for years, Forattini presented a cartoon in which Achille Occhetto and Massimo D’Alema who received money from Mikhail Gorbaev, sitting in a luxurious car at the wheel of which he was Enrico Berlinguer. Occhetto immediately sued Forattini, followed later by D’Alema. Also famous is the cartoon with which in 1992, a few days after the mafia attack against the magistrate Giovanni Falcone, he depicted Sicily, ideally identifying it with the head of a crocodile crying following the incident.
For a cartoon depicting D’Alema, then president of the Council of Ministers, published in la Repubblica on 11 October 1999 and which concerned the Mitrochin affair, he was sued and requested compensation of 3 billion lire. D’Alema then declared that he held satire in the utmost consideration, but that he had acted because the cartoon contained false and defamatory information; the complaint will be withdrawn in 2001. Following this affair, not feeling defended by his newspaper, Forattini he decided to leave the Republic.
Subsequently in protest against the lawsuit and in defense of the freedom of satire For several months he drew D’Alema without a face, with only his hair and mustache drawn. On 3 April 2002 the artist published a cartoon in the Press which depicts an Israeli tankmarked with the star of David, while aiming the cannon towards a manger in which a frightened child, identifiable as Jesus due to the halo on his head, exclaims: “They don’t want to kill me again?!”.
The cartoon provokes the indignation of the president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, Amos Luzzatto, who stigmatizes the exhumation of the accusation of deicide, and of several Catholic representatives. The then director of the Turin newspaper, Marcello Sorgi, publicly distanced himself from the content of the cartoon. On 6 November 2008 the Quotidiano Nazionale (Il Giorno, La Nazione e il Resto del Carlino) published a cartoon by Forattini on the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States of America, in which the former president George W. Bush reproaches, to one statue of liberty who just gave birth to a baby with Obama’s face, to have betrayed him with the “nigger butler”.
This cartoon gave rise to much controversy, and the Coordination of the editorial committees of the National Daily expressed in a note “firm and total dissent” towards the cartoon. On TG5 on 17 December 2008 he declared that he had been sued 20 times by members of the left alone, stating: “The left does not accept satire when it is directed against it”.