La Domenica del Corriere (“Sunday Courier”) was Sunday insert for Corriere della Sera, an Italian newspaper that ran for 90 years, from 1899 to 1989. For most of that time the section featured a full-page illustration on its cover each week.
These were often dramatic gouache or watercolor illustrations, almost in a pulp-illustration vein, but they presumably illustrated actual news stories (think of all of the notable and dramatic events that occurred during that period of time).
There is a site devoted to them at www.illustrated-history.org/, containing an archive of the illustrations and a bit of the history. The site is in Italian, and I’m afraid my Italian is even weaker then my French, so I relied on Google Translate to find my way around.
There is a search function on the home page that allows you to search by region (Per luoghi), by artist (Per autore) or event (Ricerca avanzata), with attendant drop-down menus.
It appears that there is a concentration on two artists in particular, Walter Molino (above left) and Achillies Beltrame (above right), whose work is sought after by collectors. Searching for these two may be a good place to start. Once you are on a page with a featured illustration, clicking on that image provides a pop-up with a wonderfully large reproduction of the painting. (I’ve included a full-size crop from a small section of each illustration above.) You can also informally browse from an illustration page to other pages by incrementing or decrementing the database number at the end of the URL in your browser’s address field.
Some of the illustrations are less interesting than others and there is some repetition of subject as they looked for sensational topics to illustrate (lots of train wrecks and other disasters), but some of these images are just wonderful and make the trouble of searching and browsing worth your while.
This is intended to be more of an illustrated history than an appreciation of the artists, but it serves as both. You can take a fascinating stroll through the early to mid 20th Century and view some wonderful pulp-style illustrations in the process.
I also found a blog on a site devoted to the paper, Blog del Club Domenica del Corriere, also in Italian, that features the illustrations, but doesn’t dwell on them exclusively.
[Link and suggestion courtesy of Jared Shear – see my post on Jared Shear]
