Hugo Pratt's wondrous world of artistic comics

Siena exhibit presents a voyage to the real and the imagined, included a racing car decorated by the artist

Until August 28, Siena's Palazzo Squarcialupi - also known as the museum complex of Santa Maria della Scala - offers its visitors an unforgettable tour of the world via the fantastic genius of Hugo Pratt. The suggestive exhibition, titled Periplo immaginario (Imaginary circumnavigation), is the first devoted to this artist, who passed away 10 years ago. It traces Pratt's works on the theme of voyages, both real and imagined, from Venice to the Celtic world, Africa, Latin America, North America, the Pacific Ocean and Asia.
The places of Pratt's life merge with those of his literary sources, taken from children's books (by Stevenson, Conrad and London) that inspired his multifaceted comic books as well as his pictorial universe of watercolours, temperas and ink drawings.
Pratt managed to immerse himself, with acute anthropological sensitivity, in the most diverse realities. This voyage, an imaginary circumnavigation of real and intangible places, leads the visitor through 350 works, selected especially for the Siena exhibition and divided into seven geographic areas: south-west, north-west, Africa, Latin America, North America, Pacific Ocean and Asia, linked with original video clips.
The exhibition retraces the steps of Pratt's artistic evolution from his debut, Asso di Picche (1945), to his Wheeling watercolours painted shortly before his death. The world of American Indians and the Wild West came alive in the unforgettable tableaux of Ticonderoga. Africa revelled itself, in Gli scorpioni del deserto, in the boundless immobility of its spaces and in the vivacious colours of uniforms that Pratt had known in the years spent in Addis Ababa with his father. Anna nella jungla, Sgt Kirk, Cato Zulu and Jesuit Joe are unforgettable portraits, inspired by classic adventure books of English literature.
The exhibition displays, for the first time, the 163 tableaux of Una ballata del mare salato (Pratt's first long comic book and the first appearance of Corto Maltese, his most famous character). It includes the first commented catalogue on Pratt's work (curated by Thierry Thomas and Pratt's main collaborator Patrizia Zanotti, published by Lizard, Rome), in three languages and with over 500 watercolours, a must for lovers of artistic comic books.
(Interestingly, the exhibition includes a Formula 1 racing car, the Ligier that Brundle drove in 1993's Grand Prix of Japan, the only racing car ever decorated by an internationally renowned artist.)
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Corto Maltese, son of Nina de Gibraltar (a beautiful gypsy woman from Andalucia) and a Breton sailor, was born on July 10, 1887, at La Valletta (Malta). Our first introduction to him was as a teenager in Port Arthur, during the Russo-Japanese war of 1904. At the time, he saved the life of Rasputin, an assassin and deserter from the Tsarist army. On the eve of World War I, the two became members of the crew led by the Monk, a pirate of the southern seas as well as the father and uncle of Pandora and Cain Groovesnore, the young protagonists of Una ballata del mare salato. This was where Corto made his first appearance. The Corto Maltese saga was narrated at long intervals, and it runs from 1967's Una ballata del mare salato to the final tableaux of 1992's Mu.
After the events narrated in La Ballata, Corto Maltese and Rasputin's paths crossed again and again, whether on the battlefields of Europe or in the shade of palm trees on some tropical beach. Recurring characters are also the mysterious Golden Mouth and the voluptuous Venexiana Stevenson. Pratt's minor characters sometimes stand out; among them Doctor Steiner, a former (de-tenured) professor and a drunkard who ended up stuck in a remote corner of Brazil; Straight Shot, hero of the cangaçeiros; and the heroic Red Baron, shot down by a drunken infantryman.
Since its first appearance in 1967 on the pages of Sgt. Kirk magazine, Pratt's Corto Maltese has been universally considered the last romantic hero of adventure comics, although the charm of the character goes well beyond tradition. Rather than emphasizing the dynamism of action and the classic virtues of heroism, the author chose to depict his vagabond sailor as a bitter and disenchanted witness of his own stories, a protagonist who's aware of the role that destiny had cast for him.
His wandering nature allows him to adapt easily to every environment and situation, whether sailing the southern seas, roaming the plains of Sertao, strolling the streets of Buenos Aires or following a jungle path. He's equally unmoved by the crudity of reality and the vagueness of dreams, by men of flesh and blood and spirits alike.
He's known wherever he goes: love and respect, hate and conflict are all aspects of life that he accepts without too much fuss. He answers a kiss or a rifle shot with absolute appropriateness, always maintaining his thoughtful aplomb.
He's moved only when touched by the fragility of men forced to fight an unequal battle against nature and fate. So, although he may respond to that struggle with an inner smile, still he's not lacking in compassion for human beings.
Corto chose to draw his own fate line: with a razor cut, he marked it on his own palm, becoming the master of his own destiny.
"Corto Maltese will never die," was Pratt's famous declaration. "Corto Maltese will go away, because a world where everything is computed, industrialized, consumed, has no place for someone like him."

Publication Date: 2005-04-03
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=5064