When New York’s Museum of Modern Art selected a Cisitalia Berlinetta for display in 1951, car designers felt just recognition had come to them at last. Architects and industrial designers were busy creating a new world, but they often denigrated the seductive tricks that car designers deployed with chrome, fins and annual model changes. The beautifully balanced Cisitalia proved that the control of automotive form was a real sculptural art.
However, there were deeper reasons, both cultural and aesthetic, that lay behind the huge reputation of the Cisitalia. For a start, Fiat’s factories lay almost silent in 1945, as the front line of war swept over northern Italy, and the Cisitalia, conceived in Turin by businessman and racing driver Piero Dusio (1899–1975), represented an automotive renaissance.
On an aesthetic level, too, the car represents the resolution of the trend towards the integration of the various separate parts of old-style car bodywork that had been progressing throughout the 1930s. In the last years of peace, the Touring coachwork company in Milan had produced a marvellous streamlined body for the Alfa Romeo 8C – its 1938 Le Mans entry (see the previous entry) – but, though sublime from some angles, it was, from the side view, still quite massive and heavy in the ‘shoulders’.
For the Cisitalia, Battista ‘Pinin’ Farina (1893–1966) took the same aesthetic roots but made them gel. The curves make a perfect appeal to our perception of aerodynamics, while the wheel arches and wings (fenders) have a powerful animalistic quality, evoking the front paws and rear haunches of a leopard at rest and speaking to some subconscious archetype of power and drive. This form was to influence the Italian ‘sporting line’ that Ferrari and the other great Italian marques were to use for decades to come, and even found an echo in Britain with the sporting Jaguars.
The war is over and the future starts here. The perfect stance of the Cisitalia Berlinetta shows why Pininfarina still cite it as a definitive point in the company’s design development.